The airline industry still has plenty of room for improvement when it comes to digitization – for example, regarding digital communication channels when switching to Microsoft 365 and All-IP. More and more airlines are therefore outsourcing their communication with crews, partners, and passengers to the cloud.
To ensure that processes at the airport run as efficiently as possible, the staff at large airlines send and receive around 300,000 fax documents and SMS messages per month at each hub, directly on their PCs. For instance, pilots and cabin crew are informed about when they will be on duty by way of the “crew fax”. The required hotel rooms are also booked for the crews using fax. SMS messages are sent straight to their smartphones to inform flight crew at the hub or international destinations about last-minute changes to the flight plan or crew members. In addition, SAP systems at the hub generate faxes containing orders, delivery documents and order confirmations.
Easy to integrate
While digitalizing their businesses, airlines are faced with the challenge of replacing outdated on-prem infrastructures with future-proof cloud services. State-of-the-art fax and SMS services, such as those offered by Retarus can be brought into operation effortlessly and integrated seamlessly into Microsoft 365. Using SAP-certified interfaces, they can be connected without difficulty to SAP systems and function trouble-free in All IP environments. In the best case, Retarus provides the airline with a dedicated fax number for each employee and ensures that the hub’s SAP systems can be reached by way of fax numbers that have been set up specifically for that purpose. This allows the airline to react flexibly to a variety of different scenarios and communicate efficiently with employees and partners around the globe.
Changes possible even at short notice
Employees also have the option of retrieving a crew fax which has already been approved for sending and updating it, even while the transmission is being processed, for instance if a flight is cancelled or rescheduled at short notice. This ensures that pilots and cabin crew are given the latest information in time and can systematically be assigned to other flights. It also allows the airline to make the required hotel bookings, avoid cancellations or rearrange catering or fuel orders, for instance.
Pay-per-use and lower fixed costs
Cloud-based fax and SMS services can easily be scaled to meet demand. In this way, companies can adapt at short notice to seasonal fluctuations or – in the case of company acquisitions – expand the services as required. At the same time, a transparent pay-per-use model ensures that the airlines only pay for the services they use. As migrating to the cloud means that the high costs an on-prem solution incurs for licenses, maintenance or modernizing the hardware fall away, the airlines stand to benefit from cost savings of up to 70 percent.
When selecting a communication solution from the cloud, companies are advised to make sure that their data is processed in compliance with the strict regulations for data protection and IT security. Establishing redundancy by connecting the services to several data centers also increases the fail-safety of the communication services. These quality characteristics ensure that the airline can meet the demanding requirements in the aviation industry for always reliable, trouble-free communication.
