Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited
Modernizing the national carrier
August 2009
Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited has been using the power of SITA consultancy to drive forward its aggressive plans for modernization and help in the migration from legacy networks to IP VPN.
Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited
Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited was founded as the national flag carrier in 1972, immediately following the country's independence, and remained wholly government-owned until July 2007, when it was transformed into Bangladesh's largest public limited company.
Since then, Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited has focused its efforts on reducing costs and modernizing its fleet, with the goal of re-establishing its status as a reliable on-time carrier, and transforming itself into the 'recognized leading carrier of choice for all Bangladesh domestic and international air travel'.
Biman is also the operational manager of the largest international terminal at Zia International Airport, in Dhaka - which handles over half the country's international and domestic arrivals, equating to almost five million passengers, as well as some 105,000 tonnes of freight and mail, annually.
The business issue
With legacy networks and increasing competition the local market, Biman needed to restructure and transform itself into an effective, modern, competitive airline.
"The immediate short term goal of this restructuring process is to allow Biman to address the identified critical business issues of scheduling performance and fleet capacity," says Mohammad Shahnewaz, Director Marketing and Sales of Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited. "It's the only way we can successfully address Bangladesh's growing passenger and cargo market in a competitive environment."
"We're also focused on a number of priority initiatives," he adds. "which include maintaining load factors of 70-80%, reducing our reliance on GDSs for sales and distribution, and rebuilding our image for our principal traveller markets - including tourists, Bangladeshi nationals working abroad and Hajj pilgrims."
SITA's solution
In line with its restructuring plans, Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited engaged SITA Professional Services to help ensure its IT and Communications strategy would stay closely aligned to its business strategy, supporting both the new corporate entity and Biman's future business vision.
The specific consulting activities offered - using a hybrid model of SITA proprietary methodologies and industry best practice frameworks such as CobIT and ITIL - comprised:
- IT Consultancy - defining key business objectives and developing an IT strategy roadmap that aligns with Biman's business drivers, enabling investment to be optimized and long-term, measurable cost savings to be delivered
- Network Security Consultancy - providing an objective and comprehensive evaluation and gap analysis of Biman's entire information security program and including an ethical hacking component to verify vulnerabilities
- IP Consultancy / Services - providing Biman's IT department with skills and tools that allow them to obtain maximum benefit from their move to an IP environment in both the WAN end Campus LAN environments
"These consulting activities are a great opportunity for Biman to clearly define both its short and long term business vision, and to align its efforts to support this vision," says Maneesh Jaikrishna, SITA's regional Director for South Asia and India. "We're delighted to be working closely with Biman as it moves forward with its modernization programme, and moves from legacy to IP networks."
"The combination of consultancy plus IP migration means Biman is now able to start looking at applications such as e-ticketing and online reservations, which will clearly help the bottom line as well delivering better services to passengers," he adds.
"We aspire to be as good as the best, so it's great to be working closely together with SITA now as we turn around the airline," responds Biman's Mohammad Shahnewaz. "SITA has always been a trusted IT partner for us."
SITA's consultancy for Biman Bangladesh Airlines Limited has already identified a number of key areas where the airline can improve performance and meet its business goals. These include:
- Capturing lost core revenue - through improved interline billing, for example
- Growing core revenue - through better yield management, enhanced cargo operations, and more efficient ground handling
- Enabling IT and communications - through IP migration
- Increasing IT and communications spend - the lack of real investment in IT infrastructure and business systems in the past has severely limited the ability to automate processes, distribute information and most importantly validate information for accuracies and discrepancies
Business benefits
SITA's combination of consultancy and IP migration delivers a number of key business benefits to Biman Bangladesh, including:
- A proven business case, demonstrating tangible savings over the airline's existing IT spend
- The chance to better share information, company-wide
- The opportunity to harness new technologies as they become available, and to stay abreast of the competition
- Increased staff productivity and optimized performance
- Better tracking and visibility of business issues
- Having the right infrastructure and strategies in place to develop both international and domestic business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications
- Improved reliability
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