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View from the Top - Part 2 |
Part 1
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COMPANY FILE
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Founded in 1994, Lufthansa Cargo
is the world’s biggest air cargo carrier. The company
markets its own freighter capacities and the cargo capacities
of all passenger aircraft in the Lufthansa Group.
In 2003, it handled 1.58 million
tonnes of freight and mail. It has 5,000 employees and
runs a fleet of 14 MD-11F aircraft and eight Boeing
747-200 freighters to 450 destinations worldwide.
Eight global freight forwarding companies
and a large number of local business partners have linked
their business processes with Lufthansa Cargo. It also
has the ‘WOW’ alliance with SAS Cargo, Singapore Airlines
Cargo and Japan Airlines Cargo – involving harmonised
products, IT systems and handling processes – and joint
ventures with a number of other cargo airlines as well
as DHL.
The need to link systems with partners
and respond to customer demand for more flexible services
persuaded Lufthansa Cargo to modernise and standardise
its IT systems.
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Q: HOW IS THE SYSTEM BEING IMPLEMENTED?
A: We continued with the same EAI team that did the selection,
so that we were now doing strategy work and the practical
work of implementation.
It was worth running the PoTs to get hands-on experience
of TIBCO’s integration tools and also to start the change
management process – the project managers were getting involved
and getting enthusiastic about the idea.
We set up a central EAI/Integration Competence Centre which
designed the architecture and defined the coding guidelines
and standards. We also clearly defined the tasks that the
EAI competence team would carry out.
We started with two pilot EAI projects. We built a system
for claims management, which involved integration of the Siebel
CRM system, the shipment database and the ERP billing system;
the other project was to rebuild the tracking system and move
to customers proactively tracking shipments.
To date, we have now run 13 projects – not all integration
projects, but in each project integration has played a key
role. We have integrated 15- plus systems, including SAP,
Oracle, Siebel CRM, shipment databases, EDIFACT communications,
the booking engine which is Lufthansa Cargo’s core system,
some older legacy host systems, some capacity control systems
and some modern technologies such as web services.
The TIBCO integration components are a common platform with
messaging and standard transport mechanisms which let the
applications talk to each other – the systems now speak a
common language through XML standards, both internally and
externally with business partners.
This has enabled a service oriented architecture with shared
services.
We have web services standards in place for B2B integration
with the business partners. We have integrated just a few
partners in this way and the next task is to get the web services
security to a more granular level. But with web services,
it means that we can integrate partner companies much more
quickly, in a matter of days for existing services.
More...
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Conspectus 2004
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Copyright © 2004
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