As part of its ongoing drive to upgrade infrastructure and service standards, reduce costs and improve productivity at South Africa`s airports, Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) has implemented Afaria, a cost-effective networking infrastructure which has enabled the company to automate and optimise its financial data management systems. The solution was supplied by Supported Software, the infrastructure optimisation company in the JSE-listed Datacentrix group.
ACSA owns and operates the country`s nine principal airports, including the three major international gateways of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Together, the nine airports handle more than 188 900 aircraft landings and 9,8 million departing passengers annually.
Each airport operates as an individual business unit with its own financial system. Afaria provides real-time access to the various financial systems from ACSA`s head office in Johannesburg by uploading financial data from remote sites via the ACSA transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) wide area network (WAN). "Afaria has enhanced ACSA`s business assumption planning," says Wimpie van Aswegen, ACSA IT Group Manager. "We are now able to access all financial information, produce reports and make rapid business decisions, without having to approach each business unit separately."
Access to real-time financial information has had a major impact on the preparation of financial statements and tax calculations. "Where such processes can take weeks of data collection and processing, we can now complete these tasks in a matter of days," adds Van Aswegen. Another important benefit is information accuracy. Van Aswegen notes that a `capture once` policy was implemented at ACSA to ensure accuracy and reliability of information. The policy has been facilitated by the implementation of Afaria, which not only delivers uniform information, but also has built-in error checking to prevent the transmission of damaged or incomplete files.
Afaria uses minimal bandwidth and because it is not network intensive, it can be implemented speedily and cost-effectively. Its queued event architecture makes optimum use of connection time, and incremental updating means that only updated or missing files are delivered. File compression takes place prior to connecting, and the checkpoint restart feature allows for automatic reconnection and enables failed transfers to resume at the point of failure, rather than starting over. "These features are important considering that we are transmitting 300 to 400mb files," says Van Aswegen. "Because Afaria transfers data so efficiently - even over unreliable dial-up connections - it was not necessary to make any adjustments to the ACSA WAN."
Van Aswegen also notes that optimisation of the financial management system, which forms part of ACSA`s ongoing process automation strategy, has led to a major improvement in internal customer service, particularly for financial and IT staff. Afaria`s ease-of-use was backed-up by Supported Software`s comprehensive training programme which ensured that all technicians were conversant with the system upon implementation.
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