The new Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong, officially opened in July this year, will handle three million tons of air freight annually, more than any other airport in the world.
The software solution making this volume possible was developed by Software AG, the German based software company whose applications are also used by the Hong Kong airline, Cathay Pacific, for its mission-critical tasks.
"The Hong Kong airport is a monument to superlatives," says Schalk Viljoen, general manager at SPL. "It is located on the artificial island of Lantau, which required 350 million cubic meters of landfill. The construction costs of the ten most important projects in Chek Lap, including the world`s largest train suspension bridge, exceeded 20 billion dollars. The airport`s 88 gates will see 35 million passengers yearly and move three million tons of air freight each year - twice as much as the current Kai Tak airport. Chek Lap Kok will handle the largest air freight volume in the world.
"There is good reason to call it the `Airport of the Millennium`," he says.
Two companies will share the air freight load using a new Software AG system. Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminal Ltd (HACTL) and the international consortium Asia Airfreight Terminal (AAT) will handle 2.6 and 0.42 million tons respectively each year.
"The two competing companies, which have used Software AG systems in the past based on the Adabas database and Natural developing environment, have decided to use the technology again," says Viljoen.
"They are implementing similar information systems to manage all mission-critical transactions in the air freight business. They are based on Adabas and Natural, and run in a client-server environment under Unix to track all movements inside the 100,000 square meter freight complex SuperTerminal 1 at Chek Lap Kok," he explains.
"As the air cargo handling business is very fast-paced and dynamic, it is vital that our information systems are totally reliable to support business operations. The Adabas/ Natural Unix application has been key to our highly successful operations at Kai Tak. When we needed to develop a new system for Chek Lap Kok, we decided on Software AG because it offers a proven system we can rely on," said Mr. Kwok Keung Yeung, Deputy Managing Director of HACTL.
The Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific, one of the world`s most renowned, also uses Software AG applications for its mission-critical tasks, including its entire passenger booking system, flight planning, warehouse management and maintenance planning and inspection. The system handles 18,000 enquiries daily from all around the world.
Mr. Anthony Yeung, System Delivery and Information Management Manager at Cathay Pacific Airways commented, "We are regularly implementing new developments to enhance our systems and over the years, Adabas and Natural have been continually updated to offer us the performance and reliability we need."
"Software AG has the right products for complex, mission-critical applications and for that reason they have been preferred for more than twenty years by many airlines and air freight companies," adds Viljoen.
Software AG is one of the largest software companies worldwide and is a leader in the area of integration technology. Its products and services, represented in South Africa by SPL, support the seamless integration of transaction-based mission-critical applications over heterogeneous platforms, from mainframe, Unix and Windows NT to the Web.
Software AG`s technology expertise is based in three major product areas: database management systems (ADABAS and ADABAS D); application development environments (NATURAL and the Business Application Factory Bolero for electronic business); and middleware (EntireX).
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