South African Airways (SAA) has upgraded from the Genesis system to PegaSys, used for the planning, scheduling and operations of crew and aircraft.
At a media briefing yesterday at Airways Park, SAA CIO Mike Re would not reveal how much the system was worth, as he said it would be premature to put a value to the system due to partnership agreements.
SAA used Genesis system, developed by ICL, for the past 10 years before migrating to Fujitsu`s locally developed PegaSys, which was implemented in August. A team of 40 locally based people was involved in the migration and integration of the new system, using staff drawn from Fujitsu worldwide.
PegaSys is an integrated solution that has a large screen, providing graphical displays of rosters, schedules and reports. It is used for the planning, scheduling and tracking of an airline`s operations.
SAA tested the system for a year, in four different phases.
"SAA carried out major testing and due diligence before migrating to PegaSys from Genesis. This was done to ensure our expectations were met and two end-to-end business process cycles were minimising training requirements," said Re.
Integration
PegaSys contains over 17 modules integrated into a single database with modules sharing the same information. PegaSys is integrated to over 25 of SAA`s external systems, including the storage of 12 years of historical data.
Security has also been enhanced and a centralised rule module has been included to provide better management control.
"A consolidated rule model means that rules governing flight and crew scheduling are held in one central repository. Previously rules were held within different systems and could sometimes be overlooked," explained Re.
Peter Osborne, Fujitsu airline products project manager, said the system tracks the assigned crew and aircraft utilisation and plans mandated maintenance.
Tracking, reporting
Re said the system includes an enhanced aircraft maintenance tracking system with management reporting functionality. "For example, country restrictions now exist that require SAA to provide detailed information covering crews that fly to the US. The software now meets these stringent security measures."
Re described the migration to the upgraded software as a success. "The success of the migration was shown in the fact that we did not incur one flight delay as a result of the implementation. In terms of training, Fujitsu has retained the look and feel of the previous crew interface, minimising training requirements," he said.
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