Despite a harsh business environment of high fuel costs and fierce competition for travelers’ airfares, All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd (hereafter ANA) managed to achieve its highest ever sales volume and operating profit for the fiscal year ended March 2006. Armed with a mid-term IT strategy for 2006 to 2009, ANA plans to consolidate its core corporate system servers to promote cost competitiveness. The HP Integrity Superdome is selected as the infrastructure for its standard consolidated server environment.
The aviation industry faces a tough business environment with the emergence of low-cost airlines, fierce price competition in recent years and high fuel costs. It is integrating and restructuring its costs and resources on a global scale. Under such a business environment, IT cost reduction becomes one of the major issues faced by every airline company. On the other hand, network airlines, known as mega carriers, seek to maintain their competitive edge over other companies by improving customer service. As a result, it is essential to continue investing in IT. Despite such a difficult market environment, ANA posted its highest revenue ever with sales of 1,368.7 billion yen and operating profits of 88.8 billion yen (fiscal year ended March 2006). With effect from fiscal year 2006, it forged ahead with a 4-year mid-term business strategy to be Asia’s No. 1 airline under the slogan “Quality, Customer Satisfaction and Value Creation”. For domestic flight business, ANA aims for steady growth in profits through convenient flight connectivity, meeting supply and demand of flight services, and strengthening profit management. For international flight business, it aims to strengthen its carrying capacity for hub airports of Star Alliance partners and improve its profits by strengthening its competitiveness in the China/Asia route, and meeting supply and demand.
Besides transporting cargo between airports, it also plans to strengthen its cargo business—its Third Core Business—by partnering with other cargo vendors such as Japan Post.
IT plays a critical part in this mid-term business strategy. As such, ANA reveals three major plans for its mid-term group IT strategy. They are "Building a foundation of reassurance and trust”, “Achieving continued competitive edge” and “Promoting cost competitiveness”.
Objective
- To promote cost competitiveness
- To reduce operations maintenance costs through server consolidation
Approach
- Implement HP Integrity Superdome in the core of the consolidated server environment
- Implement HP BladeSystem according to the service level
IT Improvements
- 50% cut in operations maintenance costs through server consolidation and standardisation of platform and operations processes
- Reduction in system personnel’s operations load
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