Thomsonfly flies to a new inventory and distribution system
Thomsonfly’s migration to NewSkies®
When Thomsonfly (UK), one of the largest British tourist carriers with 47 aircraft, decided to migrate from OpenSkies® to NewSkies®, it involved months of preparation: Thomsonfly finally launched its new sales platform on 31 March 2007.
NewSkies® is the successor to the OpenSkies® system, which Thomsonfly had used since its 2003 launch, and provides the business not just with a state of the art reservation system for the future, but a platform to unify the customer proposition across holidays, charter flights and scheduled flights.
THE CHALLENGE
In this project PROLOGIS was responsible for the complete implementation. This included:
- Overall planning of system implementation, migration and resources
- Management of the migration of 13 Interfaces, e.g. API, website, two payment providers, data warehouse, etc.
- Definition and management of user acceptance tests (based on the web-based PROLOGIS UAT Tools) as well as tracking and solution of system and interface issues
- Planning, execution and quality assurance of the data migration from OpenSkies® to NewSkies®
- Concepts for system set-up and for optimized processes based on the system
- User support and key user training during and after the migration
- Overall planning and communication with Navitaire Inc.
- Additionally PROLOGIS developed individual reports for Thomsonfly based on the NewSkies® reporting frontend
SUCCESS
- PROLOGIS’ involvement took pressure off the business, allowing it to concentrate largely on day-to-day operations.
- Due to the know-how that PROLOGIS has concerning NewSkies® implementation and project management, the team was able to deal successfully with issues as they arose, while at the same time solving critical go-live situations.
- The go-live of NewSkies® took place on the planned date and took just eight hours (one of the fastest migrations ever).
- Downtime during migration had no impact on revenue or booking figures.
- Thanks to intensive software tests and anticipatory planning, the post-migration phase ran smoothly, without major problems.
- By migrating to NewSkies®, Thomsonfly has made a crucial step in the strategic development of its business.
“ The successful migration was a huge effort bringing together various teams from Thomsonfly and our external expert consultants Prologis, all expertly project managed by Thomsonfly’s and Prologis project managers to whom we owe a big vote of thanks. The fact that we appeared to lose no business at all over the weekend is a quite remarkable achievement and the team can be very proud of themselves.”
Guy Stephenson, Commercial Director, Thomsonfly
