Lufthansa Cargo soars toward cloud-readiness with TIBCO

Lufthansa Cargo is one of the world’s leading airport-to-airport air freight companies. The carrier serves nearly 300 destinations in more than 100 countries with its own fleet of freighters and the belly capacities of passenger aircraft. Founded in 1994, Lufthansa is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Lufthansa AG.

Challenge

During the global pandemic, Lufthansa Cargo faced many of the same challenges as other airlines: decreased passenger flights and increased freight requests. With growing demand for medical supplies, electronics, spare parts, and equipment during a supply chain crisis, Lufthansa Cargo had to pivot quickly.

Switching out passenger seats for cargo and bringing freight from the ocean into the air, the company retrofitted passenger planes into what have become known as “preighters”. Although adopting “preighters'' was one of the most prominent adaptations Lufthansa Cargo made to accommodate market demands, the company still faced pressing issues around sustaining freighter operations amid numerous travel restrictions and requirements for crews: layovers, risk of crew quarantine, multi-leg trips, traffic rights, and more.

The company began its digital transformation journey years ago, but the pandemic accelerated the need to digitize an increasing amount of operations to easily support rapidly changing global conditions. Before the pandemic, Lufthansa Cargo used several legacy applications to support its business processes. IT had to react on very short notice and adjust its systems within days while keeping operations stable and performing day-to-day.

To fuel its digital transformation and better respond to changing conditions, Lufthansa Cargo wanted to update its technology. The upgrade would enable better responsiveness, speed time-to-market, improve service support and quality, and automate services, and reduce costs.

Transformation

Lufthansa Cargo worked to integrate all its platforms into a single framework: integration, messaging, and APIs. With TIBCO’s comprehensive Connected Intelligence solutions, the Lufthansa Cargo teams created a model that improved Lufthansa’s current capabilities while pushing its transition journey forward.

The company had two main objectives:

• First, become a digital company for digital booking, pricing, and revenue management.
• Second, achieve digital fulfillment. Get rid of all the paper, automate processes, improve service quality, and provide a seamless transport journey for clients from original shipper to final consignee.

A TIBCO partner was responsible for gathering business requirements, maintaining applications, and migrating software. The TIBCO partner also developed a flexible API architecture on an on-premises platform to host services and applications for end-to-end operations. The platform upgrade was key to cloud migration and cloud readiness.

Benefits

With its new infrastructure, Lufthansa Cargo’s integration platform is now cloud-ready, and it has moved closer to its cloud-native goals. By moving to the cloud, the carrier can easily lower costs and accelerate service capabilities. DevOps support for the core cargo applications helped accelerate transformation and significantly reduce Lufthansa’s time-to-market.

The platform’s API-based programming connects to previously incompatible programs and legacy systems. Lufthansa Cargo reports successfully replacing 20-year-old legacy systems from start to finish and integrating all of its multiple CRMs. Its new integration platform brought together more than 80 applications and systems and bridged a wide data gap.

Besides installing a new API self-service platform, the company expanded its digital sales channels with dynamic spot prices that can be booked immediately. Dynamic prices are generated in real time via the company’s new Rapid Rate Response (RRR) mechanism, also enabled through the new integration platform.

Lufthansa Cargo has been able to scale-up delivery capabilities according to the business’ demand; development capacity on the central integration platform is no longer a critical resource bottleneck for the company’s digital transformation goals.

TIBCO has empowered Lufthansa Cargo with integration solutions that bridged the company’s wide data gap and fueled transformation so it can soar to the cloud.