AMOS - a story of success at Czech Airlines

Founded in 1923, Czech Airlines belongs to the five oldest airlines worldwide and is based at Prague’s Ruzyne airport. As the flag carrier of the Czech Republic, the airline provides flights from its main hub to important destinations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (104 destinations in 45 countries in winter season 2010/2011). The flag carrier’s services range from scheduled passenger carriage, charter flights, handling, to AC maintenance and cargo. Its mixed fleet includes Airbus 319/320/321, Boeing 737 and ATR 42/72. Since 2001 Czech Airlines has been a member of the SkyTeam, an international alliance of thirteen airlines. 
In the summer of 2010 the airline outsourced all its maintenance activities to the newly founded subsidiary Czech Airlines Technics. Apart from performing Line and Base Maintenance (C, D-checks) for Czech Airlines, the organisation executes 3rd party MRO services for airlines from all over Europe.

Initially Czech Airlines was looking for a new MRO software solution since the software they had in place was outdated and spread throughout many isolated applications. The whole MRO system environment consisted of several in-house developed, single-purpose applications with no or very limited interfacing capabilities. Czech Airlines intended to replace the fragmented IT landscape by a modern and fully integrated M&E software which offers industry best practice processes. 

Some of the expected benefits arising from the implementation project were to have more effective and efficient internal processes due to the full integration of AMOS, a decrease in maintenance costs and reduced ground times because of more streamlined planning processes. In combination with enhanced labour productivity and a better ratio of labour/flight hours, Czech Airlines counted on financial benefits in the range of million(s) EUR within four years meaning a fast return on investment.

In early 2007 Czech Airlines launched its “Request for Proposal” in which 16 companies were invited to participate. Throughout the three-stage bidding process, the airline assessed functional requirements, IT technologies used, implementation methodology and experience, pricing and references. 

Due to the scattered MRO system landscape that comprised numerous isolated IT applications, the data transfer was one of the main challenges the project team was confronted with. Data mapping and grouping from multiple sources and the migration into AMOS was a critical process within the implementation. 

Fundamental changes of the working processes that had been established over the years in the maintenance organisation were necessary to fully exploit the advantages of AMOS. As a consequence, people had to change roles and assume new responsibilities.

Project resources were preoccupied with defining a complex interface that linked AMOS to Oracle-Finance. 

Necessity to train around 1’000 people within only 2-3 months - without affecting the production. Approx. 60 internal trainers were prepared by Swiss-AS to perform the train-the-trainer concept at Czech Airlines.

The design process, set up and testing of hardware were challenging since Czech Airlines decided in favour of a high availability cluster solution (extremely safe with geographical cluster).

It was due to the strict project management that all project hurdles were cleared with ease and that the project was ultimately completed in time and within budget.

The project kick-off was held in Prague in autumn 2007. Twelve months later, the legacy systems were shut down and AMOS was put into operation via a “big bang” Go-Live and the efforts of all project members were finally crowned with success. This was officially attested by winning the coveted reward “IT Project 2008”, which was awarded to Czech Airlines by the Czech Association of Information Technologies Managers (CIOs) in 2009. 

The initiative to modernise the IT landscape within the technical division was internally considered as one of the most significant development investments in the last couple of years. The profitability of this investment was proven by the fact that the implementation of AMOS - while substantially streamlining the maintenance operations processes of Czech Airlines - led to significant savings, e.g. inventory stocks dropped by almost 14% just one month after Go-Live. When the Secretary of the Association of the European Airlines congratulated Czech Airlines, it was not surprising that he pointed out that Czech Airlines counted on a return on investment within only two years upon the start of productive use of AMOS.   

It is undisputed that the main value of AMOS lies in the system's full integration, its broad and in-depth spectrum of functionalities and data transparency being the prerequisites for informed business decisions.

Presently, Czech Airlines manages its entire MRO tasks for all 38 aircraft in AMOS which means that the Swiss software replaced all formerly used applications and is the only maintenance software in place today. More than 1’000 users log into the system to successfully plan and execute the Czech flag carrier’s Line and Base Maintenance. They also use AMOS to manage 3rd party MRO services provided to customers coming from all over Europe. Since the completion of the AMOS implementation in late 2008, potential AMOS customers like to visit Czech Airlines not only to visit a beautiful town that is well worthwhile but also to be able to talk to aviation staff that has successfully managed a major restructuring process in its maintenance organisation. Within the AMOS community Czech Airlines is well known as an ambitious airline in terms of submitting valuable inputs regarding the development of new features and functions in AMOS and it is their goal to contribute to the longevity and sustainability of AMOS.