AMOS - a story of success at Portugália Airlines

PGA, based at Lisbon airport, started its operations in 1990. The Portuguese regional airline was integrated into the TAP Group in 2007. Today, PGA’s flight capacity is fully aligned with the TAP Group network, i.e. the airline operates as a feeder-defeeder. TAP is the national airline of Portugal and as a member of the Star Alliance, the flag carrier’s worldwide route network comprises 77 destinations in 35 countries. PGA has a fleet of 14 aircraft of the type Embraer 145 and Fokker 100, which are mainly maintained in-house (Line & Base Maintenance up to C-Checks).

PGA was screening the MRO software market in 2009/2010 since its current system had reached its end-of-life-cycle. As the former software was no longer complying with legal requirements in an efficient way, many tasks were completed in 3rd party applications i.e. the same data had to be re-entered in different systems.

PGA was looking for an M&E system in which the creation of reports and data analysis was easy and wanted to make sure that not only highly skilled IT staff could fulfil these tasks. 

PGA appreciated Swiss-AS’ policy to sell AMOS as a community product which is constantly under development. The Iberian airline expected functional richness, a user-friendly GUI and lower hardware costs from the new system.

In the evaluation phase, which included an AMOS presentation and a workshop over several days, Swiss-AS had the opportunity to convince the PGA evaluation team of the advantages of AMOS and its proven implementation procedure. 

Since 2011, AMOS can be used in connection with Sybase and Oracle. PGA was the first customer that decided to use AMOS in combination with an Oracle database. This was considered a challenge during the implementation and an important risk-taking decision during the pre-sales process. 

During data transfer two challenging requirements had to be met: most of the historic data had to be migrated but the legacy data was spread over several locations.

The organisation of the training sessions for end users (mainly technical staff) was challenging.

The Portuguese carrier was pleased to rely on the possibility to use AMOS on Oracle. Although some companies shy away from being launch customers for new technologies, PGA had good reasons for choosing this setup: The existing internal Oracle platforms and know-how triggered this decision. In order to support the launch customer in the best possible way, Swiss-AS’ technical experts intensively supported PGA on and offsite and were in close contact with PGA and the Oracle team of its sister IT company Megasis. Reported support cases from PGA in the “AMOS support tool” were treated with high priority to solve issues immediately.

The project length was originally estimated to be less than 12 months. However the data transfer, the most critical element in projects, took longer than expected. The extraction from several data sources, followed by the data harmonisation was time consuming. To focus on this challenging task, PGA was supported by Megasis in the field of infrastructure and interfaces (SAP finance and NetLine/Ops). 

The 120 AMOS users were trained using classroom training, e-learning and the train-the-trainer method. The back office users first completed AMOS Basics e-learning sessions, followed by classroom training with special focus on their field of work. For the technical staff, Swiss-AS trained some of the PGA key users as internal trainers who prepared the mechanics for their daily work with AMOS. Customer-tailored training exercises combined with the crucial phase of data-transfer and go-live preparations proved to be challenging. Swiss-AS was proud to be able to send a Portuguese native speaking trainer to PGA to avoid any language barriers. 

PGA decided to implement all core modules of AMOS and demanded only minor software customisations. After almost one year of project work, PGA went live with AMOS in August 2012. As generally strongly recommended by Swiss-AS, the go-live was done in a “big-bang”. The transition went very smoothly and also the interfaces to 3rd party systems were operational right from the start.

One key to the success was the PGA company culture being “lived” by the employees: Changes are considered as positive. The key user team consisted of very skilled, highly motivated people who were focused on a successful go-live within budget and time and who succeeded in passing their positive attitude on to future AMOS users.

PGA states that the implementation of AMOS has led to more integrated and leaner processes in the maintenance department based on industry best practice. In addition, having all maintenance data in one single source considerably eases the data analysis and extraction. Man-hours could be saved in some areas and the interface with SAP was highly praised as being user-friendly.

AMOS manages the entire fleet of PGA (Embraer and Fokker) and is the only MRO software in place. A centralised M&E information source now allows a much faster data analysis and less manual work also due to the successful integration of AMOS with NetLine/OPS and SAP finance.

6-12 months after the go-live, Swiss-AS performs an onsite audit to review the usage and performance of AMOS. This audit will be conducted within the next weeks.