By Nick Heath, 20 January 2009 12:55
INTERVIEW
the Limo Drive Through System, a complex web of computer systems that helps deliver business class passengers direct from their doorstep to the departure lounge - a project which recently won the 'innovation' category at the Corporate IT Forum's Real IT awards.
Virgin is also considering greater use of handheld devices for flying and ground staff in order to bring new efficiencies for the company.
The airline is looking to introduce more handheld devices for its 5,000 flying staff in order to give workers up to the minute updates on the airline's constantly shifting departure schedule.
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"You have a planned schedule for when the aircraft will depart and inevitably that changes during the day because we have technical problems on aircraft, there are weather problems or other problems at the airport," he said.
"At the moment, we mostly deal with it through phones or somebody has to go back to a PC to check. That is where the handhelds will be useful in making sure that we are able to manage that disruption and provide everybody with up to date information."
The airline has also upgraded its flight planning system, which plots out the optimum routes for its aircraft to minimise the fuel burn and country tariffs.
The airline has around 28 permanent staff in IT operations, despite it having 4,500 desktop PCs for 5,000 ground staff and 450 servers in its datacentres.
This is possible thanks to Virgin's heavily outsourced infrastructure, with the airline farming out its helpdesk and application support to TCS, network management to Affinity, overseas network provision to Sita and, from the middle of this year, its datacentres to CSC.
Cope said: "We are highly outsourced and have quite a small internal set of employees.
"We aren't outsourced to just one company - we have picked the best of breed across a number of areas."
The day-to-day running of the airline relies on a host of different applications - Oracle software for its ERP system, a PROS revenue management system, an airline specific management system called Ultramain, a crew management system from Avion, a reservation system run by EDS.
Cope said the airline is not looking to migrate its desktops to Windows Vista because it is happy with XP and "a lot of our hardware would not be able to run it given its memory and processing requirements".
Despite scaling back on the number of future projects the airline will pursue, Cope said it still has plans to implement MS Exchange 2007, MS Office SharePoint Server 2007, as well as improving its management of systems using HP OpenView.
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