Air India on Monday said it has completed the ERP modernisation programme ahead of schedule, looking to drive significant improvements in operational efficiency.

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a software that helps businesses manage day-to-day tasks such as accounting, HR and resource mobilisation.

According to the airline, it has migrated its core ERP system using ‘RISE With SAP’, a tailor-made software, bundled with services, business analytics, and partner expertise.

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The airline cited the migration as a critical component in the larger digital transformation of Air India, with an impact on the modernisation across business operations such as ‘Finance and Human Resources’ as well as major functional areas such as ‘Commercial, Operations, and Engineering’.

As per the airline, the biggest challenges in its ‘comprehensive modernisation’ journey was its outdated ERP system running on a decade-old mainframe and associated software.

“The migration and cut over of such critical systems is normally performed with backup and restore operations on an equivalent system. The unavailability of such a system anywhere in the world was a seemingly insurmountable hurdle,” the airline said.

“Team Air India worked in close collaboration with SAP to devise innovative solutions and techniques to overcome the challenge and eventually delivering a successful migration ahead of schedule.”

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This migration, the airline said, paves the way for further modernisation of Air India’s ERP system and the combination of other group airlines into one entity.

“Air India’s vision is to emerge as the world’s most technologically advanced airline. A critical and foundational capability for this is a highly reliable, scalable modern ERP system that will drive significant improvements to our operational efficiency and assist us in creating a delightful customer experience,” Air India’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Satya Ramaswamy said in the airline’s statement.

“We identified the migration of our ERP System to a modern cloud infrastructure as one of the most important steps in this transformation journey.”