Three key digital avenues for orchestrating  harmony

Building harmonious operations and ecosystems requires the industry to navigate three key digital avenues:

Connectedness

Connecting silos within an enterprise and across enterprises is at the very heart of digital enablement—this unification is the most critical building block of the whole exercise. As an example, an airline’s operations team, ground handling teams, airports, and air traffic control (ATC) will significantly benefit from a unified platform—the digital spine—built on collaborative decision-making principles. The platform will connect various siloed data and business events, automatically detecting anomalies and surfacing cross-domain intelligence for effective utilization of resources at the airport and enhancing the predictability of aircraft departure. The platform can, for example, bring unified situational awareness about flight delay and its consequences by offering insights to the front-line staff and providing artificial intelligence-machine learning (AI-ML)-based recommendations. It can suggest, for instance, whether to hold the departure of a connecting flight and the preparedness required of every team to operate the revised flight schedule to mitigate passenger inconvenience due to the delayed inbound flight. 

This harmonious way of working will enhance customer experience as the connecting flight is not missed, resulting in potential cost savings for the airline. More importantly, the front-line staff feel empowered to take informed decisions based on real-time insights. Leveraging the power of connectedness puts businesses in a better position to innovate on superior customer and employee experiences as well as productivity gains. Singapore Airlines Engineering Company, for instance, has streamlined MRO operations with a one-stop mobile app that provides history of defects of an aircraft, the maintenance manuals for the model and the servicing tools needed—all in one place, reducing the time workers spend on each aircraft. The planes can be put back to use faster, reducing passenger wait times.

Collaboration

With connected data and insights, organizations can bring in a collaborative environment for all stakeholders in the ecosystem using digital tools and applications. Some key considerations must be taken into account to attain this:

• Inclusive by design: Business users should be involved in design thinking workshops to ensure the digital collaboration systems are aligned to their needs and preferences and the tools are viewed as an enabler and not as an overhead.
• Contextual: Placing the connected real-time context at the center of collaboration tools not only simplifies interactions but also boosts the confidence and productivity of users. The cabin crew can, for example, share a picture or a video of an inflight defect (damaged seat or a faulty inflight entertainment system), along with the context (traveler who occupied the seat, his/her travel history, and preferences), making collaboration between the crew, the service, and customer experience teams easier and more effective to facilitate proactive initiation of service recovery for the traveler. 
• Intuitive and simple: Right information and insights presented in an intuitive manner can help the frontline staff, responsible for critical operational processes, make effective decisions without being overloaded by information.
• Change management and governance: The success of digital collaboration initiatives depends on their adoption by the workforce. Organizations with clear mechanisms to disseminate their vision and strategy to all levels reap maximum benefits from digital investments. 

Enhanced collaboration within an enterprise leads to enriched customer and employee experience and productivity gains, while extended collaboration across businesses helps create new business and operating models. Digital collaboration between OEMs, equipment/part manufacturers and airlines can lead to many ‘as-a-service’ business models instead of the traditional purchase-maintain-retire models for parts. Leading rideshare platform Lyft, for example, partnered with Sixt, a car rental provider, for mutual benefit. Lyft gets a ready supply of vehicles and Sixt benefits by becoming less dependent on and paying less commissions to online travel agents (OTAs).

Convergence

The future of travel will be shaped by the ability of individual travel businesses and ecosystems to converge on a larger purpose by building on connectedness and collaboration. This will help unleash great value by harnessing the collective power at the intersections of previously unconnected and disjointed value chain; composite processes transcending individual businesses, supported by robust handshake mechanisms across various technology layers, will become a fundamental construct towards enabling convergence. For example, OEMs and airline engineering portfolio working together can address pain points impacting each other’s KPIs, giving rise to newer business and operating models between these entities. The OEMs can understand the usage statistics of aircraft they are responsible for and provide a solution to improve serviceability, optimize resource utilization and improve operational efficiencies for all entities involved. Booking.com, a global digital travel platform, has partnered with Tripadvisor’s Viator, a leading experiences marketplace, to provide travelers with around 40,000 bookable attractions, tours, and activities. This provides an expansive choice of destination experiences for Booking.com customers, expanding its experience business while also creating value for Viator’s global community of tour operators and providers. 

The travel industry will witness more such convergence, serving larger purposes such as seamless customer experience across modes/phases of trips, green travel, community development, improved cash flow, and sustainable financials.