Indigo Flying High Thanks to Smart SLA Management

Summary:

IndiGo airlines recently entered the record books with the single-largest aircraft order in global aviation history. For the plucky airline, it’s more than just a grand statement: t’s testament to its fast growth, growth driven in part by IT.

Highlights:

Singh’s primary focus was clear: Improve the SLAs of systems that are critical for a flight to take off.He decided to establish a reporting structure, tuned towards creating an analytical layer within IT which also realigned reports to the business.

The Organization: When the three-and-half-year-old IndiGo recently announced an order to acquire 180 Airbus A-320 aircrafts at an estimated Rs 70,200 crore, it raised eyebrows. If the announcement is any indication of its growth, the company is poised to cause some serious damage to its competition. And the IT team at IndiGo, headed by Ramandeep Singh Virdi, VP-IT, InterGlobe Aviation (IndiGo) is guilty of causing a lot of that damage.

Multiple-layered support processes have been reduced to a single step. We’ve been able to bring down our man-power related costs significantly

If you ask Singh how IT’s been instrumental in IndiGo’s success, his answer is a modest one. “We have been able to drive better SLAs by creating a more efficient analytical structure,” he says. The Business Case: When Singh joined IndiGo two years ago, the airliner’s IT was using an ITIL compliant solution to log all incidents and changes within IT. Although the process to log tickets was being followed fairly diligently, he noticed there was still a lot of room to improve the downtime record of various systems. As an airline is highly dependent on IT systems, any downtime,  triggers manual operations, which impact the on-time performance of the airline. And that directly affects the bottom line of an airliner that is positioning itself as India’s on-time performer. On analyzing the airliners processes, Singh observed serious gaps in the analysis of logged data. The logging was not able to address recurring problems. “There were daily, weekly, and monthly reports, but they were structured to highlight only immediate issues,” he explains. The Project: Singh’s primary focus was clear: Improve the SLAs of systems that are critical for a flight to take off. But his real challenge was to achieve that while reducing costs. So, Singh created a two-pronged strategy that would study process gaps and look into cost cutting measures. He decided to establish a reporting structure, tuned towards creating an analytical layer within IT which also realigned reports to the business. First Steps: The beta editions of the new reports had about 10 slides which contained data collected manually by the team, every week. For example, they tracked the number of incidents that caused downtime across IT systems. Based on these reports, Singh prepared weekly incident trend reports which mark out action points to eliminate those incidents.  One report revealed that IndiGo’s networks contributed to a portion of IT’s downtime, which then had a domino effect on the business. Singh was now able to re-negotiate with his vendor and fix the problem.

Multiple-layered support processes have been reduced to a single step. We’ve been able to bring down our man-power related costs significantly

Benefit: Within the first year, IT’s performance for critical systems shot up by 50 percent despite a 25 percent increase in load. Today, with a 60 percent increase in load, IT has still been able to sustain a 30 percent annual improvement in performance. The analysis also allowed IndiGo to utilize IT resources better, thereby cutting costs by 30 percent. “Multiple-layered support processes have been reduced to a single step. We’ve been able to bring down our man-power related costs significantly,” says Singh.