Air India partners with SAP to accelerate its digital transformation

Air India has migrated its core Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system using SAP’s RISE with SAP software that offers business transformation services. This is expected to improve Air India’s core enterprise functions such as finance and human resources and roll out advanced capabilities in commercial, operations, and engineering areas.  

“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. We identified the migration of our ERP System to a modern cloud infrastructure as one of the most important steps in this transformation journey,” said Air India’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Satya Ramaswamy.

Until now, Air India was using an outdated ERP system that runs on a decade-old mainframe and associated software. As per the company, the unavailability of backup and restore operations for the migration of Air India’s critical system proved to be a major challenge. However, Air India and SAP developed alternatives to circumvent this hurdle and deliver migration ahead of schedule. This migration paves way for further modernisation of Air India’s ERP system and the process of combining other Star Alliance group airlines (Air India is part of Star Alliance). 

"As they (Air India) become a world-class airline and serve their global customers with a proud Indian heart, SAP’s cutting-edge cloud technology will enable the company to improve their customer experience, accelerate people transformation and develop into an intelligent, sustainable enterprise,” said Kulmeet Bawa, president and managing director, SAP Indian Subcontinent. 

RISE with SAP was launched in 2021. It is a subscription-based offering that bundles existing SAP tools and technologies to be a business transformation-as-a-model service.