IBM helps Prague Airport take flight with SAP ERP

Letiště Praha (Prague Airport) is one of the largest airports in Central Europe, employing 2,500 people and serving more than twelve million passengers per year. Over the last four years, the volume of passenger traffic has risen by nearly 30 per cent, and the airport predicts further growth in the coming years. Even with this enormous expansion, Letiště Praha has maintained excellent levels of customer service, and was named the best airport in Central and Eastern Europe in 2005 and 2007.

“The key to supporting business growth successfully is to invest in information systems,” explains Martin Šebánek, Senior Project Manager at Letiště Praha. “We used to have around ten separate systems for accounting, asset management and so on, which did not give us the level of financial control that we needed in order to manage our business and attract potential investors. Moreover, these legacy applications were becoming expensive to support and develop, so we wanted to move to a more standards-based solution.”

Choosing a solution

After reviewing various options, Letiště Praha decided to implement the SAP Business Suite family of applications, to provide a single integrated system that would be able to handle almost all of the airport’s financial, logistics, SRM and HR processes.

“SAP is one of the few vendors that can offer a truly comprehensive ERP solution,” explains Martin Šebánek. “SAP Business Suite is used by many major world airports, so we were confident that it could deliver the functionalities we needed.”

The airport’s senior management set a deadline of just 15 months for the project – an ambitious time-frame, considering that it would involve the implementation of 19 SAP applications. Without in-house expertise, Letiště Praha needed to find an implementation partner with the experience, expertise and resources to manage the project successfully.

Letiště Praha sent out an invitation to tender, and received responses from several major players, including IBM, Accenture, SAP and IDS Scheer.

“We evaluated all of the proposals, but IBM was the best in terms of both the price and the expertise that IBM has demonstrated in previous SAP application implementations for airports and airlines,” says Martin Šebánek. “IBM was also able to bring additional consultants from Siemens IT Services & Solutions onto the team, so we knew that they could provide sufficient resources to complete the project on time.”

The ERPort project

IBM Global Business Services worked with Letiště Praha to divide the project (known as ERPort) into five phases, starting with the core financial and logistics features of SAP ERP as well as the SAP ERP Human Capital Management application.

“One of the major challenges here was to configure the asset management system within SAP ERP,” explains Martin Šebánek. “IBM Global Business Services did an extensive job of customizing the SAP applications to manage our large and complex network of assets, adapting them to meet the required accounting standards.”

In the second phase of the ERPort project, IBM Global Business Services helped Letiště Praha implement a data warehouse and reporting tools, using the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component, and built a SAP Employee Self Service (ESS) portal using the SAP NetWeaver Portal component.

“The SAP ESS application enables our 2,500 staff to check and update personal information, submit vacation requests, view payroll and so on,” explains Martin Šebánek. “As more and more staff take advantage of the services it offers, SAP ESS will significantly cut down on paperwork and reduce the workload for our Human Resources department.”

The third phase of the project included plant maintenance, real estate management and investment management applications, and was followed within a month by the fourth phase, in which IBM Global Business Services implemented SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) applications.

Finally, the fifth phase saw an extension of the business intelligence environment, and a new version of the intranet portal. These final components went live just 14 months after the start of the first phase – comfortably within the 15-month deadline set by Letiště Praha’s senior management.

“The IBM Global Business Services team have delivered a highly complex project on time and on budget,” says Martin Šebánek. “This achievement is a real testament to their technical expertise, business experience and highly professional approach to project management.”

IBM is also providing a four-year support package for the SAP solution, which gives Prague Airport confidence that its SAP applications will perform well for the foreseeable future.

Building a new infrastructure

Having developed a strong relationship with IBM Global Business Services during the project planning stage, Letiště Praha also decided to work with IBM to build a new hardware infrastructure to support the SAP applications.

“We are running SAP Business Suite on three IBM System p 560 servers, each with 16 POWER5+ processors and 96GB of memory,” says Martin Šebánek. “The System p platform provides excellent performance and we have already gone a year without experiencing any hardware problems.”

Ready for take-off

Moving from a complex landscape of separate systems, where business data was held in a variety of different databases and Excel spreadsheets, to a fully integrated suite of business applications supported by a single database is already providing a number of benefits for Letiště Praha’s 420 SAP software users and a further 2,080 ESS portal users.

The successful implementation of SAP software as part of the ERPort project is also an essential step in the ongoing transformation of Letiště Praha from a government-owned entity to a public-owned entity.

“With SAP Business Suite, we have one set of applications and one data warehouse for all business operations – giving us the level of control over finances and assets that we need if we are to maintain our position as one of the world’s leading airports,” concludes Martin Šebánek. “By working with IBM Global Business Services, we have gained a solution that is tailored to our needs, running on highly reliable IBM System p 560 servers and supported by dedicated IBM experts. The most important part of the ERPort project has been completed thanks to the exceptional effort of the joint team and great cooperation between IBM, Siemens and SAP.

“As we adapt to the new solution, we will be able to introduce electronic invoicing and payslips and improve our CRM processes too – delivering a better service to our customers while increasing internal efficiency and reducing costs.”