The pressure to be on time, every time
Managing the movement of cabin and cockpit crews across thousands of flights is a high-stakes, precision-driven challenge. Airlines rely on specialized crew management systems to assign rosters, avoid conflicts, and keep operations moving smoothly.
With its 20-year-old crew management system approaching end-of-life, a major airline needed to migrate to a modern system to coordinate crews for around 3,000 flights each week.
Effective crew scheduling is a crucial factor in an airline’s on-time performance (OTP). OTP measures the percentage of flights that arrive within 15 minutes of their scheduled time, directly impacting customer satisfaction in a competitive market.
Because crew management is so critical to OTP, the migration simply couldn’t go wrong, and downtime was not an option. So, the airline turned to Thoughtworks — its longstanding and trusted technology partner — to ensure a smooth transition.
Challenge: A complex migration, with no room for error
After two decades of use, the existing crew management system relied on a complex web of interdependencies with numerous applications, making a seamless migration an even bigger risk.
In addition, while the same vendor provided the existing and new systems, the airline’s legacy system was so old that the vendor’s team had limited knowledge of its intricacies. In fact, the full scale of the complexities in the existing system were only uncovered as the project progressed.
To overcome these challenges, Thoughtworks took a collaborative and adaptive approach, helping accelerate the migration while minimizing operational risk.
Solution: A close partnership for a smooth transition
Thoughtworks embedded a small team alongside the airline’s developers to build a close working relationship and facilitate continuous communication and knowledge sharing.
This collaborative, evolutionary approach allowed us to make ‘intermediate decisions’ to maintain momentum during the migration and revisit them as new information emerged. To support this approach, we prioritized robust testing to ensure any changes wouldn’t break existing functionality, allowing the team to make modifications safely.
To ensure the short - and long-term success of the new system, we also championed observability and data-driven decision-making. By instrumenting the system for real-time performance insights, we could detect and address issues early. And by analyzing data from the new system, we gained insights into unexpected patterns and inconsistencies in the data pipelines, helping uncover unanticipated problems in the data migration process.
While migrating the system to a modern technology stack — including Node.js development, a container-based architecture, and serverless technologies from Amazon Web Services (AWS) — we also upskilled the in-house team with modern development practices.
Outcome: A disruption-free migration and a new collaborative culture
This project delivered far more than just a system replacement. While the primary goal was a successful and seamless migration to safeguard the airline’s OTP, it has also realized other valuable benefits.
Zero operational disruption
Our emphasis on robust testing and observability meant there were no major disruptions during the migration. This ensured uninterrupted crew scheduling, allowing the airline to maintain its OTP while undergoing a complex technology transition.
Fresher data for faster decisions
Though the new system offers similar functionality to its predecessor, Thoughtworks’ architectural decisions unlocked new operational advantages. A shift to an event-driven architecture has enabled faster data refresh rates, reducing them from up to four hours to just a few minutes, with some refreshes happening in around one minute. This gives employees near real-time insights to help improve OTP and respond to issues more proactively.
A stable platform to reduce risk
Our emphasis on robust testing and exemplary quality has laid the groundwork for safer and faster changes in the future, helping the airline gain the stability needed to maintain high levels of operational performance and minimize OTP risk.
Enhanced visibility for deeper understanding
The collaborative migration process and enhanced observability in the new system have dramatically increased the airline’s knowledge and understanding of its complex crew management ecosystem, both from a technical and business perspective.
An upskilled team with a quality-focused culture
The Thoughtworks team empowered the airline’s developers with modern development practices, including a clear focus on testing, collaboration and quality. This team has become an ‘exemplar team’ at the airline, championing a shift toward a quality-obsessed culture that drives more effective software development.
This project is a testament to the power of strategic collaboration and a flexible, quality-focused approach. The airline has secured a stable future for its crew management and flight operations, and it has an upskilled team focused on delivering business impact far beyond this migration.
