Letting digital transformation lead airlines' sustainable operating capabilities and market competitiveness is no longer just empty talk.
Recently, Spring Airlines, the first listed private aviation company in China, officially introduced AlphaFlow process platform as a unified platform for internal process design and management of the group. Based on the process architecture of "strategy-operation-management support", it strives to create a self-operating process management system that matches the strategy.
Spring Airlines launched its first Shanghai-Yantai route on July 18, 2005. By March 2024, it has 124 Airbus A320 series aircraft with an average age of 7.34 years. Its destinations cover major business and tourist cities in China, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia, operating more than 220 routes and transporting 20 million passengers annually. Spring Airlines is headquartered in Shanghai and has bases in Shenyang, Dalian, Shijiazhuang, Yangzhou (Taizhou), Ningbo, Nanchang, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Jieyang (Chaoshan), Lanzhou, Xi'an, Chengdu, Jeju, South Korea, Osaka, Japan, and Bangkok, Thailand.
On January 21, 2015, Spring Airlines issued its first A-shares and entered the capital market, becoming the first private airline in China. In the first three quarters of 2023, its profits ranked first among the seven listed airlines in the A-share market.
As the first company in the civil aviation industry to independently develop an IDS, DCS, FOC, and MIS, the importance of digital technology to Spring Airlines is unquestionable. As the three transformations are advancing, Spring Airlines is also seriously considering some issues in its information construction:
1. How many business processes does Spring Airlines have? How many business processes have not yet been informatized? If all business processes are informatized, can the company's strategic requirements be met?
2. Given limited resources, which business processes should be sorted out and solidified, and what are their priorities? In which business process scenarios will intelligence be more valuable?
3. Is it necessary to manage all business processes of Spring Airlines as assets? How to integrate them with global data and what is the relationship between the two?
Based on these considerations, Spring Airlines uses the AlphaFlow process platform as a unified process management IT platform, and guided by the "end-to-end" business process management concept, deeply analyzes the business environment and business characteristics of the civil aviation industry and its own business, and will implement the implementation steps of "clarifying, managing, and continuously optimizing" to achieve the goal of quantifiable, analyzable, and optimizable management and control of the company's overall business processes.
The first is to "sort things out clearly". Spring Airlines will use business processes as a link to comprehensively sort out and integrate various existing management elements and management systems, and eventually form standardized process documents, operation manuals, job manuals and other management documents and analysis reports, so that managers can sort out management ideas clearly and employees can clearly know what is the "right way to do things".
The second is to "manage it". Use processes to refine and consolidate the best practices of core businesses such as flight, dispatch, flight operations, maintenance, marketing, and services, and manage the results of the sorting as fixed assets in a unified manner. Through unified platforms, unified specifications, unified methods, and unified standards, we can achieve process visualization, standardized, and integrated management, and ultimately reflect and implement the company's overall business control requirements step by step, achieving the goal of unified processes and efficient utilization.
The third is "continuous optimization". Business process management is not a "one-time transformation project". With the continuous changes in the civil aviation business environment and characteristics, management requirements and management radius will also change accordingly. Spring Airlines will also achieve continuous optimization and improvement of processes based on the company's process and performance analysis system.
Through this cooperation, Econage Technology will also help Spring Airlines to gain efficiency from processes, accelerate the IT planning route centered on business processes, coordinate functions, reduce costs and increase efficiency.
