Earlier this year, low-cost airline flydubai revealed that it had deployed roaming staff with Windows 8 tablets to help check in passengers "on the spot" throughout the check-in zone, rather than being tied to a desk. The airline said that this move had reduced the average amount of time it takes to check in a passenger down to just two minutes - a major boost to the efficiency of its team there.
Now, Microsoft is trumpeting its success at another major passenger carrier, Saudi Airlines, where its software has been deployed to replace existing antiquated and disparate systems, saving the airline millions of dollars per year.
Muhammad Albakri, executive vice president of finance for Saudi Airlines, said: "Before we worked with Microsoft, we had scattered information everywhere. We had many different business intelligence and incentive solutions, separate training and no standard platform to run all the environments."
Microsoft worked with Saudi Airlines to develop a business intelligence solution that expands across many of its products, including SQL Server 2012, Power BI for Office 365, Windows Server 2012, and SharePoint Server 2013. Microsoft explains that its solution uses these products "to analyze, visualize and share data in a unified way, which allows the company to have better business visibility, more engaged employees, and projected savings of millions of dollars per year in the process."
It took just 90 days to establish the foundations of the business intelligence solution for the airline, and it now provides "dynamic dashboards, enterprise reports and customer reports that allow executives to view any subset of information and any level of detail they require." In addition to this, a custom line-of-business Windows 8.1 app has been deployed, offering "a consolidated view of the data for [Saudi Airlines"] highly mobile workforce."
A single deployment of Microsoft"s software, services and tools saving such a significant amount of money at a single company is quite a feather in Microsoft"s cap. We have a feeling the company will be sharing more of these success stories in the weeks and months ahead, as it continues to aggressively push its services and solutions to enterprise customers.