British Airways Deploying Tata Consultancy Tool

Chennai: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is building a cabin crew software management solution for British Airways to help the airline monitor its 15,000 plus cabin crew located at Heathrow and Gatwick in UK, and at international locations like Buenos Aires, Delhi and Bahrain.

TCS and British Airways will jointly work on the solution to be developed at the TCS Travel and Hospitality Innovation Lab in Chennai. The solution could become an ‘industry standard’ and commercially made available for other airlines too, Paul Coby, Chief Information Officer, British Airways, told newspersons at the lab.

At present, the cabin crew at British Airways is monitored manually, while the new solution will fully automate the entire cabin crew management, said G. Raghavan, Head, Travel and Hospitality, TCS.

Innovation 2.0

TCS launched its travel and hospitality innovation lab with a new set of solutions to help the airline industry identify and retain high value customers. Named Innovation 2.0 solutions, these offerings will help clients in the travel and hospitality sectors migrate to the latest technology from legacy systems, said Raghavan.

In the earlier Innovation 1.0 offering, the solutions for the airline industry involved things like ‘touch point,’ Web sites and check-in kiosks. However, the Innovation 2.0 will help airlines to provide new business offerings such as redeeming real-time royalty points and travel concierge.

For TCS, the travel and transportation contributed 4.4 per cent of total revenue of $2.7 billion (at the end of six months of the current fiscal year). Around 3,000 people work for the vertical, which has clients such as British Airways, Qantas and Singapore Airlines, said S. Ramadorai, CEO, TCS.