BA completes six-year SAP rollout

British Airways (BA) has completed a six-year SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) rollout to computerise the maintenance system supporting the company's entire fleet of aircraft.

The SAP-based system is one of the largest implementations of its kind anywhere in Europe and replaces more than 150 out-dated and disparate legacy systems.

The new Engineering Wide System (EWS) will cover every aspect of aircraft maintenance in 26 hangars across 142 airports globally, as well as spare parts supply, air-worthiness data, and finance and component workshops.

BA claims EWS will improve accuracy in tracking and managing components and maintenance requirements, make it quicker to order parts, will control overtime better, and will result in cost savings and efficiencies through streamlining the system.

British Airways' engineering has a workforce of almost 6,000 and EWS required 23,000 man-days of classroom training, with on-the-job training supported by 1,000 system advisers and 200 process transaction manuals.

Paul Coby, BA's CIO, said the transformation has been "a major undertaking" but he added the effort is already paying dividends through greater efficiencies born of the simplification of the systems.