Application Integration Success Story
WestJet
WestJet is Canada’s leading and most successful discount airline. Based in
Calgary, the company has been in operation since Feb 29, 1996. In its ninth year of
operation, the airline is operating a fleet of more than 50 Boeing 737’s and will have
a fleet comprised exclusively of Next-Generation 737’s by the end of 2005. WestJet
has more than 1 billion in annual revenue and services 34 destinations in Canada
and the US.
Challenge
WestJet was faced with the challenge of implementing a new aircraft maintenance
system which required integration between existing flight operations, human
relations, finance, maintenance operations and maintenance planning systems.
The family of systems involved in the integration effort was heterogeneous both in
terms of integration techniques as well as technology and platform. This extremely
complex implementation needed to take place without any interruption to service or
loss of data. Because all systems, underlying data, integration points and software
would be subject to Transport Canada scrutiny as part of the airline’s regular
airworthiness audit, Ideaca needed to approach the project with an emphasis on
testing and quality assurance needs.
Solution
Ideaca tackled the project with a small integration team which provided all project
management, business analysis, test coordination and development for the project.
Ideaca’s team put a custom built EAI framework in place which contained flexible
exception handling, complex business rules management, intuitive notifications,
dynamic message routing and comprehensive self-diagnostic features. The
flexibility of the EAI framework allowed the team to work around restrictions on use
of test and development environments by switching source and destination pairs to
accommodate system availability and data integrity concerns.
In spite of an aggressive timeline and a large requirement set, Ideaca was able to
finish the build and test of the framework many months in advance of the ‘Go-Live’
date for the new system. This allowed WestJet tremendous flexibility to test the
evolving API’s and other integration components being supplied to WestJet by third
party vendors.