Mindtree worked with a leading airline and helped them achieve cost efficiency, leading to a lot of savings in 15 months. We were their specialized test partner in performance, automation and test data services, driving enterprise transformations.
The Customer
Our customer is a leading airline operating globally, offering several services to diverse destinations, serving an extensive domestic and international network across six continents.
The Opportunity
The portfolio represents a diverse spectrum of commercial and operational business functions with over 400 applications including sales channels, online and kiosk check-in, revenue management, loyalty, tech ops, flight operations, including IROPS, crew management and airport customer service.
The airline needed a strategic partner with transformational capabilities in setting up a scalable operating model, driving enterprise test automation and resource optimization. The objective was mainly to help them deliver with speed, optimized cost and better quality. There was an initial set of challenges to be overcome:
- High cost of testing operations
- Transition responsibilities from over 45 positions with minimal business interruptions across 80+ applications
- Lack of strategy for automation testing which resulted in automation coverage (~8-10%) for key applications
- Lack of tool and framework standardization
- Lack of industry standard test processes and SLAs
- Inconvenient test data sourcing
- Unavailability of skills to deliver testing across a wide range of technology stacks
Mindtree’s Approach
Our expertise in quality engineering transformations with multiple airlines helped us make a smooth transition with minimal or no business interruption, while managing risks including non-cooperation of the incumbent vendor. Our transition approach included:
- Staggered transition in three waves with core team including architects and leads driving transition
- Overlapping with the incumbent vendor’s time to maximize their availability
- Setting up the knowledge management platform to record all knowledge transfer sessions
- Highlighting issues/risks early to the customer’ transition management office to resolve any roadblocks
In parallel with the transition, Mindtree carried out enterprise assessments/consulting in the areas of automation and performance engineering, and provided early recommendations. As part of this, Mindtree developed a technology/ tool-agnostic framework called the Unified Automation Framework, which includes automation factory.
Highlights of Solution
- Focused on high critical applications for the first wave of transition to minimize vendor dependency and mitigate early vendor attrition
- Mindtree’s expertise and experience working with multiple airlines helped us understand the customers’ landscape and bring out strategy that defined standards, metrics etc. aligned to customers work and technical culture
- Developed a “Unified Automation Framework”, which was scaled to support multiple technologies
- Delivered test automation services across 40+ applications through a test engineering platform that supported parallel executions
- Implemented mobile automation with Cloud parallel distributed execution, resulting in reduction of manual effort by ~30%
- Test data generation was automated for repeated scenarios and reduced the overall effort by 30-35%
- Established continuous Integration using Jenkins for different portfolio applications like tech ops, revenue management, and airport customer service
- Migrated scripts from commercial tools to open source technologies under Enterprise Unified Framework (around 30+ applications) – saved license cost of 100+ K USD
- Automation regression suite coverage for machine/business critical applications (100+ applications) increased to over 80% from the initial 8-10% coverage
- Spearheaded an enterprise IT operating model transformation for the customer’ QA organization that enabled seam less delivery and drove test engineering transformations across the organization
- Automation of ~300 applications for functional health check, sanity and regression priority test cases accelerated BVT across environments including production
- Leveraged Mindtree’s knowledge management platform, YORBIT, to enable ramping up of 100+ test engineers (vs manual testers) in two months
Outcomes
- Completed transition in 9 weeks, thus enabling a rapid vendor consolidation without any disruption to existing business with 0% schedule overrun
- Overall ~$1.56 M of savings over 15 months through transformation
- Estimated $3.5M TCO reduction in 3 years using automation and other optimization levers
- Estimated overall 36.5% efficiency gains on transformation engineering & 15% on right shoring optimized on/off in 3 years
- Saved over $100,000 moving from commercial to open source tools
- Regression Automation of 100+ Key Applications with a coverage of 85% resulted in effort savings of 30%
