Flight invoicing system at skeyes atc
 

Challenges

The gathering and reconciliation of flight and aircraft information for the invoicing of the related ATC service fees is a highly complex process, involving industry communication formats, national calculation rules, aircraft-specific noise and weight information, route and call sign recognition and other information.

 

Due to the complex nature, extending an ERP package to support this would render the ERP very difficult to upgrade in the future.

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The solution

It became clear that redesigning the existing bespoke application was the best option, and at the same time creating separate components that would be of value for the entire administrative organization of Skeyes, such as access to flight plans and access to actual flight movements as a separate offering.

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We developed open data components for flight plans and actual movements and built a dynamic reconciliation engine and fee calculation engine with variables and logic that can be parametrized.

At the same time we built connectors to sources as they are today, which can be replaced by new connectors as integration technologies evolve further. A client self-service offering can be developed with ease building upon the platform.

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Our team of analyst-developers carefully observed the as is process end-to-end including all existing forms and information repositories, actors and constraints, opportunities and potential pitfalls, in close cooperation with the head of purchasing of Skeyes. Together they created the data model and decision policies, which were required as a baseline when creating the process flow and associated forms in Bizagi.

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Digital Innovation analysts inventoried the as is process with the help of Skeyes' process operators and gained a profound insight on the industry formats and highly specific categorization and reporting rules that are in place. Specific attention was given to the national invoicing formula with all aircraft-specific parameters and the requirement for it to evolve in the future.

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Combining Microsoft .NET and Angular with an implementation agnostic database connector, we were able to achieve a set of standardized OData APIs, a robust calculation engine and user-friendly interface for the data intensive environment the reconciliation process is.

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The results

Validation errors raised by the system are more insightful for the system operators and much of the tacit knowledge of the operators has been turned into explicit business rules, making the system easier to operate for new personnel.

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Based on the insights provided, we aimed to further limit manual intervention in the reconciliation process to only that what cannot be predicted using business rules. We shifted the focus from transactional intervention to master data maintenance, further reducing the likelihood of any claims or corrections raised by

customers of Skeyes. The invoicing calculation detail could now be exposed to customers, further reducing the amount of questions raised.