At Air France-KLM, we’re one of the global leaders in international air transport. Through our subsidiaries Air France, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and Transavia, we offer passenger services, cargo transport, and aircraft maintenance flights to over 300 destinations.
To transport our 83 million passengers a year, it’s vital that we keep our modern fleet of 522 aircraft in top condition. Commercial aviation is one of the safest ways to travel for a very good reason; like all leading global airlines, Air France-KLM follows rigorous and tightly regulated inspection and maintenance processes for all aircraft and airside equipment.
Maintaining a world-class fleet
Our aircraft are made up of thousands of individual components, each of which requires planned as well as unplanned maintenance. Every asset inspection and repair we carry out is associated with documentation: maintenance manuals and tech logs, work instructions, engineering drawings, and much more. With reference to these documents, our mechanics and engineers can perform their duties safely, efficiently, and accurately.
For many years, all our documents were printed on paper, and our teams relied on hundreds of thousands of hard copies to do their work. New maintenance processes and airworthiness directives are released all the time—and with so many paper copies, it was a major effort to keep our records up to date. What’s more, the cost of storing all these paper documents was climbing and climbing every year. We knew we needed a different approach.
Driving digital transformation
That’s where our journey with OpenText™ began. Working together, we switched from paper records to digital documents, managed securely and efficiently in OpenText™ Documentum™. For more than two decades, Documentum has acted as the single source of truth for all our maintenance and engineering content—including data from industry vendors such as Airbus, Boeing, and General Electric.
Today, 15,000 employees across the business rely on data in Documentum to perform their day-to-day work. For our aircraft engineers particularly, the solution had a massive impact on efficiency. Gone are the days of leafing through filing cabinets to find vital maintenance information—today, all the information they need is right at their fingertips. They simply enter a part number into Documentum, and they can navigate to the associated records immediately.
We operate in a highly regulated industry, which makes OpenText the perfect fit for our compliance needs. The solution offers a watertight audit trial for every user action, helping us to demonstrate to our regulators that we are following the proper procedures for our maintenance activities.
Soaring into cloud
Documentum is such an important solution for our business that we continuously invest in extending and enhancing its capabilities. Over the years, we’ve integrated Documentum with our core business systems, including SAP® ERP and Salesforce®. One of our most recent projects was deploying Documentum D2 SmartView—a modern user experience that empowers our employees with personalized workspaces that make it even faster and easier to find the data they need. With some features still pending, we continue to partner with OpenText to help drive product roadmaps.
At the moment, we’re planning our next big Documentum project—a move to the cloud. By bringing the solution to Azure, we’ll unlock all the familiar benefits of cloud: easier management and maintenance, lower infrastructure costs, and tighter information security. As an early adopter, Professional Services is helping us navigate vulnerabilities as we containerize in Azure.
Working with OpenText, we’re going a step further. By deploying OpenText™ Extended ECM Documentum™ for SAP® Solutions alongside Documentum on the new cloud platform, we’ll enable our users to access data from our information management system directly from their SAP applications.
Read our case study to learn more
