Application Integration Success Story
WestJet
WestJet is Canada's preferred airline, offering scheduled service throughout its 69-city North American and Caribbean network. Inducted into the Canada's Most Admired Corporate Cultures Hall of Fame and named one of Canada's best employers, WestJet pioneered low-cost flying in Canada.
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.
