Qantas Freight migrates to AWS Native Data Platform to Enhance Decision Making, Improve Revenue Management and Modernise Architecture

Operating continuously for more than a century, Australia’s Qantas is one of the oldest and most recognisable airlines in the world. Carrying freight has been a part of the Qantas story since the airline’s very first scheduled flight in 1922. Today it remains Australia’s largest air freight services business, servicing up to 500 destinations around the world, with a network of over 20 dedicated handling terminals.

To modernise its freight systems and fully integrate them with an upgraded ERP platform, Qantas selected Australian expert data consultancy Altis Consulting and Amazon Redshift Cloud Data Warehouse.

The project has delivered enhanced decision support and analysis capabilities, improved revenue management and modern platform ready to support AI, machine learning and other new capabilities.

The opportunity

Qantas knew it had the opportunity to enhance freight services by better linking its freight systems to its ERP, helping it make better decisions and lift the operational efficiency that sits at the heart of any successful logistics business.

The accuracy of Qantas Freight’s data it had available would be improved with more timely updates and full two-way data exchange, and the more accurate data that resulted would enhance its business agility.

In addition, the legacy systems it had in place were being increasingly constrained by the limited availability of skills to support them, escalating costs and limiting opportunities for modernisation.

Moving its freight systems onto Amazon Redshift Cloud Data Warehouse would also allow the airline to take advantage of new opportunities for automation and enhanced data processing.

The solution

Altis Consulting had previously implemented Qantas Freight’s data warehouse and the company again relied on Altis’ expertise to seamlessly move its freight systems onto AWS and integrate them with the airline’s upgraded ERP platform.

A pivotal aspect of the new solution involved establishing a two-way data exchange between Amazon Redshift and the ERP, ensuring real-time synchronisation of critical business information. Altis’ strategic approach to the implementation ensured the uninterrupted flow of downstream data feeds, maintaining business continuity and minimising disruptions during the transition. The upgrade program leveraged Altida - a metadatadriven framework that automates and simplifies the extract, load, transform (ELT) process using pre-built logic and data setups.

Both data and business logic were migrated to Amazon Redshift to ensure the seamless integration of the upgraded ERP system. Business logic from the legacy extract, transform and load (ETL) function was converted to SQL with the support of Altis’ DLA. This preserved the data model of the warehouse and seamlessly integrated Power BI reports with AWS Redshift, preserving the integrity and accessibility of essential business insights.

This approach also accelerated the delivery of the business logic migration, while using SQL enhanced the portability of the solution. (See fig. 1)

“AWS offered the combination of flexibility, scale and functionality breadth that we needed for our data platform. After an initial toolset comparison, we rapidly agreed on an architecture for our target environment. Our long-term Data and Analytics partner, Altis Consulting, brought critical expertise in the fields of AWS cloud and data migration. Their domain knowledge combined with their packaged accelerators meant that we could efficiently migrate our existing workloads to AWS.” - Igor Kwiatkowski, Executive Manager, Qantas Freight.

Figure 1

The outcome

The migration means the organisation is far better placed to make data-driven decisions to enhance operational efficiency. It's also enhancing strategic planning and responsiveness to market dynamics, helping Qantas Freight stay ahead of the competition in the fast-moving logistics industry.

Meanwhile the integration of a new revenue management module has given Qantas access to advanced functionality for pricing, inventory management, and revenue optimisation.

The new Amazon Redshift-based solution also put Qantas Freight on a far more modern footing, with the adoption of DevOps, infrastructure as code, and a serverless architecture helping ensure agility, scalability, and maintainability. The new architecture has helped reduce operational costs and also positioned Qantas Freight for scalable growth, giving it a platform that will support innovation and further enhancements in the future.

Those plans currently include adding additional data sources to enrich existing data assets, expansion of analytics capability using AWS AI/ML services to improve efficiency and forecasting, and providing governed selfservice access to data to scale and strengthen data-driven decision-making at Qantas Freight.