Lux Airport selects Ordina to Implement SAP S/4HANA

Luxembourg-Findel airport is the only airport in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg with some 230 employees. It is the world’s 25th largest airport and Europe’s 6th largest freight airport. Composed of 3 terminals, it last year welcomed 3.6 million passengers and handles around 940,000 T of goods. For the first time in its history, the airport also registered over 300,000 passengers per month for several months. With 1.84 million passengers, Luxair remains by far the main airline at Luxembourg airport in 2017.

Selecting an SAP Partner

Just over a year ago, Lux Airport entrusted a consultancy firm with the selection of a service provider capable of providing a new platform for managing its organisational processes. The need for greater professionalism in its services, linked to a significant growth in its activities (the company saw the number of passengers welcomed increase from 2 million in 2013 to more than 3 million in 2017), in fact encourages the airport to replace its existing solutions, largely developed to measure and now outdated.

Among the selection criteria, Lux Airport had mainly highlighted the reliability of the platform, its stability, its ability to integrate with other applications, both internal and external partners (customers, other operators active at the airport, etc.), its ergonomics, its scalability and its functionality.

Ordina SAP partner

In the end, Lux Airport opted for the solution proposed by Ordina, namely S/4HANA from SAP, an integrated platform at the cutting edge of technological evolution. At the beginning of 2018 Ordina deployed the modules for general and cost accounting, purchasing management, operational and commercial management. The aviation business module is being migrated to SAP S/4HANA. Integration with the other players on the site is the next logical step.

One of the major challenges of the project was to replace the many manual processes still carried out on paper, given that Lux Airport’s activities are largely decentralised (notably since the construction of the new terminal B in summer 2017). Similarly, the many interactions with other trading partners required an efficient and integrated central system.

In addition to helping with the choice of hardware, Ordina took charge of the entire project, including physical installation, design, implementation (with the advantage that S/4HANA is largely pre-configured, which speeds up its deployment, even if Lux Airport’s business is quite specific and its needs rather specific), support and maintenance as well as user training.

Lux Airport already plans to add new functionalities to its  SAP S/4HANA platform, notably in the areas of document management and integration with other solutions.