The Opportunity
In April 2022, Virgin launched a business flyers loyalty program to enhance the utilisation of Virgin Australia among business flyers and strengthen the company's connection with businesses.
The program necessitated the coordination of workflows across multiple systems, such as iFly, Salesforce, and Amadeus. Manual execution of these workflows is inefficient, prone to errors, and costly, leading to delayed feedback for Business passengers regarding their earned and redeemed rewards status.
Our Approach
We endorsed the use of Kafka as a streaming event platform to coordinate the flow of events among systems, and worked with Virgin to develop a high-level architecture documenting the required data types, messaging channels (Kafka topics), and event triggers.
A set of microservices to consume and transform incoming messages was developed prior to invoking the required APIs on destination systems.
Sida4 (as 4impact) worked with Virgin Australia SMEs to affect a complete transition in support of the solution to Virgin’s in-house BAU support teams.
Project Outcomes
- The solution went live in Q1 2023 handling thousands of messages per day while putting no appreciable load on the endpoint systems.
- Reward earnings and redemptions are kept in sync across all systems, with no need for manual intervention.
- Wider internal initiatives are now considering how they can leverage the business data captured in the Kafka environment to build out their own business services at a fraction of the cost and time that was previously required.
Key Services, Technologies and Toolkits
Details are contained in the full Case Study, download below
