Lufthansa Group: Cocreating a data fabric infused with context and governance for true business-wide data-driven decision-making
Explore Lufthansa Group’s data transformation with SAP
Leading global airline group Lufthansa Group sought to harmonize critical data from siloed systems across its subsidiaries. By integrating the SAP Datasphere solution with a partner solution on SAP Business Technology Platform, it federated SAP and third-party data while preserving key metadata, making it available for analytics and business intelligence.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Passenger travel and leisure | Frankfurt, Germany | 105,000 employees |
disparate data sources virtualized on a single foundation.
day instead of months to connect additional data sources.
spend transparency across connected systems.
Enterprise Architect, Lufthansa Group
Enabling a data transformation to harmonize mission-critical data
One of the biggest airline groups, Lufthansa Group plays a leading role in the European market. Operating a passenger airlines network with Lufthansa German Airlines, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, and Brussels Airlines, the organization offers flights from global hubs in Frankfurt and Munich, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland – as well as Vienna, Austria, and Brussels, Belgium. Besides its passenger airlines, Lufthansa Group’s business also includes logistics, maintenance, and catering operations.
Committed to playing a part in actively shaping the global airline market, Lufthansa Group aims to connect people, cultures, and economies in a sustainable way. In doing so, it aspires to set new standards for customer friendliness and uses the potential for innovation and digitalization to develop customer-focused products. A strict focus on costs, operational stability, and reliability in all areas of the organization means Lufthansa Group is constantly innovating to improve efficiency, customer experiences, and safety.
With a disparate data landscape and 14 separate ERP applications, data streamed in separately from a multitude of different sources such as Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft applications. Data poured in from its aircraft systems, booking and sales applications, finance processes, and its supply chain for managing incoming parts.
For Lufthansa Group, it’s crucial to bring this data together in context to derive meaning from it. But with data sources kept in silos, the organization needed to copy data from these sources for analytics use cases, which was cumbersome and time consuming. With the organization’s vast, complex, and growing operations, the need to harmonize the data coming from different systems across its subsidiaries grew urgent.
Enterprise Architect, Lufthansa Group
Adopting next-generation data management capabilities
Lufthansa Group was running a large portion of its business operations enterprise-wide on SAP solutions and used third-party software from its partner to analyze spend data across more than 20 source systems. This setup meant it lacked a consolidated view on procurement spend.
As a decades-long user of SAP software across its group of companies, Lufthansa Group trusted SAP to propose a solution to harmonize its disparate data and make it readily available for data analytics. The goal was to build a business data fabric architecture to provide a foundation for digital innovation, simplifying the delivery of trusted data across its different systems while retaining the important business context. Holger Koenig, enterprise architect at Lufthansa Group, explains, “We have some applications that are specific to airline operations and Lufthansa Group in particular. Others, like HR, finance, and procurement, are not. Ideally, we want data from all our systems to come together to provide a clear and holistic picture by keeping the business context that comes from our processes. For example, if you think about the myriad of orders we place for airline parts from thousands of business partners, extracting this data out of context creates additional work for our teams. Because of this, they need to remap the incoming parts to the correct regional business partner.”
As a solution, Lufthansa Group liked the next-generation functionality and rich integration capabilities offered by the SAP Datasphere solution to meet its significant needs. To stress test the capabilities of SAP Datasphere, Lufthansa Group co-innovated a solution with its partner and SAP for its maintenance business. Using SAP Datasphere on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), the teams built a business data fabric as an integrated layer that sits on top of data from the partner solution. This data service connects with its SAP solution landscape and the SAP Analytics Cloud solution for use in reporting.
Enterprise Architect, Lufthansa Group
Retaining critical business context in a federated data landscape
Simplifying its data landscape while providing ready access to meaningful data with business context and logic intact, the team at Lufthansa Group’s maintenance business has access to federated spend management information from different SAP and third-party applications.
Using SAP Datasphere preserves critical business context, giving the organization information it needs to make rapid decisions that improve everything from boosting profit margins to enhancing supply chain resilience.
With an integrated layer sitting on top of the partner solution’s spend analytics data, Lufthansa Group can take advantage of greater spend transparency across various source systems. With a direct line to mission-critical business data and metadata and the relationship between them from SAP and third-party applications, critical business context information is retained while eliminating manual data collation and reporting efforts. By mitigating the need to extract data from original sources and export it to a central location, Lufthansa Group reduced time to data and lowered data integration costs.
For Lufthansa Group, giving teams easier access to context-rich spend management in its maintenance operations is just the beginning. As Koenig asserts, “We’re excited about where we’re heading as we unleash our data and use the capabilities of this new approach with SAP Datasphere to federate data from across our subsidiaries.”
Enterprise Architect, Lufthansa Group
Exploring new use cases for enabling data discovery and fresh insights
Using SAP Datasphere on SAP BTP allows the team from Lufthansa Group to extend the data model to other use cases within days instead of months. Already, the airline group is looking to extend the use of SAP Datasphere to finance use cases and sees transactional and reporting data coming together and giving the company just one home for this critical information.
And with an always-on daily refresh of operational data, Lufthansa Group is looking to enable near-real-time cash position management with payment terms. With a data fabric helping eliminate data silos and simplifying access to data across its organization, Lufthansa Group can move at speed to continue its business transformation and gain competitive advantage.