Case Study

dnata catering Australia Completes Complex System Migration Following Acquisition

Catering provider deploys SnapLogic to migrate dozens of apps and systems following acquisition of Qantas Airways’ catering business

dnata catering Backstory

dnata catering is Australia’s largest inflight caterer, chosen by many of the world’s airlines for their fresh award-winning meals and outstanding service. With a geographically diverse footprint, dnata catering employs over 4,000 people across 9 cities, produces over 64 million meals, and services over 246 thousand flights each year.

Offering a suite of services, dnata catering supports the aviation industry through the provision of inflight catering for domestic and international airlines, management of buy-on-board catering programs, provide inflight retail solutions, operation of airport lounges, and offering of readymade meal manufacturing for export, airline, and non-airline markets.

Parent company dnata – part of the Emirates Group – is one of the world’s largest air services providers. Offering ground handling, cargo, travel, and inflight catering services in 85 countries, dnata is a trusted partner for over 270 airline customers globally.

The Challenge

In 2018, dnata catering Australia acquired Qantas Airways’ catering businesses called Q Catering and Snap Fresh. Q Catering maintained five food production centers that supplied meals to more than 600 Qantas flights per day.

dnata catering was tasked with migrating all applications and systems used by Q Catering from the Qantas environment to the dnata catering environment, ensuring a seamless migration without interruption to business operations or customer delivery.

This migration involved integrating multiple applications and systems that managed passenger information, meal scheduling and forecasting, as well as real time changes as dictated by the nature of the airline industry.

For the Qantas to dnata catering migration project, dnata catering Australia’s lean IT team was tasked with these major goals:

• Completely transition from Qantas catering apps on AWS to dnata catering’s Microsoft Azure cloud
• Integrate dnata catering’s applications with Qantas’s passenger and scheduling systems, other third party vendor systems, and internal systems including QAD Enterprise Resource Planning
• Integrate dnata catering apps with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB to store critical audit information
• Ensure platform stability and scalability for 17 dnata catering centers in Australia, including the five new ones that were added after the Q Catering merger

And finally, the dnata catering team only had three months to fully test, validate, integrate, and implement.

The Solution

To assist with their migration project, dnata catering Australia set out to find an intuitive, easy to use as well as scalable and enterprise-grade Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solution.

“We reached out to SnapLogic based on a recommendation from Emirates Group IT,” said Vinod Nemade, IT Operations Manager at dnata catering Australia. “We had a very tight schedule for the project and building a new in-house integration competency team for this major project was not a viable solution.”

Nemade continued: “With SnapLogic’s intuitive integration platform, customer-centric approach, fast turnaround, and reliable consultancy services, we were able to complete close to 30 complex integrations, with the help of our internal IT teams.

This enabled us to efficiently migrate critical systems and integrations without any impact on newly adopted business operations and customer delivery, all while meeting our aggressive timeline goals.”

Nick Slager, General Manager IT, dnata catering Australia, added: “SnapLogic’s API management solution was a key technology enabler for application migration in the Qantas Catering acquisition. The easy to use, low code platform delivered a flexible and business-agile interface capability, allowing fast-tracked integration of acquired systems with no downtime in a 24×7 manufacturing environment, all within our aggressive deadlines. Further, the cloud-native data governance capabilities built into the platform provide an excellent basis for fine-grained control and visibility of data flows across the organization as well as with partners and other third parties.”

SnapLogic’s intuitive, visual approach towards integration enabled dnata catering Australia’s lean IT team to accelerate multiple complex integrations and deliver fast value to customers and stakeholders.