GOL does more with less through airline contract automation
Like most of the industry dealing with the effects of the pandemic, GOL reevaluated their strategy and started looking for ways to be more efficient. The airline turned to ATPCO and Express Contracts for a better way to process thousands of contracts and manage their corporate and private fares in the market without disrupting their current customer commitments—a way to do more with less.
Built in partnership with Volaro, Express Contracts allows airlines to get their contract fares to market faster and with fewer resources by automating the process. The tool helps airlines find increased revenue through fewer manual coding hours, reduced number of errors, and faster time to market.
Need
Limited resources overwhelmed by contracts requiring hours of manual coding
As GOL adjusted their strategy in light of forecasts suggesting air travel would not return to pre-pandemic volumes for years, they were also migrating to a new PSS (passenger service system). With reduced people power focusing the on-going PSS migration and constrained budgets, GOL needed to find areas of their business where they could gain efficiency.
Filing corporate contracts has long been a cumbersome process ripe for automation. Fierce competition leads to notoriously complex contracts and customers want to be able to book their new fares quickly, but skilled resources to handle the manual coding are limited.
GOL needed to find a solution that would allow their existing contracts to be transitioned seamlessly while they set up a process for the automation of all future contracts and updates. And they needed to do it with a team of just four people.
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Solution
Simplicity without sacrificing sophistication
- GOL’s dedicated team of four opted for a simpler integration. As they enter contracts into their existing system, a standard instruction sheet is automatically populated that they can submit to Express Contracts via FTP or through a dashboard. ATPCO systems then process and distribute that data to the right markets. (When implementing Express Contracts, an airline could choose to integrate the Express Contracts API into their contract management system (CMS), which automatically sends the data to Express Contracts).
- GOL's plan to simplify and reconfigure their contract implementation process to automatically populate the Express Contracts standard instruction sheet meant they could file their contracted fares within one day instead of manually coding each new agreement.
- With the help of ATPCO, GOL mapped out a customized implementation strategy that was designed for their unique situation. Three months later, the new automated workflow was up and running. With the new simplified process, 99% of GOL’s existing contracts were processed and distributed to the market in 30 minutes.
- Now, once GOL’s sales team has negotiated and signed the contract, the data is automatically populated in the standard instructions sheet using a specially created macro. From there, the information is then sent to Express Contracts via FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and the data is converted into bookable fares.
Result
Effective solutions have an immediate impact
After three months from start to finish, a team of four GOL staffers made an immediate impact with Express Contracts and a little implementation assistance from ATPCO.
Implementing Express Contracts meant that our small team could handle many more contracts in a fraction of the time and making core pricing strategies changes, feasible. With the finest ATPCO’s support, we were able to institute new workflow changes that save us time and money,” said Rogerio Maldonado, Revenue Operations Manager at GOL.
GOL found that a process that used to take days was reduced to as little as 30 minutes. They were suddenly processing hundreds of contracts, that previously required thousands of manual coding hours, automatically. Not only did the implementation of Express Contracts free up precious resources, but it also dramatically reduced time to market, with 99% of GOL’s contract fares reaching customers in a matter of minutes.
Conclusion
Creating a competitive advantage with airline contract automation
The complexity and slow speed of filing negotiated, and private contracted fares has for too long been a thorn in the side of airlines big and small. GOL embraced this challenge to relieve their pandemic-strained resources, adopting a solution that used automation. Not only has Express Contracts enabled them to do more with less, but the reduced time to market has created a competitive advantage for GOL.
Additional resources
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