Case Study : Northwest Airlines
Northwest Airlines is the world's fourth largest airline,
operating more than 2,600 daily flights to nearly 250 destinations worldwide. Throughout the airline's 75-year history,
it has been on the cutting edge of aviation technology. However, the airlines ground operations were not always able
to keep pace with the rapid technological advancements made in the air.
In 2000, Northwest implemented an aggressive Systems Management project to revamp and improve the efficiency and security of the company's 20-year-old baggage tracking system. Using Device Networking solutions from Lantronix, Northwest is connecting its entire baggage claim system to a standard network.
The Excess Baggage of Old Systems
Northwest's baggage tracking system is comprised of baggage tag printers, bar code scanners and dumb terminals at in-terminal check-in stations. The legacy system was networked using the P1024 protocol an old, proprietary protocol used throughout the airline industry. While the system worked effectively for many years, it began to show signs of age:
- Hardware began breaking and could not be replaced, requiring field engineers to visit problem terminals.
- Lack of remote management capabilities meant that engineers had to travel to each dispersed device when a problem presented itself.
- The central servers hosting the baggage tracking system were overtaxed by the volume of connected devices and failed frequently.
- When the central hosts were reset after a failure, all the baggage tracking devices tried to reconnect immediately and often faced long delays before communication could be restored.
A Solution That Flies
Searching for a solution to improve the efficiency and security of their baggage tracking system, Northwest turned to Lantronix and began to test Device Servers in its main hubs last year the Detroit, Memphis and Minneapolis/St. Paul airports.
With Lantronix's Device Servers, Northwest Airlines was
able to connect its entire baggage tracking system to a single standard network, minimizing down time and increasing
efficiency.
Time savings: Connecting the baggage tag printers, bar code readers and terminals to a standard network connection gives field engineers the ability to make programming changes from anywhere in the world. Recently, when a printer in Asia began spewing additional pages after each baggage tag was printed, technical support personnel in Minnesota were able to correct the problem in minutes.
In the past, fixing this problem would have required an engineer to fly to the site and make the change manually. The total timesaving for the engineering team would have to be calculated in months according to Dean Svela, a network consultant for Northwest.
Reduced Down Time: Device Servers can be programmed to minimize network congestion, decreasing the chance that the host will be overtaxed and would shut down the entire baggage tracking system. The airline says that terminals retrofitted with Device Servers experience at least 50% less downtime.
Efficiency: Connecting the baggage tracking system to a standard network has increased the efficiency of individual podiums, making it possible to tag baggage more quickly and track it more accurately, shortening the average travelers' wait in line.
In ongoing adaptations of Device Servers, Northwest is experimenting with the system at ticket counters in five cities, and plans to expand the project to the new Detroit terminal opening in December. Each podium is equipped with four Device Servers and takes one engineer less than an hour to configure.
More than 200 Device Servers have been integrated into the baggage tracking system to date with several thousand more scheduled to be incorporated throughout the world.
Contact Info:
Kristine Fowler
949-450-7240
kristine.fowler@lantronix.com
