Today one of the major Australian airlines (VirginBlue) had a significant systems outage – resulting in the need to revert to manual check-in procedures and major disruption for passengers and flights nationwide.
VirginBlue have outsourced their booking systems to a platform provided (and hosted) by Navitaire – who are associated with Accenture (that Anderson Consulting stigma never seems to go away). Despite the advertised virtues of their multi-user platform, it seems a robust approach to availability and service continuity are not major selling points.
Or perhaps like a lot of approaches to outsourcing, it is all about saving a few bucks. The risks that outsourcing can add to your supply chain have recently been the subject of a post by Jan Husdal – worth reviewing in this context of an oprational outage by a key supplier.
A similar, but shorter, outage at competitor Qantas created a world-wide ripple effect back in January of this year.
Is it an acceptable approach to resilience to have these risks and simply seek to absorb the operational impact and ‘spin’ the reputation and PR issues?
Despite the earlier outage, Qantas is still my preferred carrier. Do incidents like this prompt you to consider the suppliers you use?
Leave a Reply