As the global market leader, Lufthansa Technik AG has to manage a wide variety of international customers and partners as well as their MRO requirements. With the help of the webMethods hybrid integration platform, the company successfully does that quickly, efficiently, and securely. As part of the company's digitalization strategy, the Group uses webMethods as the basis for an ecosystem among partners who work together to reduce costs, save energy, and increase their added value.

Customer orientation with the crane: a standardized integration platform for all requirements

Lufthansa Technik AG is a strong backbone for the parent company and its brand. The specialized MRO company ensures that Lufthansa can keep its service promise of quality, reliability, and innovation. Its portfolio includes the maintenance, repair, overhaul, modification, and retrofitting of aircraft components for large commercial, private, and government aircraft. To deliver those services, the company deploys cutting-edge technologies and innovative repair processes, some of which were developed in-house. In short: Lufthansa Technik AG covers the entire process chain with its services for the MRO business—for its own airline, of course, as well as for Airbus and many other customers around the globe.

In times of a pandemic and resource shortages, the company not only has to defend its market leadership against growing competition—it has to understand how to sustain it over the long term. In addition to cost savings and customer orientation, the security of the systems and availability of materials are also key pillars for overcoming current and future challenges. Lufthansa Technik AG is supported by many partners in these efforts, including Software AG. The company deploys Software AG's webMethods solution as a standardized platform for its numerous interfaces to engage its customers all over the world wherever they are.

A direct line to its customers

webMethods gives Lufthansa Technik AG a direct line to its customers. "Our goal was to curb the proliferation of interfaces to our nearly 800 customers and suppliers," explains Munderloh. The company wanted to deploy a single standardized process, namely webMethods, to avoid the operating costs for several, heterogenous environments. Only internal applications communicate via the middleware with the company’s partners and customers outside. It's how invoices are sent, data and documentation are shared between departments and applications, and material, delivery times, and availabilities are queried—under the strictest security standards and with maximum transparency. Overall, Lufthansa Technik AG was able to reduce its manual processes from 27 percent to 8 percent, and with 45,000 transactions per day, more than half of the material requests run through the B2B platform.

AMOS use case: a separate integration environment prevents overload

After an initial B2B integration environment, the company added a second environment in 2021 to absorb the process load from AMOS (aircraft MRO software solution) and integrate new interfaces. "Material requests and aircraft data from all over the world come into our system through the bundled external platform. It's used to derive analyses, capture replacement parts, and manage maintenance. But the anticipated load was too great and could have impacted existing customer and supplier connections," states Munderloh. "To avoid that, we successfully implemented a second integration platform with webMethods," he sums up.

Cloud as the long-term goal for even greater efficiency and sustainability

Lufthansa Technik AG succeeded in standardizing its systems and separating the applications from its requesters—resulting in more efficient management, improved security, and clearer customer orientation. To deliver more services to its B2B customers, the company plans to use webMethods in the cloud environment in the long term. Reducing the hardware infrastructure enables greater cost savings and improved sustainability. What's more, the line to customer requirements is getting shorter all the time: Integration via the cloud creates an ecosystem that turns customers into partners and enables everyone involved to work together to increase their added value and sustainability.