Australia Pacific Airports Corporation elevates operations with Dynamics 365 to keep the pace of modern travel

Preparing for take-off

Melbourne Airport, for instance, has its own postal code (and a nearby surf park). It’s part of an independent retail district that offers high-end shopping and dining options. It operates a solar farm and is responsible for all roadways, buildings, and parking areas. The property is surrounded by protected grasslands and built on traditional First Nations land with associated agreements. Launceston Airport operates a single terminal but has many of the same requirements and needs, on a smaller scale. 

APAC’s operations are complex, with unique safety, regulatory, hospitality, transportation, mechanical, maintenance, energy, and environmental requirements. For years, those departments ran on multiple on-premises software solutions, which supported specific areas such as finance, property management, and marketing. By 2020, many were aging and lacked key features common in modern solutions. Leadership had plans for significant growth and the legacy systems didn’t offer an easy way to collaborate, view the overall business, generate reports, or forecast trends.  

In mid-2020, with air travel shut down in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic, APAC leadership began a data harmonization and technology modernization project. Their goals were twofold: to simplify and unify disparate solutions to better serve the company’s businesses, customers, and passengers, and to clear the runway for future growth. 

The right solution to connect people and operations

Whatever solution the group chose would have to serve the needs of both airports and offer cloud-based deployment with shared data so that everyone could work off the same up-to-date information. Three key legacy systems had to be considered: Oracle Primavera for project operations; IBM Maximo for a variety of operational needs, including enterprise asset management and field service; and Salesforce for marketing. Integrated with these systems were many independent apps supporting everything from parking permits to leasing agreements. As Nicola Taylor, Head of Business Solutions for the airport explains, “We needed more than a branded technology system laid on top of the existing siloed processes and tools. We also preferred a solution that was quite easy to learn for hundreds of contract workers who aren’t heavy computer users. Microsoft offered that.” APAC leadership ultimately selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 for its robust platform, breadth of solutions for all areas of the business, and industry-leading security and privacy.  

Turbulent take off leads to a successful partnership

Early project challenges resulted in poor outcomes initially. APAC leadership turned to Microsoft for help correcting missteps with architecture, data mapping, integrations, and post-implementation support. At the same time, the internal team expanded its focus more intently on change management to ensure that every department was aligned before project 2.0 got underway. Says Taylor, “We began adapting our processes to the product, and not the product to entrenched processes. It’s a big ask, but we knew it was essential to modernize and free up our busy staff for more value-add activities.”  

With a new plan in hand, the team got to work quickly on a four-part deployment schedule. From August 2021 through October 2022, they would roll out Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (formerly Marketing), Finance, Customer Service, Sales, Field Service, Supply Chain Management, and its Asset Management Add-in. In addition, dual-write synchronization with party and global address book capabilities would unify data across the Dynamics 365 platform.   

Solving challenges from the runway to the car park

In addition to deduping, harmonizing, and migrating data (including more than two million marketing contacts), simplifying processes, adding automation to major aspects of the business such as accounts payable and receivable, human resources, and procurement, the team identified three key areas where Dynamics 365 could make a meaningful impact:  

Work orders and asset management

Melbourne Airport has an operational staff of 360 people and indirect workforce of more than 20,000 to welcome, transport, guide, entertain, and process 30 million passengers per year through its facilities. Contract workers do everything else, from cutting the grass and cleaning the terminals to fixing potholes and loading baggage carousels. They need a user-friendly way to receive work orders, track the status of tasks, and communicate with one another. In the past, some of this was handled in various legacy systems which worked very well on their own but were disconnected from key financial systems. This slowed access to contracts, invoicing, and other relevant service and asset data. APAC needed to optimize job allocation, react quickly and effectively to complex asset management issues such as H-VAC or equipment malfunctions, and solve geospatial challenges with a single geographic information system. 

Dynamics 365 Field Service and Asset Management together have replaced a legacy tool that was used to track work orders for building repairs, recurring machine maintenance, scheduling, invoicing, retiring, and other tasks associated with the airports’ physical assets—everything from repairing a solar panel to installing new equipment in the air traffic control tower. And unlike the legacy tool, Dynamics 365 allows APAC to prioritize work according to operational and regulatory requirements. For example, a pothole on a runway is a critical fix and takes precedence over a standard maintenance work request. All financial activities feed directly into the Dynamics 365 Finance system for collection or payment. 

Property management

Another key business area for the two airports is property management and leasing to restaurants, retail stores, and airlines. Its legacy solution worked well, but activities required multiple steps that weren’t visible to other departments or easily shared. Integrating Flex Property with Dynamics 365 and setting up automations and connections with finance allows the company to automatically assign recurring events like monthly maintenance checks and annual lease renewal contracts. 

Marketing communications

For two decades, customers have opted in to email notifications while visiting the airports’ websites for everything from wireless network access to parking passes. Airline personnel doing business with the airports are in regular email contact with APAC’s sales and service departments. As a result, by 2020 APAC had an email database of nearly two million customer contacts. The marketing department needed better ways to segment those contacts to create and send more relevant emails. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights provides a clearer picture of their customers. It simplifies and automates marketing journeys to improve communications and increases team efficiency. For example, marketers can quickly add content to email templates preconfigured in the system, select an email or text message list, and schedule to send.

Piloting improvements now and into the future

The team has more projects on its 2024 roadmap. For example, Marketing has just begun utilizing real-time journeys in Customer Insights for parking bookings to create profiles that will allow them to better serve customers in the future with personalized messages and relevant offers. Next, they plan to move key project management activities to Finance, eliminating some steps that will likely save the company money over time.  

Taylor sums up their modernization project this way, “The reality is, with any large deployment on this scale there’s a lagging change curve that follows it. And, while we’re still working through some areas, the positive change Dynamics 365 has had on the business, and will continue to have, cannot be overstated.”  

Melbourne and Launceston Airports now have a modern foundation on which to build better experiences for passengers, customers, and staff. In addition, the internal team has a wonderful partnership with Microsoft and meets regularly with Account Management and the FastTrack team to share feedback and celebrate successes. As Taylor explains, “You can make all the promises in the world but without the right team, you can’t deliver at the highest level. With our Business Solutions group and the support of Microsoft, we absolutely have the right team.”