Virgin Atlantic

Q Who are Virgin Atlantic's competitors?

A As an independent airline, Virgin Atlantic successfully competes on all of its routes with most of the industry's major national carriers. These include British Airways, bmi british midland, American Airlines, Continental, Delta and United on transatlantic routes; BA and SAA to South Africa; BA, ANA, Cathay Pacific and JAL to the Far East; BA to Delhi

The pain area

Huge number of parts used in aircraft making

Maintaining

The solution

Use of RFID and sensor-based solution to manage the accurate consignment, storage and dispatch of parts

This helps reduce costs and increase efficiencies through improved visibility and accountability, and to gain better automated control of its engineering parts supply chain

are tracking three things with tags: parts, location identifiers on bins and users within the warehouse, so we can identify who is doing what and who is supposed to be doing what

The process is such that as a part arrives at the store's door, it goes through a three-stage receiving process to confirm that the parts have arrived at the facility, that the quantity of parts is accurate and that the parts are in good condition. From receiving, the parts move to an inspection process and then out to store shelves to be issued to aircraft engineers for maintenance

The problem

With a globally dispersed workforce, and engineers located wherever the aircraft were, Virgin was looking for a remote access network solution which would let their employees use business applications and access email and documents from anywhere. Virgin's engineers were among many remote workers who were spending vast sums of money on costly international dial-up connections to access the company's intranet. Virgin needed a remote access solution that would cut these costs. For example, engineers in the Dublin offices spent Ј20,000 a year on dial-up access charges alone, said Sha Tao, Technical Architect at Virgin Atlantic. e-Gap Remote Access Appliance, an SSL VPN, enables secure web-based access to internal corporate applications and files. It centralizes access to disperse applications