Supernova Award Category
Next Generation Customer Experience
The Problem
At Airbus, customer service provides support to airlines and their maintenance partners, certification authorities, and the numerous suppliers involved in the manufacturing of an aircraft. This totals approximately 80,000 internal and external users. With an ever growing dossier of reference documents being produced for each new airplane delivered, Airbus decided to develop an internal application to replace their previous solution—from 2003—for digitizing the large volumes of assorted aircraft reference documents. This is how the development of the ADNS (Advanced Data Navigation Services) project was born—with the dual objective of satisfying 3,000 requests per minute in less than two seconds, and launching its new consulting portal within a two-year deadline.
The Solution
To guarantee a high level of performance for the ADNS platform's navigation tool, the project manager and his team rely on the search and indexing power of Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack. It provides a “Google-like approach” for the search functionalities for our end users.
Near real-time performance is aligned with the high availability requirements of the ADNS infrastructure, which is intended to guarantee Airbus' 24/7 commitment to customer service. The Elastic Stack fulfills the vital promise of having a solid infrastructure and continuous production activity that complies with Airbus’ SLA, and the commercial features of the Elastic Stack ensures the ADNS platform's health and maintained access-based security.
The results
The Airbus ADNS platform forms an integral part of the sale and delivery of an aircraft. It also centralizes the information relied upon by airlines and their maintenance departments to carry out necessary maintenance operations after each landing and during routine aircraft overhauls.
Kibana dashboards offer visualizations that inform the IT team about the ADNS platform's current state of health, ensuring optimal functionality.
Elasticsearch indexes documents in real time and enables rapid, full-text search capabilities. Simply enter a keyword to search the entire database of more than 2 billion structured or unstructured fragments (or blocks of documents), whose features and formats have been constantly changing since the creation of the first Airbus aircraft in the 1970s.
Metrics
Airbus is currently ingesting about 6TB of data on a monthly basis with about two billion of technical blocks created and updated every month. The system can now process 3,000 requests per minute in less than two seconds. In the past, it would sometimes take up to several minutes for a single request.
That increase in data translates directly to increasing our capacity to make increased numbers of aircrafts. We estimate that the new solution enables Airbus to manage 15% more aircraft per year.
Also, Airbus IT can perform major software changes and updates more easily without any service interruption.
The Technology
The Elastic Stack, which encompasses the open source products Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana and Beats and commercial features (for security, alerting, machine learning, graph analytics and more) and other open source technologies have also supported this solution.
Disruptive Factor
To keep Airbus’ leadership position, we needed to build and deploy a new solution quickly. The deployment of ADNS was so rapid that it changed our perspective of the project. Within 14 months, we started a pilot that included a few initial features for all users. A full-feature beta version was made available to everyone after 20 months and full production soon after. That’s remarkably rapid for a 6 TB database of technical documents relating to Airbus aircrafts.
Another key surprising factor was the adoption of this new technology. It was our wish to deliver a similar search experience that we all have with Google, or other search browsers. We’ve all experienced technology deployments that didn’t come close to our hopes; the ADNS project was fundamentally different. The impact was immediate, and user satisfaction has been very high. All search requests are satisfied with high relevance in less than two seconds. Information is available to numerous authorized internal and external users who need access, using an automated rights management system. All the end users are unanimous about the performance and the functional maturity of ADNS since its implementation.
Finally, the flexibility of this platform has been a game changer for our IT group because flexibility is so critical as we grow and change. We can make changes to the system, add new data sources, adjust relevancy rankings, add new users and more--all without any downtime.
Shining Moment
Even if this was new technology to Airbus, we delivered this ambitious project in a way that felt familiar and mature to the company and to end users. After a few months, all internal users have made this solution part of their daily activity. And we add more external users every day to a search approach that we believe will become the standard for our industry.