Elixir Report helps deliver reliable, accurate flight plans

January 2008: Founded in 1986, British-based AirData specialises in computerised flight planning and weather briefing services. Its current flight planning system, AirPlan3, incorporates navigation, weather and aircraft performance data with both previously saved and automatically generated optimum routings to produce flight plans and crew briefing for airlines and flight-handling companies.

AirData faces the constant challenge of processing flight plans correctly, accurately, and speedily for thousands of flight plans every day, worldwide. This is no small feat considering the complexity of modern airspace and increasing traffic volume in the aviation industry.

Replacing the reporting engine

The original reporting engine was hard coded to achieve the efficiency required, during the days when hardware resources were rudimentary and scarce. With today’s modern equipment, the emphasis on efficiency has to be balanced with flexibility and ease of change.

To modify a hard-coded report is time-consuming, and requires skilled programming and in-depth knowledge of the system. All these contribute to the high cost of maintenance and slower delivery time.

Hence, to replace the reporting engine, a third party software must be able to leverage the complex logic embedded in the system. Most reporting tools are geared towards reading from databases directly, while AirData needs one that can seamlessly read XML data, which its system produces.

Performance and scalability are other concerns. With the software designed and written by its own team of programmers, any amount of optimisation can be done if required. But a third party solution may only allow limited control, while some are entirely closed black box solutions.

Finally, cost effectiveness is important to ensure ROI, considering the total costs of ownership and the upfront costs of migration. Many well-known proprietary solutions may be able to handle large volumes, but this is hardly justifiable when their licensing scheme is based on the number of users.

Solution

Elixir Technology provides the solution: its powerful yet cost-effective Elixir Report – a core component of its integrated Business Intelligence solution. Based on open standards such as Java, XML and Web Services, Elixir Report is able to access XML data in native mode, with built-in advanced processing capability to handle complex XML structure. Having its templates stored in XML also brings a new level of openness, coupled with its underlying Web Services, which makes integration as simple as sending a URL.

Elixir Report has been in the market since 1999, and used by large companies for business critical report generation tasks. The Elixir team was also readily available to assist in system testing and fine-tuning, including optimising the report templates and the data streaming mechanism to ensure minimal overheads.

Elixir Report Server is also competitively-priced and is licensed on a per server processor. This allows unlimited user connections to generate data and reports from the server. Such a fixed cost model enables AirData to effectively plan for expansion over time, as opposed to a per-user charging model.

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