French-Dutch airline group, Air France-KLM, has announced its partnership with global professional services company, Accenture, to help transition its existing digital applications to the cloud.

The multi-year initiative aims to enhance the airline group’s operational functions across the organisation, including passenger transport, cargo services, and aircraft maintenance, as well as provide it with increased agility.

Together with Accenture, Air France-KLM has defined a common operating model with a governance process, allowing Accenture to co-lead the initiative. Together they have established a cloud migration factory that uses predefined and reusable templates, which enables simultaneous migration and transformation of the group’s existing applications in the cloud.

With the new cloud infrastructure, Air France-KLM will also be able to access information in real time, allowing for more data-driven decision making, stronger collaborations, and improving business resilience and growth opportunities.

“By leveraging cloud and AI, we can build more flexible and efficient operations that enhance agility and performance across the organisation,” said Pierre-Olivier Bandet, executive vice president of information systems at Air France-KLM.

This approach has already had a high success rate, with the deployment of 350 applications, thereby fulfilling an ambitious delivery roadmap and allowing for a faster time-to-market of the applications. Recently, the infrastructure was tested in France and the Netherlands via sales campaigns and its scalability provided quick access to a range of resources.

Sabine Bechelani, managing director for travel and client account lead at Accenture, said: “This collaboration underscores our ability to help clients establish the digital core needed to successfully compete in the operationally complex and highly competitive market of air travel. As a result, we are enabling our clients to thrive and innovate with speed, efficiency and access to information.”

Bandet added: “Our work with Accenture will help us unlock new opportunities to streamline processes, optimise decision-making, and leverage data to continuously improve the travel experience for millions of customers.”