Heathrow

When Heathrow’s Maximo application ran into performance issues, Simoco Wireless Solutions identified the problems and improved the overall application performance.

About Heathrow Airport Holdings

This case study relates to work completed for BAA (now Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd), prior to the divestment of Gatwick and Stansted airports, and the additional divestment of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton Airports, which went on to form AGS Airports. Heathrow Airport Holdings now owns and runs London’s Heathrow airport.

The Challenge

The airport operator’s workflow application, Maximo, is at the heart of airport maintenance management operations. From managing housekeeping incidents through to fuel stock levels, this critical system is used 24×7 to track and manage many assets across their airports. Hundreds of users access the system concurrently and therefore application performance in terms of availability and responsiveness is essential.

The airport operator implemented a new infrastructure for the application including underlying servers and storage. Even with guidance from the various vendors involved, the operator was experiencing significant performance issues and were unable to identify the root cause of the problem.

Simoco Wireless Solutions has a long standing relationship with the airport operator. Responding to Gale’s request for support, a team with the extensive skills needed to meet the challenges was rapidly put in place.

The team was led by a Principal Consultant with substantial experience of both the airport operator and of using Simoco Wireless Solutions’s tried and tested Application Performance Review. This methodology was used to deliver the service.

It consisted of the following four- phase process:

• Planning and discovery: Quickly identifying stakeholders, defining the problem, and selecting the right tools to use
• Set up and capture: Configuring tools, running application processes and capturing performance baselines using Compuware Vantage
• Detailed analysis: Investigating the results of the capture process and identifying what is happening across the environment
• Findings and recommendations: Provision of a report and stakeholder presentation

Benefits

After only a couple of days Simoco Wireless Solutions was able to identify the underlying problems and co-ordinate the resolution with each of the vendors and the airport operator’s key stakeholders. Being vendor independent, Simoco Wireless Solutions was also able to suggest improvements to the system architecture. These enhancements were used to support the upgrade and enabled the operator to achieve the best possible performance.

In creating the performance baseline required to analyse the environment, the airport operator were provided with a tool that could be used as a benchmark for other similar projects.