HCL Leap Empowers Lufthansa’s Employees to Embrace Digital Transformation through App Development

What kind of applications have been developed and what role are they playing within the Lufthansa organization? Today there are approximately 2,000 applications ranging from those that have casual sporadic use within small groups to business-critical ones used across an entire business unit. Here are just a few examples.

Net Correction App

Lufthansa’s air freight unit, “Lufthansa Cargo,” for example, has built a part of their standard process of accepting and invoicing deliveries coming in from customers on a Leap app. Lufthansa Cargo receives orders from its customers by tonnage. Quite frequently, the actual weight of the freight differs from the order and the handlers would need to decide how much to charge. The process, fully supported and managed by Leap, involves multiple roles and multiple levels of decision makers. If the application is not available for even a few hours, it has a significant business impact.

The beauty is that the expertise to adapt the app to frequently changing processes and business requirements sits within their department, with no cost or time dependencies on service providers that could slow down continuous development.

Personalized Name Badge App

Flight attendants design and order personalized name badges showing which languages they speak, adding a touch of personalization within a standardized format. With one click, the designs are automatically sent to a printer and arrive at the worker’s doorstep within days. This is a typical example of a Leap app that adds simplicity and efficiency to the day-to-day work experience of Lufthansa employees but would not likely have been taken on by a central IT function because the use case would not have been considered strategic or mission-critical.

Customer Satisfaction Survey App

Another app captures input from airline travelers. With the surveys function in Leap, it’s easy to aggregate and analyze data captured by multiple users. For the regular customer-satisfaction survey, conducted by staff in various Lufthansa lounges worldwide, a survey template is used on an iPad to capture customer feedback from business and first-class travelers.

A Centrally Managed Platform for Local and Global Business Needs Diminishes Shadow IT

Because Leap is a well-established platform, Lufthansa has cost-effectively migrated several standalone applications and Leap is positioned as the de-facto standard for no-code and low-code applications.

“We believe that we have successfully eliminated a large chunk of shadow IT projects, that typically appear when employees decide to take things into their own hands, as they cannot get the automation, they need delivered by the corporate IT function. “

In addition, the Leap platform can replace many of the error-prone and inefficient processes that previously caused employees to use traditional "spreadsheet/email ping-pong" due to a lack of alternatives. Leap is now seen as “mission-critical” within the Lufthansa Group.

Successfully Driving Digital Transformation Bottom Up

Overall, Lufthansa has identified their citizen-developer initiative as a major success factor in their ongoing digital transformation. With this also comes a cultural transformation strengthening the sense of ownership and responsibility in every employee, empowering them to take care of their own application needs rather than blaming IT departments for not delivering the right tools.