IT AND DIGITISATION
OVERVIEW
The need to digitalise the passenger experience, the airport environment and our operational processes has been identified as a core strategic focus for the business and this process had to be accelerated in response to the impact of the pandemic. Remote and hybrid working solutions had to be put into place at short notice and we had to rapidly improve our ability to deliver a contactless travel experience. Our operational processes also had to be extremely flexible in order to accommodate changes to lockdown levels.
Our existing infrastructure and the digital strategy put into place in FY2020 have provided a robust foundation for the management of these challenges over the past two years. The key objectives of our strategy are to adopt and leverage appropriate technology in order to enhance the customer experience and operational efficiency while simultaneously protecting our systems and information. Our IT capabilities are intended to support our value creation process through the delivery of a consistently positive customer experience, paperless travel, automated cost management, greater efficiency, revenue diversification and, ultimately, business growth.
The digital roadmap we put into place to support our strategy included an allocation for capex expenditure of R1.2 billion of the five years to FY2025. Annual allocations have since been adjusted in alignment with the revised Financial Plan adopted in 2020. Of the R397.8 million budgeted for the reporting period, R367.4 million was used. Despite having to work with a reduced budget during the past two periods, we have been able to honour all of our commitments on existing projects as well as on projects for which tenders had already been signed. Other than these contractual obligations, we have prioritised urgent and high-impact projects intended to secure business sustainability.
Some of the projects introduced during the past two periods include:
- A biometrics-driven automated border control system, which was deployed at Cape Town International. Similar projects are currently being implemented at O.R. Tambo International in Johannesburg and King Shaka International in Durban.
- The ACSA app, which is a downloadable platform that allows passengers and other airport users to check flight information, book and pay for parking, book a PCR test and receive a result within an hour (this is not a requirement for domestic travel, but is required when travelling to some international destinations).
- A new public address system, which was deployed at seven airports. This has improved operational efficiency and provides the ability to make announcements according to regulatory requirements.
- An upgraded Enterprise Resource Planning and Queue Management System, which has been fully operationalised to improve efficiency. This has introduced the capacity to track queuing hotspots and to monitor passenger security while queues are being processed.
In the medium term, our priority will be to continue upweighting digital self-service programmes and to automate border control by integrating our systems with those of the Department of Home Affairs. We will, in particular, be focusing on security processing systems that use facial recognition capabilities or biometric information embedded in a bar code in each passenger’s passport.
We will also continue to strengthen digital integration across all of our operations in order to improve efficiency and enhance the experience of our airports for all stakeholders, especially passengers.
SELF-SERVICE SOLUTIONS
While all of our airports had self-scanning capabilities in place before the advent of COVID-19, we saw a rapid increase in adoption as soon as air travel began to open up again. Since then, the demand for a reduction in physical contact has increased steadily and we have continued to optimise existing systems in order to improve the overall passenger experience and grow non-aeronautical revenue.
STAFF ENABLEMENT
Most of our employees had the necessary systems at their disposal to work from home when the lockdown was announced in March 2020. As soon as the initial "hard" lockdown period had been lifted, we rolled out Microsoft 365 across all our operations and introduced Adobe’s digital signature to complement existing systems. During the reporting period, we focused intensely on training to support that adoption. Our IT service desk has remained fully operational throughout the pandemic and has been outsourced to a third party, which reduced operational costs and optimised the service provided.
Through a service portal, employees can request IT equipment and services, stay informed with regard to the status of their logged tickets and engage with the service desk.
CYBERSECURITY AND INFORMATION SECURITY
As we faced budgetary constraints during the reporting period, some of our programmes to enhance cyber and information security maturity had to be cancelled.
Despite this, we have adopted a zero trust architecture approach, leveraging existing investments and adopting a cyber security mesh architecture. This has enabled us to deploy security controls closer to our various assets and to support hybrid workers. While our IT systems are secure, we will continue to prioritise key initiatives across the strategic horizon and to explore savings in other areas in order to fund our cyber and information security journey as the technology develops.
It is important to note that we have significantly improved our cyber and information security maturity by instituting a Cyber Security Operations Centre (SOC), with a key focus on people, processes and
technology. SOC analysts are on duty 24/7/365 to focus on security incident monitoring and remediation, automation of the core SOC processes, and the enablement of our technology investments. All of our activities are implemented within the framework of our Cyber and Information Security Strategy and are operationalised in the form of our structured and formalised Information Security Management System (ISMS). Cyber and information security awareness sessions across all our airports have reached a completion rate of 90% (2021: 80%). We did not record any significant cybersecurity incidents during the reporting period.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
In previous years, we were able to implement several business intelligence projects in various business units to track performance as part of our business intelligence strategy. This year, however, we have engaged external stakeholder to gain third-party funding. An example of this is our request for funding from a leader in software development to run a proof-of-concept programme around parking management to increase efficiencies.
MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
In FY2020/21, we successfully implemented a radio network at George Airport. All our airports now have a radio frequency spectrum licence, issued by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) which covers a 10-kilometre radius around our airports. The radio network facilitates communication between our staff and with other stakeholders within this area.
OUTLOOK
As all parts of the business have been affected by cost reduction initiatives, we must engage with stakeholders to execute innovative IT and digitisation initiatives through collaboration. These engagements have the potential to result in collaborative public-private partnerships.