A successful European airline is breaking into new global markets, with help from Laserfiche. When Virgin Airlines of Great Britain launched Virgin Blue in Australia, it chose Laserfiche to support its initiative of instantly scanning and retrieving passenger data.

The key to Virgin’s success is a remarkably efficient online booking operation. While booking flights online is not a new concept, utilizing Portable Document Format (PDF) itineraries that double as tickets is a significant time-saver. Virgin travelers need only print out the PDF and bring it to the airport, and they receive a bar code on a printed slip of paper.

The need for Virgin to print paper tickets is eliminated, and travelers do not agonize over whether they will have a ticket waiting at the airport. The PDF is their ticket, and the corresponding bar code secures their seat on the plane from the moment their credit card is processed.

Laserfiche software maintains each customer’s information in a secure repository. The correct documents are instantly copied to Virgin servers as soon as the flight attendants’ Laserfiche-powered scanner reads the passenger’s bar code at the gate. The files are never dumped or re-loaded.

“As soon as the door closes on any flight, we know how much money is on that flight,” says Nick Brant, the head of IT at Virgin Blue in Australia. “Many older airlines with legacy systems can’t see those results for months.

“Too many companies use technology to cut their costs, but never pass the savings on to their customers,” Brant says. “We implemented Laserfiche with its bar- code reader so our customers would benefit from the software’s ease-of-use and efficiency.”

Laserfiche can be easily integrated into a wide variety of business environments. Manufacturers, financial professionals, healthcare offices and other organizations are managing their electronic documents and scanned images, old and new, with Laserfiche. The Snapshot feature instantly converts any electronic document to a TIFF file and adds it to the repository. The images are accessible by a variety of useful add-on tools, including Virgin’s bar-code scanning feature.

Virgin Blue Airlines picked Laserfiche and is making other savvy business decisions as it takes command of new markets. Several years after entering the market, Virgin Blue is on its way to becoming a leading airline in Australia, while many competitors have fallen by the wayside.

Tags: bar code

Posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 4:34 pm under Customer Stories, Other Industries. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.