Case Study: Lufthansa Cargo achieves modern, scalable crew operations with IBS Software

How IBS completely overhauled the Crew Management System (CMS) IT landscape hosted on the Unisys platform, and successfully replaced the 40 year old legacy system to become the backbone of crew management within Lufthansa's IT landscape

Lufthansa Cargo faced a high-risk, high-cost crew management landscape built on a 40-year-old Unisys mainframe that was expensive to maintain, hard to extend and increasingly fragile as crew operations scaled. To modernize rostering, pairing and crew services, Lufthansa Cargo engaged IBS Software to replace the legacy stack using IBS’s iFlight Crew (iFCM) platform.

IBS Software implemented the iFlight Crew solution, building 40+ inbound/outbound interfaces, operating the old and new systems in parallel for data validation, and going live in August 2018. Within four months the new platform handled 520,000 crew hotel bookings, 120,000 immigration messages, 110,000 deadhead bookings and processed nearly 700 million real‑time messages, delivering a scalable, web‑accessible, API‑friendly and GDPR‑compliant CMS while substantially lowering operational risk (IBS Software was later recognized with Lufthansa’s Outstanding IT Product Supplier award).

Lufthansa Cargo

Florian Wikenhauser

Sr. Director, IT Service Factory Flight & Crew Operations