Lufthansa Miles & More

Challenge

As Europe’s leading frequent flyer program with more than 11 million members worldwide, Lufthansa receives and processes over 8 million documents a year – which in turn result in approximately 2 million individual customer-facing business procedures a year taking place.

Prior to starting Lufthansa’s business process management (BPM) initiative, paper-based letters and faxes were manually sorted before being sent in original form to numerous locations around the world for processing. These manual methods led to higher logistics costs and prolonged processing times. In order to increase customer satisfaction, the company needed to significantly reduce its processing time and make the process more transparent to ultimately cut processing costs and speed up response time.

To achieve these objectives, Lufthansa Miles & More wanted to automate its manual processes as much as possible and integrate its worldwide locations through an intelligent business process management system.

Metastorm was selected to be the foundation of a highly specialized solution for the paperless processing of the Miles & More program. The solution was designed and implemented by Metastorm partner, arvato systems and arvato direct services, the long standing outsourcing provider for the Lufthansa Miles & More program since the first day of its existence.

Solution

Using Metastorm BPM™, arvato developed a project called SWIMM – Scanning & Workflow Integration Miles & More – to redesign and automate Lufthansa’s Miles & More procedures.

SWIMM can process 100,000 documents daily of varying form and quality – from hand written letters to boarding passes that include paper documents, e-mails, and faxes. After the first processing step, which includes high-performance scanning and the subsequent ICR/OCR identification, the documents are sent electronically to Metastorm BPM as inbound cases. These cases are the content basis for a complex process that is fully mapped by Metastorm BPM.

Metastorm BPM has supported a complete overhaul for processing all documents related to the Lufthansa Miles & More program. The use of Metastorm BPM has resulted in a more collaborative work environment that ensures documents are processed as quickly as possible. The solution also provides employees with visibility across the entire process so that they can see the status of cases at any given point in time. In addition, users can simultaneously review work-in-process on the system – a collaborative capability that leads to more efficient communication.

Results

With the help of Metastorm BPM, the incoming mail processing time at Miles & More has been substantially reduced while cutting transport and logistics costs to a minimum. The entire processing procedure has become transparent and includes many process control capabilities. Customer requests are answered faster and more effectively – resulting in increasing customer satisfaction and all around better customer service.

Lufthansa Miles & More has reached its goal of accelerating response times by simplifying complex manual procedures, integrating worldwide service with 24x7 availability, and increasing the speed of information sharing.

The company has endorsed Metastorm BPM as a critical system and plans to continue working with arvato to extend its use of Metastorm by automating and improving additional processes throughout the organization.