ARC to Launch First Phase of System Overhaul in Spring

In the early spring of next year, the Airlines Reporting Corp. will launch the first phase of a new core settlement system built on modern technology.

Lucianne Leighton, managing director of business process management and settlement services, said ARC’s current system is based on COBOL, the second oldest high-level computing language, running on two mainframes “from the Dark Ages.”

ARC’s travel agency customers may not notice any specific changes, but there will be “improvements in how we do business with them,” Leighton said.

“It will be a better customer experience,” she said. “We are going to get rid of some things that are inconvenient or frustrating.”

There also will be additional functionality.

To prepare for the change, ARC looked at how it does business and how it is likely to do business in the future.

For example, some aspects of NDC, the “New Distribution Capability” standard developed under the auspices of IATA, “can’t be done in the system today,” Leighton said.

If an airline wanted to add new data elements, it would be a huge undertaking.

Originally, ARC had planned to revamp the system on a project-by-project basis but soon realized that approach could take a decade and would not achieve the desired results.

The older the system, the more complex it becomes, turning into a tangle of “spaghetti code,” Leighton said.  

It’s also risky to hang onto an old system, she said. People who know COBOL are retiring, and new programmers aren’t learning it.

“We don’t want to lose the ability to update the system,” Leighton said. “So we made the call to accelerate the modernization.”

It is no small task. ARC is devoting a third of its internal resources to move to more modern technology architecture.

There won’t be a “sudden death” flipping of a switch, however. The project has been broken up into about five phases and is expected to be completed sometime in 2018 or 2019.