GTAA & Wipro: In partnership with SirionLabs for Success

Angella Dikmic, Manager of IT Vendor Management at Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) and  Anudeep Kambhampati, Director, Global Client Partner at Wipro, share how together, by leveraging SirionLabs’ contract management platform, SirionOne, they overcame the challenges of the pandemic and are building back better than ever.

“It's not an exaggeration to say the pandemic brought the aviation industry to its knees,” says Dikmic. “We were fortunate enough to remain open, but we needed to quickly adjust and implement safe and healthy processes for our employees, passengers and everyone doing business at Toronto Pearson. In many cases, these processes have changed the airport experience forever.  Technologies such as touchless passenger processing and facial recognition are all part of creating a contactless passenger journey.” 

The pandemic brought many changes along, and a strategy was required to reinvent business. “Before the pandemic in 2019, we welcomed over 50 million passengers through our doors. We're a heavily outsourced operation, so we only have 1,500 employees on staff, but there were 40,000 people working at the airport in 2019, levels that we hope to return to soon.” 

Sirion, GTAA, and Wipro: Building Strong Connections 

“GTAA has had a very strong partnership with Sirion over the past six years. In fact, Sirion was only in business a couple of years when we selected them under an RFP for a contract life cycle management solution. Both my vendor management team and Sirion have grown and matured together ever since by tackling ever-evolving contracting challenges optimally. It's been a very positive story for us.”

Sirion and GTAA worked collaboratively on transforming the contract management processes through a well-thought-out plan. “The entire team at Sirion, from technical support and development to our executive account leads and the founders, have always worked very closely with my team and myself. They are very responsive and flexible, adjusting to our ever-changing needs in vendor management. And Sirion is upgrading its technology stack constantly and making the changes to the platform in an agile fashion. It's been a great journey.”

GTAA: Flexing A Future-Oriented Mindset

“Being Canada's largest airport, we serve passengers from across the globe, each coming with their own expectations and airport experiences. Continuous innovation is at the core of our business, and we partner with organisations like Wipro to help us achieve our innovation goals. The simple fact that Wipro understands and appreciates the value of participating in our vendor management programme and using Sirion to manage governance so that we can all report the great work that we're achieving together is a testament to that.” 

Leveraging automation has been a game-changer for GTAA. “Sirion has automated what used to be highly manual touchpoints with both GTAA and Wipro. It provides us with a single source of truth that we can leverage to report just how well the contract is performing between GTAA and Wipro. This information is shared with all levels of management, including our CIO and CEO.”

“The automation that Sirion provides for contract management activities has been critical during the pandemic. We use CRM to track contract renewals and negotiated savings to mitigate the significant revenue losses that we've had to endure. We're able to swiftly pull key contract clauses from Sirion in preparation for the negotiations and report our results through rich, intuitive dashboards. One thing that's important to note is we also use Sirion to track work effort. We can report on just how much more demand there is on the VMO during a time of crisis, like the pandemic.”

Wipro: Maintaining Core Airport Operations 

“Wipro is a global IT consulting and digital services company with revenues worth over $8 billion and 190,000 employees across 56 countries, and 60% of our profit goes to communities through a foundation, which means we have a deep purpose for the organisation,” explains Kambhampati.

“Sirion is an extremely critical tool for us. Every service manager in our team uses Sirion day-to-day to register, assign, deliver and track our commitments. It automates most of the tasks, which helps to keep track, ensuring there's no value leakage and illustrates how well we are performing. It helps us to plan in advance and deliver our commitments effectively and efficiently.

Obligation management has especially seen some major improvements. “As we review our obligations, if you need to look at the contract clauses for more context, we can easily pull up the clauses from SirionOne, providing one place for all of our obligation management activities. We use SirionOne to provide GTAA with weekly status updates as well.”

The Future of Air Travel 

Looking forward, GTAA plans to continue its partnership with SirionLabs for a better future. “We're working with several Canadian airports to take advantage of economies of scale and drive efficiencies for airport operations across Canada,” concludes Dikmic. “We hope to draw on each other's strengths to provide a consistent travel experience. My vision is to develop a governance framework with the airports that includes partners such as Wipro and Sirion to promote consistent and fact-based interactions that will help drive successful outcomes for the airports.”