Aer Lingus · Project Manager · 2025
OCC Vendor RFP
Four strategic tracks, a staged vendor evaluation, and a clear business-user pick, marking the decision that set up everything built in 2026.
Challenge
Aer Lingus's operations-control modernization programme needed a real-time decision-support tool for operations controllers managing disruption. Four genuinely different paths were on the table: buy from an external vendor, adapt a sister airline's existing platform, build in-house on internal cloud infrastructure, or back an early-stage startup out of the group's innovation incubator. Each carried a different cost, timeline, and risk profile, and the recommendation had to hold up in front of executive leadership.
Multi-Track Solution Space
Navigating four disparate execution models: commercial COTS, sister-airline codebase, internal cloud build, and incubator startup.
Controller Consensus
Testing finalist systems against live disruption scenarios with operations controllers rather than relying on generic vendor presentations.
Approach
Joined the initiative in September 2025 and ran the final stretch of a staged vendor evaluation through to a December 2025 decision.
Staged down-selection
9 vendor candidates narrowed to 3 on-site finalists, coordinating technical (non-functional) scoring from the architecture team alongside business-side functional scoring.
Live demo day and controller workshop
Hosted an on-site demonstration day in Dublin with the finalists, then ran a workshop with actual OCC controllers to pressure-test each option against real operating scenarios rather than vendor pitch decks.
Executive business case
Built the comparison across all four tracks (covering cost, capability, and team endorsement) into an executive-ready recommendation, rather than presenting the vendor pick in isolation.
Critical Decision Points
External vendor over the other three tracks
Per the evaluation's own timeline estimates, buying from an external vendor could deliver value in 1–1.5 years, compared to roughly 2+ years for both adapting a sister airline's platform and building in-house on internal cloud infrastructure, and 2.5+ years for the startup-incubator track (which also carried the highest deployment risk). The in-house build wasn't dropped; it stayed under longer-term consideration in parallel, but only the external-vendor track cleared the near-term timeline the business needed, and that's what the recommendation to executive leadership was built around.
Disqualify both other finalists, not just one
Business users at the on-site workshop favored one finalist over a second on flexibility, integration simplicity, and user experience; the third finalist was separately ruled out over integration complexity and cost. The recommendation didn't keep either of the other two in reserve as a contractual fallback: both were formally disqualified at that stage, and the program moved to a proof of concept with the single chosen vendor.
Outcomes
- Business users at the on-site workshop favored one vendor over the field, driven by flexibility, integration simplicity, and user experience.
- Leadership approved the recommendation to proceed with that vendor for a proof of concept; the other two on-site finalists were formally disqualified at that stage.
- That decision, made in December 2025, set up the governance, procurement, and proof-of-concept work that followed in 2026 (see the OCC Decision-Support POC case study).