Patricio Tillard

I moved the entire American Airlines account IT operations team to Cordoba, Argentina. The team was originally only present in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. A co-worker and I were sent to a two-week knowledge transfer workshop where we spent time with different operations agents. Since the operations were 24/7, we had sessions at other times to accommodate day and night shifts.

Once we finished KT and documentation generated as an output, we were responsible for training ten new agents based in Cordoba, Argentina. We were entitled to run the operations entirely within a month.

The project timeline was reduced by one week. After three weeks of training, two teams of five members, divided into day and night shifts, supported American Airlines and managed infrastructure without causing any disruption to the operation.

By the time the outsourcing effort was completed, the new team was handling around 2,500 servers, running around 150 applications, and monitoring around three million events.

To achieve 85% reductions in the events and incidents generated from American Airlines-managed infrastructure, the first step was collecting information on recurring incidents. Once we had the reports, we could clean up 100% of events that were false positives, and the support team required no action. They were ignored.

The following action was configuring accurate monitoring for events triggered during maintenance windows and expected to alert and solve. Finally, we attacked errors and misleading events from customer application logs, achieving a 75% reduction in Priority 1 outages, positively impacting the accomplishment of SLAs.

For this project to achieve its outstanding goals, a lot of coordination was required between internal and external teams, such as the client’s team as well as other providers. I performed as the project owner and a support team member responsible for applying configuration and technical changes to reduce three million monthly events to roughly 750,000 monthly events.

As a result of the separation between American Airlines and Sabre Holdings, many tools used in daily operations were needed to be migrated to new defined platforms. In this case, the target was the knowledge management system used to understand the entire Infrastructure managed for American Airlines, which contain information of over ~300 applications and their dependency along with support contact information and steps needed to keep the airline running without flaws.

The challenging part was to clean up inaccurate data since the platform remained had no owner for several years causing a huge amount of information outdated. In order to sort this out, a lot of coordination and sessions were held with the different client application owners with the goal of updating escalation support processes and troubleshooting steps that allowed our first level of support to be capable of resolving the majority of the issues with immediate actions.

As a result, the number of applications actually still being supported and running were reduced to ~200 and the count of documents was also reduced in over 65%, reflected in Mean-Time-To-Resolution time and missed escalations reduced considerably.

Hewlett-Packard and American Airlines contract was coming to an end by 2020. Being this was one of the top three major accounts for the company, a good deal of effort was made to ensure a renewal. For this, I was selected as the chief architect for designing and implementing a suite of integrated solutions that would allow faster IT for business. The platform consisted of several HP solutions working together to support IT operations management, service asset and configuration management, and release and portfolio management, all under a highly complex automation engine. Before this integrated solution, delivering a server to our customer could take two to three weeks. After six months of connecting all the dots, we delivered servers in less than two hours without human intervention.

With these results, the contract renewal was signed six months prior to the end date, for which I was awarded the Tech Honors Fellow prize.

In 2013, American Airlines and US Airways received approval for an airline merger. This meant a lot of work ahead, especially in technology, since both airlines operated under their systems. The first rock to face was unifying the passenger reservation system, which would officially make a single new airline arise. Hewlett-Packard was a strategic partner for both airlines, primarily for Americans, since most of the infrastructure is hosted and managed by HP.

I was selected as a representative for all midrange teams worldwide to make this system merge possible. This involved over 300 employees supporting more than 5000 systems.

This exercise has never been successfully performed in the history of airline mergers. The coordination of this effort took over a year, but it was, for the first time in history, perfectly achieved with no impact on the entire airline operations. American Airlines CIO Maya Liebman thanks our team for making this happen, which, without whom, it wouldn’t be possible to accomplish.

In the journey of consolidating American Airlines and US Airways as one new airline after the merger, another challenge was to be faced. With the passenger system merger accomplished, all eyes were watching the outcome of this exercise. For all aircraft to be handled under the same system, Hewlett-Packard was one of the partners to perform due to the number of systems under its management. I was assigned to coordinate all HP teams involved in the impacted systems. After six months of planning, both systems were consolidated on a single FOS. This milestone meant that now both airlines had become one forever.

The coordination under my control had multiple assignments like meetings, change management for system integrations, and collaboration across teams from different providers distributed around the globe.

One of the biggest challenges faced today by universities worldwide is keeping students throughout their education lifecycle up to achieving degrees.

To understand student behavior and provide the business with strategies to mitigate the chances of students abandoning their studies, a huge amount of data from various sources was collected, cleaned, and prepared.

Once the data was prepared, it was processed using machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques that allowed to not only predict a probability of churn for each student but also understand the ranking of variables that were considered by these students on their decision, such as the number of exams approved in the past six months or other demographic data like age, gender and more.

After a three-month proof of concept project, the university successfully retained 60% more students than the previous year despite big economic changes suffered in Argentina.

The customers are specialized in providing services to users like roadside assistance, home services such as plumbing and locksmith, nautical assistance, and more. To provide high-quality support to their users, the customer was willing to build a service management platform that enables affected users to submit service requests. Then, those services need to allocate a provider who will take care of the assistance and manage billing and invoicing.

The first module was to build a solution that allows agents to receive the requests following a standardized process. The solution provides workflow configuration to adapt to business rules, reducing the agent onboarding to two hours instead of months.

The second module consists of service logistics with a back-end intelligent automated assignment system that makes decisions on which is the best provider to fulfill the service, taking into account several variables in order to find the most efficient while optimizing time and costs.

Finally, the third module automates most of the billing and invoicing processes, reducing conflicts between providers and the company. The platform was built using C#, .Net, and AngularJS connected to Oracle databases.

The team is formed by two back-end software engineers, one front-end software engineer, and two software engineers in the test. Altogether, the resources work in a team with the customer on projects related to integrating the EHR platform with various electronic voucher providers, allowing patients to benefit from different offers when purchasing their medication.

The back-end is built using C#, and the UI is built using EmberJS. All code is tested using automation frameworks.

One of the major banks in North America hired our big data, machine learning, and AI services to develop a solution that allows them to identify the best product to recommend to a customer using personalized speech and through the best channel available.

We provided the best product to be offered to an existing bank customer with high accuracy. The sale process also benefited from a personalized script that would take into account the recommended product and the customer’s profile to emphasize the benefits that would attract that particular person.

Besides that, we reduced marketing operational costs by identifying the appropriate channel to reach the lead, whether it was direct mail, email, or contact center, as well as the time and content of those communications.

As part of the digital transformation roadmap proposed to our customer, one big rock needed to tackle was the CMDB migration to allow asset and configuration management process to enable business process modeling, which allowed the customer to understand their infrastructure and dependencies among different services that run the operations, in this case, an airline. A complete migration from a legacy custom system was performed for this transformation.

The destination platform was UCMDB, an HP configuration management system solution. I designed both architectures, one in the client’s network and another in our internal infrastructure. Both CMDBs were federated and synchronized when the assets or service models changed. This solution was then integrated with ServiceNow CMDB, a cloud-based platform for SACM. This transformation also allowed the integration with various IT Operations management tools, which provided real-time monitoring of assets and configuration items, giving a 360 view of the complete operation health status.
We worked with an infrastructure of 6000+ servers and 400+ applications, meaning five million configuration items. All of them were onboarded with agent-based and agentless techniques.

As chief operations officer, I was responsible for keeping the company’s overall financial and operational processes running and coached the technology team Agile to deliver consistent increments that added value to the users.