Meet our customer hero

Fraport AG is one of the world’s leading airport operators, managing 29 airports across four continents. Its flagship location, Frankfurt Airport, is a critical hub for Germany and Europe, handling over 61 million passengers and 2.1 million metric tons of cargo every year. With more than 19,200 employees and €4.4 billion in annual revenue in 2024, Fraport is a major player in global logistics and transportation infrastructure.

ARIS/Fraport: The operational excellence backstory

It was many years ago that Fraport first adopted ARIS to support its SAP ERP implementation and process documentation needs. Since then, the company has expanded its use of the ARIS Process Intelligence Platform to include a wide range of capabilities; from Business Process Management (BPM) with modelling, dashboarding and publishing to Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) and Governance Automation Workflow (APG).

With a single source of truth across Fraport’s process landscape, the company has clear responsibilities and hierarchies—and has substantially reduced complexity. It also has begun to foster a culture of good governance: Fraport’s dedicated BPM@FRA unit (Center of Excellence), trust ARIS to ensure process efficiency, quality best practices, risk reduction, and compliance.

Flying high at cloud altitude

More recently, Fraport has had razor-sharp focus on meeting its company’s strategic priorities for efficiency, lean operations, and operational excellence. So, when the BPM@FRA with Fraport IT-team identified an obvious low hanging fruit, it was all systems go. The task: Migrating its ARIS instance to the Cloud. One aspect that stands out in this context is Fraport IT’s high level of self-reliance: Since the launch of ARIS, the team has managed most of the implementation on its own, deliberately forgoing external consultants. This hands-on approach has allowed Fraport IT to build deep expertise in both methodology and operations. The result? A strong foundation that has been instrumental in ensuring the ongoing use and continuous development of the BPM platform at Fraport AG.

With an accelerator available to do this easily into Azure, Fraport even used ARIS to document and plan the ARIS implementation, identifying dependencies and potential roadblocks. Able to simulate the future state of their process portal in the Cloud, the PoC was smoothly completed in three months and full implementation followed soon after.

The benefits were immediate:

• Lower administrative overhead through SCIM-based user management.
• Always-on availability with quarterly release updates.
• Restructured Governance workflows aligned to guidelines.

The Cloud environment has also allowed Fraport to modernize its user interface and symbol palette, making process documentation more intuitive and accessible. By reducing the burden of system administration, Fraport’s teams can focus on creating value by improving process quality and focusing on process-enabled innovation. “The Cloud makes it easier to access one common process portal, enhancing collaboration and agility across the Group’s organizations,” Osmani explains: “And ARIS Connect, as the single process library, facilitates audits from regulating authorities to ensure aviation-service compliance.”

AI-driven Process Intelligence for a better customer experience

With so much value on the table, Fraport is now exploring the next frontier of process excellence: AI and customer-centricity. As a key trial partner for the ARIS AI Companion, Fraport played a vital role in validating the product’s value cases and functionality. Fraport was among the first companies to put the new tool through its paces in practical and operational conditions. Drawing on their hands-on experience, Fraport’s Test Team provided valuable feedback that directly informed the further development of the product-playing a key role in ensuring the tool meets the practical needs of everyday operations.

The AI Companion will enable non-experts to create and document processes quickly and accurately, removing bottlenecks and accelerating value creation. By translating natural language descriptions into structured process models, the AI Companion empowers business users to contribute directly to process design, reducing the time it takes for new processes to be documented. This democratization of process modelling helps eliminate reliance on a small group of BPM experts, speeding up the documentation and optimization cycle, providing additional context to models, and increasing stakeholder buy-in to co-owned processes assets.

ARIS has also partnered with Fraport at various internal events to drive awareness, showcase features and drive engagement in the platform, working to increase the confidence in non-BPM specialists as they become more empowered across the company.

Where use cases are concerned, the company has also begun a new initiative to explore Customer Experience Management. By mapping processes from the passenger’s perspective across their journey through the airport from arrival to departure, Fraport aims to improve service at every customer touchpoint. ARIS will help connect these customer journeys to the underlying processes and enable responsive, model-driven optimization. Plans also include using ARIS to implement an enhanced Business Continuity Management program, ensuring that Frankfurt Airport remains resilient and secure.

A partnership where the sky’s the limit

The Fraport and ARIS relationship is one built on a decades-long partnership. Working together across multiple verticals, from IT to operations to innovation, the two organizations know the benefits of trusted collaboration.
As one of Europe’s largest and busiest logistics hubs, Frankfurt Airport is more than just an airport—it’s critical infrastructure for Germany and Europe. No wonder, as Fraport continues to modernize and evolve, ARIS remains a trusted partner in ensuring process excellence, resilience, and automation shape their operations.