Modernizing a legacy airport ground transportation platform

The client builds operations software used by airports to manage ground transportation and airfield operations. Coherent Solutions joined as a staff-augmentation partner in 2021, embedding UX, front-end, and QA automation specialists inside the client’s existing product team.

Coherent’s specialists worked on the platform’s user-facing layers, redesigning the main administration panel and search experience, contributing to geolocation-enabled asset visibility, and helping rebuild reporting around flexible, custom, and predefined formats. The modernization program delivered a 25% gain in system administration efficiency, a 50% cut in onboarding time for new users, and 80% of platform features modernized, with Coherent’s QA automation supporting validation as the client migrated from its legacy system to the updated one.

The challenge

The client’s flagship platform had grown complex over years of upgrades layered on legacy architecture. Airports using it had to coordinate multiple departments, assets, transportation providers, compliance workflows, inspections, and reporting obligations, and the platform’s non-intuitive design was slowing all of it down. New users faced a steep onboarding curve, data management was inefficient, report generation was complicated, and decision-making lagged as a result.

The client needed to modernize usability and functionality without disrupting the specialized, compliance-sensitive workflows airports depended on daily.

Our approach

Coherent’s UX specialists began with data gathering, a UX audit, and design analysis to identify usability issues and modernization priorities before redesign work started. That analysis fed updated layouts and UX prototypes, and from there into the two surfaces airport staff used most heavily: the main system administration panel and the search experience.

Beyond those surfaces, Coherent’s designers and front-end developers contributed to the interfaces around asset tracking and maintenance workflows, to geolocation-enabled visibility of assets and activity across the airfield, and to internal communication features between airport departments. Reporting was rebuilt to be more flexible, with support for predefined reports and custom checklists, and a training management system was added to help new users ramp faster.

A front-end developer joined in late 2021, and a QA automation specialist joined in mid-2022 to support validation as new features shipped and as the client migrated from its legacy platform to the modernized one. Coherent’s people worked as part of a larger client-led team, contributing UX analysis, design modernization, front-end implementation, and QA automation, while the client’s own engineers owned the platform’s architecture and domain logic.

The solution

The modernization landed in stages, surface by surface. The redesigned administration panel and search experience went into daily use as the platform’s most-used entry points. Geolocation-enabled asset visibility and the rebuilt reporting system followed, giving airport staff a view of assets across the airfield and report generation they could shape to the question at hand. The training management system shortened the ramp for new users. Across the flagship platform, 80% of features were modernized and improved, with Coherent supporting the client’s migration from the legacy system to the updated one.

The impact

• 25% increase in system administration efficiency

• 50% reduction in onboarding time for new users

• 80% of system features modernized and improved

• More efficient data management and simplified report generation

• Improved internal communication between airport departments

• Enhanced collaboration through geolocation-enabled asset visibility

• Better support for decision-making through improved data access and reporting

• Supported migration from the legacy platform to the modernized system

What’s next

This engagement shows what legacy modernization looks like for operationally complex, compliance-sensitive software. The pattern is to modernize the highest-friction surfaces first, administration and search, then layer in automation and reporting improvements as the platform stabilizes. For organizations running specialized operational software that can’t afford downtime or disrupted workflows, it’s a model for modernizing in place, then stepping back as the client takes development in-house.