Continental Airlines Takes Off with Real-time Business Intelligence Introduction: Continental Airlines was once successfully revolution by using Business Intelligence and save it from bankrupt. Below are some items discuss how Continental Airlines implement strategies related with Business Intelligence. 1. In what ways does real-time data warehousing fit with the Continental strategy and plans? Go Forward Plan was the earliest plan that start in Continental revolution, and real-time data warehousing helps it to realize the plan which include four parts as below: a.
Fly to win: Use real time data warehousing to integrated multiple data sources, including flight schedule data, customer data and inventory data to support pricing and revenue management decision making based on journey information to increase the revenue. b. Fund the Future: Demand-driven dispatch application by data warehouse can make adjustment to minimized impact and create maximum profit. c. Make Reliability a Reality: Use data warehouse to analysis the most valuable customers and provide other services such as Elite Access, Elite upgrade monitoring to achieve customer satisfication. . Working Together: The data warehouse supports the culture by providing employees with information and tools that they can use to do a better job. 2. Describe the benefits of real-time data warehousing at Continental. The benefits can be described as below aspects.
* Marketing: a. Continental performs customer segmentation, target marketing, loyalty/retention management, customer acquisition, channel optimization, and campaign management using the data warehouse. Targeted promotions have produced cost savings and incremental revenue of $15 to $18 million per year. . A targeted CRM program resulted in $150 million in additional revenues in one year, while the rest of the airline industry declined 5 percent. c. Over the past year, a goal was to increase the amount of travel by Continental’s most valuable customers travel. There has been an average increase in travel of $800 for each of the top 35,000 customers. * Corporate Security: Continental was able to identify and prevent over $30 million in fraud over the last three years.
This includes more than $7 million in cash collected. * IT: The Teradata Warehouse technology has significantly improved data center management, leading to cost savings of $20 million in capital and $15 million in recurring data center costs. * Revenue Management: a. Tracking and forecasting demand has resulted in $5 million incremental revenue. b. Fare design and analysis improves the ability to gauge the impact of fare sales, and these activities have been estimated to earn $10 million annually. c.
Full reservation analysis has realized $20 million in savings through alliances, overbooking systems, and demand-based scheduling. 3. What did the data warehousing group do right that has led to the successful deployment of (real-time) data warehousing and BI within Continental? a. The data warehousing group is well function in four groups which are revenue management, marketing, crew operations and supporting Hyperion Intelligence and miscellaneous tasks. b. All of the support people originally worked in the user areas so they are experts on the data for those areas.
They do not program the applications directly but support in their expert area. 4. What elements of the data-warehousing environment at Continental are necessary to support the extensive end-user BI application development that occurs? a. Teradata warehouse b. Enterprise Data model c. Data Access d. Real-time Data Sources e. The Service Bureau f. A standard Data Loading Process g. Managing Mixed Queries h. Creating a “ Time Machine” 5. Why does Continental believe that a 3rd normal form enterprise data model is important?
Master Data Modeler believes that 3rd normal form makes the data warehouse much easier to administer. Also it supports and encourages enterprise-wide use. Data redundancies are eliminated and data are easily maintained, there are agreed upon data definitions, queries can easily cross subject areas, and an enterprise-wide view of the data is provided. By the 3rd normal form, Continental’s data warehouse team believes that the enterprise view has allowed the data warehouse to be much more widely used throughout the company.
