Business Information System Air Asia: Business Information

Business Information System

Air Asia: Business Information System

The airline industry throughout the world now has become a competitive business especially with the never-ending increase in aircraft fuel. Different airline companies are finding different ways of attracting customers via several marketing initiatives. In Malaysia, AirAsia, founded in the mid-1990s, offered no frills budget fares with the marketing theme "Every One Can Fly. (AirAsia 2011)" This Malaysian airline company has captured the market not only locally but also in the Asian region. The success the company has made was made possible not only through the low fares and excellent service but through the acquisition of additional aircrafts. Further, AirAsia has currently adopted information technologies strategically to integrate the operations and coordinate all the business and management functions (Wong Pui Man 2009). Amongst the business information systems implementation AirAsia engaged in, the company capitalized on developments in Transaction Processing System, Decision Support System, and Office Automation System. By integrating the various systems and ensuring that the right hardware and software including networking and processes are integrated, AirAsia was able to streamline business operations providing for more efficient and effective outputs. With information technology for instance, "AirAsia was able to be the first airline in Southeast Asia utilize e-ticketing and bypass traditional travel agents. This enabled the airline to save on the cost of issuing physical ticket (i.e. estimated at U.S.$10 per ticket), and eliminated the need for large and expensive booking and reservation systems, and agents' commissions. (Zhu 2011)"

Aside from the above, several initiatives in information systems saw fruition such as with transaction processing system, AirAsia deployed the Computer Reservation System (CRS), "an integrated web-enabled reservation and inventory system suite powered that includes Internet, call center, and airport departure control functionality (Wong Pui Man 2009)." This system provides a hassle free reservation to check-in system for Air Asia's customers. In terms of decision support system, the Yield Management System (YMS) anticipates and reacts to the behavior of customers to maximize the revenue - taking into account the operating cost and aids (Wong Pui Man 2009). The system avoid s conventional forecasting guesswork thus enabling decisions to be made based on real time information provided by the system. Office Automation of AirAsia has been achieved with the various information technology implementations; however, the end to end approach thereto has been made possible via the company's Enterprise Resource Planning System, (ERP). The ERP solution is "powered by Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) on Microsoft technology platform. AirAsia is able to successfully maintain process integrity, reduce financial month-end closing processing time, speeds up reporting and data retrieval process. (Wong Pui Man 2009)" Thus, information systems of AirAsia can boast of having a direct link to its customer base via the CRS and various systems processing are done within the ERP of the company.