Continental Go Forward Strategy the Overarching Objective

¶ … Continental Go Forward Strategy

The overarching objective of the Go Forward Strategy was to continually accelerate the gains made in customer relationship management (CRM), customer service, operations and the maintenance, repair and overhaul of their jets. What Continental was after was the ability to unify their entire operation into a highly integrated, coordinated customer-based platform that could be used for streamlining every aspect of their operations to exceed customer expectations and deliver exceptional value (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006). The Go Forward strategy further galvanized Continental unto a very focused strategy for ensuring their Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) turned into a Powerful catalyst for customer-driven change (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006).

The $30M investment in the Go Forward Strategy was one of the most effective investments in technology any airline has ever made in technology, with Continental netting a gain of $500M in increased revenue and cost savings. In the first year alone, Continental was able to eradicate $7M in fraud and drastically reduce the threat of bankruptcy. In addition to all of these benefits, the company skyrocketed in customer experience ratings and customer satisfaction polls, becoming over time the most respected and favored airline (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006). Another significant benefit was the ability to integrate many diverse sets of customer, financial and operational data into a single system of record, which gave Continental a very significant competitive advantage over competitors. With the depth of analytics and business intelligence that Continental Airlines has been able to achieve, they are transforming intelligence and knowledge into a competitive strength which is the most advanced and mature level of analytics decision making there is (Cunningham, Il-Yeol Song, Chen, 2006). All of these benefits are also allowing the Continental culture to heal from three bankruptcies and become stronger as a result, which has also given the entire company a chance to resurrect itself and serve customers more effectively than ever before.

Explain why it is important for an airline to use a real-time data warehouse

The very nature of the airline industry is very real-time, with seconds making the difference in being able to fill a jet to capacity and earn a high gross margin per flight or not. There are also the many real-time needs of cost management including fuel management and operations costs, all of which must be integrated into the overall marketing and service strategies (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006). IT strategies that concentrate on creating real-time systems to capture the specifics of a business' operations can literally mean the difference between being profitable or not, especially where sales and service cycles are very rapid and commodity-like in nature (Johnson, 2004). As Continental has real-time systems for revenue management and accounting, CRM, crew operations and payroll, security and fraud, and flight operations underscore how critical this aspect of analytics and BI are to the value chain of an airline who deals in time-based services (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006). Real-time analytics and BI are critical for the transformation of Continental and also serve as catalyst for making the entire enterprise more customer-driven and focused on exceeding their expectations.

Examine the sample output screen at Teradata.com/t/page/139245 / . Describe how it can assist the user in identifying problems and opportunities.

There is a wealth of insight provided by this screen, with a delineation of age ranges of flyers by their relative levels of profitability contribution. It's intuitively obvious that the 20-year-old age group is the most profitable and the most profitable flights occur over weekends. There is also a very clear message that the 40-year-old age range is where the majority of complaints come from. The use of advanced analytics and BI needs to be used to understand better why these customers are dissatisfied and if they are part of the business flyer market. Using analytics it is also important to see how best to get more 20 to 30-year-olds to fly on weekends as well.

Identify the major differences between the traditional data warehouse and a real-time data warehouse as implemented by Continental.

There are significant differences between a traditional data warehouse and a real-time data warehouse as implemented by Continental. The first and most significant is the design of the EDW, with the focus on real-time extraction, transfer and load (ETL) connectors (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006). The decision has been made to create real-time integration points throughout the organization, further assuring a very high level of latency and speed of information. Second, the real-time EDW has the ability to quickly quantify the overall level of performance from a customer-based, financial and operational standpoint. Third, a real-time EDW has the ability to quickly aggregate, analyze and then propagate knowledge, capturing insights and information faster than a traditional data warehouse and using it to reduce risk while increasing the chance of capturing opportunities.