Continental Airlines Go Forward Strategy and Real-Time Data Warehouse

The Go Forward Strategy Overview

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

The $30M investment in the Go Forward Strategy was one of the most effective technology investments any airline has ever made, 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 these financial benefits, the company skyrocketed in customer experience ratings and customer satisfaction surveys, becoming over time one of the most respected and favored airlines in the industry (Watson et al., 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 meaningful competitive advantage over its rivals. With the depth of analytics and business intelligence that Continental Airlines achieved, the company was transforming knowledge into competitive strength — representing the most advanced and mature level of analytics-driven decision-making available (Cunningham, Il-Yeol Song, & Chen, 2006). These benefits also allowed Continental's culture to heal from three prior bankruptcies and emerge stronger, giving the entire organization an opportunity to resurrect itself and serve customers more effectively than ever before.

The Importance of Real-Time Data Warehousing for Airlines

The very nature of the airline industry is inherently real-time, with seconds making the difference between filling a jet to capacity and earning a high gross margin per flight or falling short. There are also numerous real-time cost management needs — including fuel management and operations costs — all of which must be integrated into overall marketing and service strategies (Watson et al., 2006). IT strategies that focus on creating real-time systems to capture the specifics of a business's operations can literally mean the difference between profitability and loss, especially where sales and service cycles are rapid and commodity-like in nature (Johnson, 2004).

Continental's real-time systems for revenue management and accounting, CRM, crew operations and payroll, security and fraud detection, and flight operations underscore how critical analytics and business intelligence are to the value chain of an airline that deals in time-sensitive services (Watson et al., 2006). Real-time analytics and BI are essential for Continental's ongoing transformation and serve as a catalyst for making the entire enterprise more customer-driven and focused on exceeding expectations.

Analyzing Customer Insights Through Business Intelligence

A wealth of insight is provided by advanced data warehouse analytics dashboards, including the delineation of age ranges of flyers by their relative levels of profitability contribution. The data makes clear that the 20-year-old age group is among the most profitable and that the most profitable flights tend to occur over weekends. There is also a clear signal that the 40-year-old age range generates the majority of customer complaints. Advanced analytics and BI tools should be used to better understand why these customers are dissatisfied and whether they represent the business-traveler market segment.

Using analytics, it is also important to assess how best to attract more travelers in the 20-to-30-year-old demographic to fly on weekends, capitalizing on that segment's demonstrated profitability. These types of insights illustrate how business intelligence tools translate raw data into actionable opportunities for revenue growth and service improvement.