Real Time Business Intelligence at Continental Airlines Essay Example

the company's goal has been to increase travel among their highest-value customers. This initiative has yielded positive results with an average increase in travel of $800 per top 35,000 customers.

According to Managing Information Technology (2009), Continental Airlines utilizes marketing insight and fraud detection techniques to improve sales and enhance security. The marketing insight feature is designed to assist sales personnel, marketing managers, and flight personnel in understanding customer profiles, such as their travel history with Continental and their value to the airline. Fraud detection capabilities are utilized by Continental to identify reservations that do not comply with fare and contract agreements, as well as to profile suspicious booking and ticketing activities. This includes blocking seat inventory, selling tickets at unauthorized prices, creating fictitious booking records, making fraudulent lost baggage claims, and abusing OnePass account redemption. Continental's real-time data warehouse also contributes to airline security by preventing approximately $30 million in fraud over the past three years.

According to Managing information technology (2009, P.318), Continental has collected over $7 million in cash, which includes more than just cash. In my opinion, Continental has implemented real-time data warehousing and strong management leadership around data in various areas such as revenue management, customer relationship management, flight and ground operations, fraud detection, security, and others. This implementation has brought significant changes to all aspects of the company's business (Managing information technology, 2009, P.315,316,218,321).


In line with the Continental strategy and plans, real-time data warehousing fits perfectly. Furthermore, the company has experienced specific benefits from its implementation, although they are not mentioned in the text (Managing information technology, 2009).

To align with Continental's strategy and plans, various applications in revenue

management, customer relationship management, flight and ground operations, fraud detection, security, and other areas are being deployed. These real-time data warehousing applications are effectively influencing Continental's business approach. The benefits of implementing such applications are numerous. Some of the benefits observed include improved ticket pricing, increased travel, and enhanced fraud detection. Continental has also realized several marketing benefits through the use of a data warehouse. These include customer segmentation, target marketing, loyalty/retention management, customer acquisition, channel optimization, and campaign management. Regular utilization of the data warehouse has resulted in targeted promotions that have generated cost savings and additional revenue of $15 to $18 million per year for Continental.

The past year saw an objective to increase the travel of Continental's most important customers, resulting in an average increase of $800 for each of the top 35,000 customers. The company's corporate security measures were successful in identifying and preventing over $30 million in fraud over the last three years, with a notable portion being $7 million in cash collected. Additionally, the improvement in warehouse technology has greatly enhanced data center management, leading to cost savings of $20 million in capital and $15 million in recurring data center costs. Continentals Full reservation analysis has also yielded $20 million in savings through alliances, overbooking systems, and demand-based scheduling (Managing information technology, 2009, P.321).

From a technical perspective, the data warehousing group at Continental successfully divided their work, ensuring each team member was accountable for their tasks. They collectively managed the warehouse, developed and maintained infrastructure, handled data modeling and ETL processes, and collaborated with various business units. This organized approach played a crucial role in the implementation of real-time data

warehousing and business intelligence within Continental.The group has succeeded in facilitating communication among employees, which is another positive aspect.

The warehouse staff meets with the committee to inform and educate members about warehouse-related issues, and the members identify opportunities for staff involvement in business areas. The warehouse teams also assist in validating and writing requests for additional funding, as well as setting priorities for future warehouse directions. Elements of the data warehousing environment, people, organization, and technical aspects at Continental are necessary to support extensive end-user BI application development. One example is the Flight Management Dashboard, an interactive graphical display developed by the data warehouse group. This system helps the operations team identify and improve issues in the flight network to enhance customer satisfaction and airline profitability.Users can see real-time flight statistics that are updated every minute. They can submit queries to understand how the airline operation is performing at any moment.

The Management can monitor real-time revenue projections, the location of valuable customers during flights, and the impact of delays and cancellations. They can also analyze bookings and run "what-if" scenarios to assess the effects of changes to specific flights. Additionally, the data warehouse includes automatically generated metadata published on the Intranet for easy access, an SQL Server operational database for storing configuration and status data, Teradata control for loading utilities, monitoring of MVS jobs through 3270 emulators, and real-time display of each service's activities on transformation server machines. Continental believes that a 3rd normal form enterprise data model is important for several reasons as mentioned in the case.

Following is the most important reason As shown in the case with the use of the 3rd normal

form model, all warehouse data can be stored in one place. By storing in one place the data can be easily maintained, queries can easily cross subject areas, and the data can be available any time enterprises wide. Due to the use of 3normal form model Continental has had great success with its enterprise data warehouse. People at continental think that the use of enterprise-wide data has made them think more creatively. Because of this particular reason I think continental believes that a 3rd normal form enterprise data model is important to the growth of its business.

What special issues about data warehouse management (e.g., data capture and loading for the data warehouse (ETL processes) and query workload balancing) does this case suggest occur for real-time data warehousing? How has Continental addressed these issues? Ans: Special issues about the data warehouse management which continental has address are: Due to the Continuous data loads software use, such as CDC (Change Data Capture), and also the captured the special hooks or triggers on the operation system.

Under continuous monitoring of Service processes, the data queues are transformed for loading into the warehouse using the Teradata continuous load TPump facility. High priority is assigned to tactical queries accessing single records. The high data volume uploading does not permit user intervention as the monitoring system detects a condition requiring attention.