DATA WAREHOUSING

Data Warehousing

Data Warehousing

1. Produce a report to present the findings of an investigation into their information contained in NAMO.

a. Real-time business intelligence (BI) is taking National Airline Monitoring Organisation to new heights. Powered by a real-time data warehouse, the company has dramatically changed all aspects of its business. NAMO's president and COO, describes the impact of real-time BI in the following way: “Real-time BI is critical to the accomplishment of our business strategy and has created significant business benefits." In fact, NAMO has realized more than $500 million in cost savings and revenue generation over the past six years from its BI initiatives, producing an ROI of more than 1,000 percent. NAMO's current position is dramatically different from only ten years ago.

A key to this turnaround was the Go Forward Plan, which continues to be NAMO's blueprint for success and is increasingly supported by real-time BI and data warehousing. Currently, the use of real-time technologies has been critical for NAMO in moving from “first to favorite” among its customers, especially among its best customers. NAMO's real-time warehouse provides a powerful platform for quickly developing and deploying applications in revenue management, customer relationship management, flight and ground operations, fraud detection, security, and others. Some of these applications, the quantifiable benefits they are generating, and the technology in place that supports them are described. NAMO's experiences with realtime BI and data warehousing have resulted in insights and practices from which other companies can benefit, and these lessons learned are discussed. Decision support has evolved over the years, and the work at NAMO exemplifies current practices. The article concludes by putting NAMO's real-time BI and data warehousing initiatives into a larger decision support context.

Only ten years ago, NAMO was in trouble. There were ten major US airlines, and NAMO ranked tenth in on-time performance, mishandled baggage, customer complaints, and denied boarding because of overbooking. Not surprisingly, with this kind of service, NAMO was in financial trouble. It had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection twice in the previous ten years and was heading for a third, and likely final, bankruptcy. It had also gone through ten CEOs in ten years. People joked that NAMO was a “Perfect.”

Most employees supported the plan; those who did not left the company. Under Bethune's leadership, the Go Forward Plan, and a re-energized workforce, NAMO made rapid strides. Within two years, it moved from “worst to first” in many airline performance metrics.

The movement from “worst to first” was, at first, only minimally supported by information technology. Historically, NAMO had outsourced its operational systems to EDS, including the mainframe systems that provided a limited set of scheduled reports. There was no support for ad hoc queries. Each department had its own approach to data management and reporting. The airline lacked the corporate data infrastructure for employees to quickly access the information they needed to gain key insights about the business. However, senior management's vision was to merge data into a single source, with information ...