Case Study - 2 Real-Time Business Intelligence at Continental Airlines

1. In what ways does real-time data warehousing fit with the Continental strategy and plans? Discuss the benefits of the real time data warehousing approach to the issues mentioned versus alternative methods. Do you think that there were other ways to achieve their goals that might have been more effective?

In 1994, Continental had very low rate with on-time performance, mishandled baggage, customer complaints, and overbooking lead to deny boardings. Continental's plan was to promote their company from worst to first, then become customers' favorite company in the airline industry. Continental needed to do something to solve those problems that can get the better ranked and make customers more satisfied. In addition, access to information was too limited for management and customers. As we know, generally, airlines are very reliant on accurate data such as flying schedules, seasonal trends and weather. Real-time data warehousing helps Continental Airlines to become more accurate on data, support the company's strategies, and benefit to revenue management.

Compare to the situation before using real-time data warehousing, real-time data warehousing provides more available data and more benefits to Continental Airlines. Real-time data warehousing provides accurate, integrate flight schedule data, customer data, inventory data, and some other data for supporting pricing for revenue management. By using those data from warehouse, it provides benefits for revenue management and revenue accounting, customer relationship management, flight operations, fraud detection and airline security, etc.

In my opinion, this is the best way to achieve their goals currently. First, real time data warehousing is much more efficient and effective than any other systems recently. The real-time data system provided Continental Airline knowledge about the most valuable customers. By using this information Continental Airlines set their business strategies and plans to successfully target the most valued customer and make their customers more satisfied that can implement "first to favorite".

2. What did the data warehousing group do right that has led to the successful deployment of (real-time) data warehousing and BI within Continental? What elements of the data warehousing environment at Continental are necessary to support the extensive end-user BI application development that occurs?

Continental use real-time technologies as critical technologies to promote the rank from "first to favorite", and Continental think real-time BI is critical to accomplishment of company's strategy and provide lots of benefits on business. Continental's business strategy and real-time BI are in sync, "the data warehousing group maintains the warehouse, and the business areas develop their own applications, with assistance from the warehouse staff." (Anderson-Lehman, Watson, Wixom,