¶ … 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...
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…
