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On a wing and
a prayer
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by Campbell
McCracken |
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The
terrorist attack that took place in the US in September
2001 shows how vulnerable an industry can be to a
massive change to its market place. In the case of
airlines, it came on top of the changes brought about by
the success of the budget market. Together these factors
showed how some sectors of the industry were in a good
position to survive business downturns virtually
unscathed, while others suffered economic ruin.
One
of the determining factors was how much knowledge each
airline had about its market and how well it managed
that knowledge. "It was very easy for people like
Ryanair to be able to change the way they worked and
marketed, because they knew who their customers were,"
said Hummingbird's business development manager Charles
Race. "BA found it very difficult and consequently
started to lose money and customers to those other
airlines."
"The
ability to react to change means you don't want to be
wasting too much time performing tasks that could be
automated," said Race. "You want to be spending as much
resource as possible doing the actual analysis itself
and making decisions, which is the business intelligence
side".
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Case Study
BancTec Plexus and high-speed ticket
scanning |
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Plexus is part of
BancTec which does high speed document scanning
(e.g. for cheque clearing) for several High Street
banks. For the past 15 years, it has provided
software to manage optical storage systems and
workflow systems within a business infrastructure.
"If you can think of
an airline ticket," said Plexus UK sales director
Chris Bryce, "across the middle of it is a series
of code information which gives the actual
segments of the flight." One of the significant
pieces of information is the price of that ticket,
what is called the 'pro-ration'. For example, if
you buy a ticket from British Airways and part of
the journey uses Saudi Airlines, then Saudi
Airlines has to have a way of claiming that fare
back from British Airways. The pro-ration
information lets each airline know how much money
they are owed by the airline who originally sold
the ticket.
At the end of each
month there's a massive clearing system world-wide
where, say, Saudi Airlines bills every other
airline for each ticket which has been sold
through that airline but which is flown on Saudi.
As there are 800 different airlines it’s a massive
administrative and invoicing task.
Although you can
read some features from the ticket, such as the
ticket number, generally optical character
recognition techniques cannot be used to extract
all the pro-ration information because the image
quality on the ticket carbons is so poor. This
means that the information has to be read by a
human and typed into a database. It's a very
labour intensive part of the application.
"What we've been
doing is to introduce image processing into this
so that we can electronically image the tickets,
capture the relevant data at the same time," said
Bryce. Some airlines transmit the images to, say,
India and they have a workshop out there that keys
in the information and transmits the data back to
the relevant airline.
"Now, of course,
there's a lot of queries subsequent to the
flight," said Plexus' Bryce. "And when the airline
gets the invoice they say, 'Well, I don't
particularly like the value of that ticket I
want to see that actual ticket please'." So what
happens is that all tickets get sent back with the
invoice as proof of the price.
Plexus' objective is
to digitalise this process. Part of its portfolio
is a very high speed scanning transport that in
full flight can run at 2,200 per minute. "On
airline tickets it can only run at 1,000 because
of the structure of an airline ticket," said Chris
Bryce. "The paper, the red carbon paper, is too
flimsy and the quality as it bleeds through on the
fourth or fifth copy is too poor."
The ticketing system
Plexus installed at Saudi Airlines processes
100,000 tickets on a slow day up to a peak of
around 200,000 tickets. At the time of the hajj
when Muslims make their pilgrimage to Mecca, the
volume of tickets also rises dramatically. "We've
also installed a huge system in American
Airlines," said Chris Bryce, "and this is
archiving 400,000 ticket images a
day." |
Transactional Systems
Hummingbird worked with Virgin Atlantic to help
it get better information on its frequent flyers, how
they were purchasing its products, the age groups and
profile of the people, so that it could sell them value
added services, such as the limousine service."
The
difficulty Virgin had, though, was that the information
it needed to access was on its transactional system.
With airlines, the reliance on the transactional system
is so great (because, for instance, of online bookings )
that the companies cannot afford to use the system to
generate reports directly because they cannot afford to
compromise its performance.
Virgin uses Hummingbird's ETL (Extract, Translate
and Load) tools to pull the information off the
transactional system so that the analysis can be done
elsewhere. This allows it to focus on its two main areas
the budget package holiday line, and the business
user oriented flights. "It's the ability to react to
change that tools like ours can give them," said Race,
"when potentially you can lose a million pounds a day
just because you haven't got your planes in the right
place."
Flexibility
As
well as an organisation being able to react to change,
its staff have to be flexible too. That means they need
access to just-in-time training. "Following September
11th there was a massive economic argument to say that
BA could no longer provide training to their staff in
the traditional way," said Nige Howarth, international
marketing manager with NETg, a Thomson Learning company.
"It just wasn't cost effective. Although they'd had to
cut back their workforce significantly, they've had to
focus energy on those that are left, and to be seen to
be trying to encourage growth."
E-learning is hardly a new concept for BA
employees. "BA had always been successful in using
simulator-based learning for pilots," observes Howarth,
"and online training has also been used well for
language training for cabin crew." NETg provides BA with
training in a wide range of subject areas. These are
primarily soft skills, business and professional-type
skills, including running meetings, interviewing and
customer service skills followed by Microsoft Office
skills.
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Case Study
Enigma: Customer service management at
easyJet |
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UK budget airline
easyJet has been running for seven years now. "Two
years down the line it became apparent that we
were going to grow quite rapidly and we thought it
was important that we had a way of monitoring how
our service affected our customers," said
easyJet's Customer Service Manager Clayre Catlin.
The company wanted
to be able to log, for example, what problems were
on what flights, or perhaps log if there were any
ground handling issues. It also wanted to track
customer enquiries, to check how long an enquiry
had been open. Then it could carry out analysis to
improve the actual customer response
processes.
EasyJet approached
UK based strategic business consultancy Enigma who
supplied it with CARM, an integrated customer
relationship management tool. "CARM is set up so
that whether you correspond with easyJet via
e-mail, by letter or from the website, you'll end
up at the same point in customer service," said
Enigma's operations director Shailesh Patel. "If
you send in any correspondence, it will get
scanned in, in line with easyJet's philosophy of a
paperless office."
"Since we started
using CARM, and it's been so easy for our
customers to access us, we're getting in the
region of 12,000 to 15,000 e-mails a month
compared to even a year ago when it might have
just been 3,000," said easyJet's
Catlin. |
Customer Service
Customer service is a major initiative in the
airline industry today in a bid to gain and retain
customers. Airlines are increasingly relying on
web-based and e-mail-based input and response, and
systems to support that. (See
Case Study - Enigma: Customer service management at
easyJet)
Inxight Software, a leading provider of software
applications for understanding and effectively using
unstructured data, can filter and tag priority e-mail
and other web-based input and determine what the subject
topic of a message is very accurately. For example, they
can automatically identify a frequent flyer number, a
flight segment number or a ticket number from within
plain text.
"We
can then forward that message, based upon the items that
are detailed in the metatext, to a customer service
agent, already pre-filtered to the agent that deals with
the particular issue that's identified," said Inxight's
marketing VP Dave Spenhoff. "Alternatively we can
automatically respond to it, if that's appropriate, and
within the workflow process of the business."
Airline maintenance
Inxight's tools can also help companies organise,
access and retrieve information from most unstructured
data sources including e-mail messages, word processing
documents and PowerPoint files . "It's the 85 percent of
an information base that a company has, that isn't in
the database," said Spenhoff. "We handle something like
70 different document file formats, which covers all of
the common document formats."
One
application of this is in the area of airline
maintenance. "The maintenance manual and maintenance
records, both for families of aircraft and for specific
aircraft, run to millions of pages," said Spenhoff.
Being able to rapidly find new updates and specific
maintenance information within those millions of pages
of documentation, and making sure that they are
complying with all of the latest aircraft manufacturing
and aviation authority safety regulations, provides a
competitive advantage for airline companies.
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