Airline: Solving Fragmented Legacy Data Systems

The Challenge:

Imagine managing financial planning for a massive international airline, operating flights across over 50 destinations across the globe! Fragmented legacy data systems across departments – Finance, Operations, Network Planning – made the process inefficient. Budgeting was slow, scenario planning difficult, and collaboration a challenge. The biggest hurdle? Handling data with incredible detail – down to the route, sector, aircraft type and flight number level, and on a daily cadence.

The Solution:

The airline worked with Cortell to adopt IBM Planning Analytics, a powerful platform that unifies their financial planning into a streamlined operation, handling the immense detail of their flight data with ease. Benefits include:

  • Faster Budget Cycles: Planning Analytics significantly reduced budgeting time, freeing up resources for strategic thinking.
  • Multiple Scenario Planning: Simulating different scenarios with ease – fuel price fluctuations, market changes, new routes – allowed them to see the financial impact in real-time, all at the route, sector, flight number, and daily level.
  • Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Breaking down departmental silos. Finance, Operations, and Network Planning can now all contribute seamlessly to a single, centralized plan, with accurate granular data that everyone can rely on.

Planning Analytics acts as a central hub, seamlessly ingesting and processing vast amounts of data from various departmental systems, regardless of the level of detail, it can handle it all. This eliminates the need for complex data migration and ensures everyone is working from the same source.

Our solution fostered a culture of collaboration across the airline. Departments now work together on a unified platform with granular data readily available, leading to faster, well informed decision-making.