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Customer Profile
After some years of heavy growth and its going public in 2006 today AirBerlin is the second largest airline in Germany. In 2009, AirBerlin carried a total of 28.6 million passengers employing around 8,200 employees. In 2008 the airline received more than 10 awards for outstanding service and quality. With an average age of 4.6 years AirBerlin has one of the youngest fleets in Europe contributing to a significant reduction of air pollutant emissions.
Solution Overview
With the support of pmOne AirBerlin has realized a Group Information and Control System that builds on a Data Warehouse as a foundation designed to support fast changing business and market environments as well as organizational structures. The solution has proved to be successful after only a few months and has made a significant contribution to the company’s turnaround.
Connecting the Dots
AirBerlin has grown strongly in recent years both organically and through takeovers of other airlines. With the acquisition of dba the domestic German network was expanded and LTU added an extensive international route network to AirBerlin’s offering. In the course of such rapid change and growth AirBerlin has not only expanded the portfolio considerably, but also the amount of data the group has to process. For the group controlling department that meant in particular, that for the acquired entities data and new system architectures had to be integrated and new business processes had to be established and adapted to.
In order to bring more consistency to the group data, a new Enterprise Data Warehouse encompassing all business transactions within the group was going to provide the necessary integration, transparency and agility ultimately enabling decision makers of all levels to connect the dots and make faster and better decisions.
In December 2008, only one year into the project, Claus Glüsing, Director of Controlling gave account of what this project does for Air Berlin, "Today we have no collection of isolated Data Warehouse solutions, but actually a comprehensive Data Warehouse for the entire Air Berlin Group. Initially AirBerlin had started the project from a report/front end point of view only to discover that the foundation was not right. The project had faltered before pmOne was found as a partner.”
When asked about the reasons for choosing pmOne Glüsing says: "pmOne is a hungry, fresh and agile company. Besides its great BI experience the team has a lot fun creating success and solving challenges as you would find them in any project."
A Solid Foundation is vital to the Success
One of the most crucial milestones of the project has been a particularly intensive design phase says Glüsing in retrospect. It took the team about three months to match all requirements to a logical consistent data model that is susceptible to constant change. Moreover, the data had to be uniformly transformed into the data warehouse and then surfaced through a presentation layer through dimensions, key figures and reports. Of course different internal target groups and their specific requirements had to be considered. As an example information as diverse as analysis on fuel consumption per flight and revenue or cost per passenger or the number of flights in a particular period made with a specific type of aircraft is of interest. As all data were available within the Data Warehouse it was natural to establish a complete route profitability reporting facility providing insight about the contribution margins of all flights. This highly complex solution contains current and historical data always allowing to compare current with earlier booking periods, even if parameters such as the capacity of a flight change. When a planned flight departs from a different airport for operational reasons - e.g. because of fog - the system will also reflect that. Currently the Data Warehouse contains several Terabytes of data and the multidimensional cube alone is one and a half Terabytes in size.
Contribution to economic success
“One year into the project we now have a solid foundation to build upon. Quite successfully we started with the features that promised immediate or very fast return. Now we turn to the somewhat trickier areas, "says Claus Glüsing. By this he means a more detailed analysis of the data which will stretch as far as to the level of the individual passenger. And the project team can already refer to initial success. The finance expert is convinced that the initial investment paid off within less than one year. "Through smart standardization and processing of data we can now grasp causal relations we were not able to see before. We utilized this capability at a very early stage, "says Glüsing. “For example, we based the winter 2008/2009 schedules entirely on analysis and findings out of our Data Warehouse. The results for each route and aircraft type were used to review profitability of routes constantly. Unprofitable routes were shut down. Consequently we now produce results that by far exceed the industry average", says Glüsing. In fact, Air Berlin reported a significant growth in profitability in fall of 2008, marking the best quarterly result in its history.
For Glüsing it is elementary to become clear from the outset, which analyses bear the largest benefits in regards to the control of an area or even the entire organization. This will bring the tasks at hand in a logical order.
About the cooperation with the pmOne team in respect to the technical implementation, he says: "They have demonstrated throughout the project that they are conceptually strong, are able to moderate the process very well and are always state-of-the-art in terms of technical realization."
So far, about 50 users work from different areas such as controlling, sales and management are working with the Data Warehouse solution of Air Berlin. The number of users will gradually extend to about 300. The willingness among employees to use the system is very high, says the Director of Controlling: "By now people are really waiting for further development of the system as it gives all parties the opportunity to contribute and to control their own area of business better."
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