Flying High with Real-Time Business Intelligence

Abstract

Real-time data warehousing and business intelligence (BI), supporting an aggressive Go Forward business plan, have helped Continental Airlines transform its industry position from worst to first and then from first to favorite. With a $30 million investment in hardware and software over six years, Continental has realized conservatively over $500 million in increased revenues and cost savings in areas such as marketing, fraud detection, demand forecasting and tracking, and improved data center management. Continental is now recognized as a leader in real-time business intelligence based upon its scalable and extensible architecture, prudent decisions on what data are captured in real time, strong relationships with end users, a small and highly competent data warehouse staff, a careful balance of strategic and tactical decision-support requirements, and understanding of the synergies between decision support and operations, and new business processes that utilize real-time data.