BIAM 500
Week 7 Case Study Assignment The cost of the implementation of software and hardware for Continental was $30 million over a 6 year period including hardware and software. Considering the extra revenue of $500 million, let alone all the benefits which will be listed later in the paper, the cost is very low. It may have cost a few employees their job in the future since this technology is doing the work of many people. Some of the general benefits from this project were being able to better understand customer needs and their perception of services offered. Marketing processes were greatly improved after being deemed inefficient when their data was spread over various databases and managed by outside vendors. They were previously involved with two bankruptcies but returned to profitability after going with the in-house data warehouse. They were able to use the warehouse for real-time data feeds and get real-time data results which dramatically lowered their response time to various operations throughout the companys. Delay times were lowered dramatically for planes. Customer check-ins and reservations could be monitored closely so management could correct the situation quickly. Continental was also able to save $7 million in fraud and reduce costs by $41 million in the first year alone. That was more in one year than the warehouse cost over a six year period. They are a leader in business intelligence and won the Data Warehousing Institute’s Best Practices and Leadership Award in 2004. Continental also was able to save on departure taxes that they constantly overpaid for years. There was a rule that passengers who were in the UK for under 24 hours didn’t qualify for the departure tax. Without the use of the data warehouse, it was too difficult to determine and they ended up overpaying every year. They were able to save $800,000 per year for