easyJet operate their business with the help of a number of specialised software applications. The package used for airline operations (flight planning, flight tracking and crew management) provides a wealth of off-the-shelf reports to support its users, but it wasn’t fully integrated to other sources of data for the purposes of summary analysis and management reporting.
This is where Objective were brought in.
About easyJet
easyJet is Europe's leading low-cost airline offering 109 routes to 38 key business and leisure airports in Europe.
easyJet keep costs low by eliminating the unnecessary costs and 'frills' which characterise 'traditional' airlines. Since its first flight in November 1995, the phenomenal growth of easyJet was boosted by its merger with Go-fly in August 2002 making the combined company Europe's Number 1 low cost airline.
Business Situation
easyJet operate their business with the help of a number of specialised software applications. The package used for airline operations (flight planning, flight tracking and crew management) provides a wealth of off-the-shelf reports to support its users, but it wasn’t fully integrated to other sources of data for the purposes of summary analysis and management reporting.
A range of management reports had been developed over time, often being prepared and edited manually, from a variety of different data sources. However, this could be time consuming, inconsistent and unreliable.
Solution
An Operations Data Warehouse was developed, based on Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and using Visual Basic to develop a custom ETL (Extract Transform Load) process to migrate data from the various operational systems automatically, re-organising and re-formatting at the same time.
A range of reporting tools were developed based around MS Office and with integration in Visual Basic. These range from on-demand ad hoc reports, OLAP (on line analytical processing) tools for data mining, and automated, regular reports which are automatically distributed to a management audience.
The result is an orderly, accurate and efficient reporting system which presents information in a consistent manner, using familiar tools and interfaces, in precisely the desired format, and requiring minimal user intervention.
The Challenges
The operations systems are “Mission Critical”, a key challenge was to extract the large volumes of necessary data without disturbance to these, yet with a good enough reliability to ensure that vital reports are delivered on time each day.
Operations systems often depended on obscure data formats and database technologies, to ensure accuracy and data integrity involved a degree of “reverse engineering” to understand how these functioned prior to development.
The Verdict
A data warehouse now collates information from various legacy systems and pushes tailor-made reports to executives as they need them.