In the summer of 2005, a large consumer transportation company asked LiveLogic to help them deliver their first true Business Intelligence to the organization. The client was faced with a business challenge in their Marketing and Pricing division and sought help from our consultants to restructure their reporting process.
With over 22 million passengers a year, the client needed to learn as much about their product and pricing as possible to better target their marketing campaign and expand their customer base. They wanted to start with a Marketing and Pricing analysis dashboard, allowing analysts and executives to study variables on basically every business aspect, including demand trends, passenger yield, and price elasticity.
Their reporting and analysis application was out of date and too slow for modern technology. The client needed an interactive process to achieve the following:
- better understand effect of pricing on consumers
- attain insight into how to best reduce the number of origins and destinations served
- dynamically analyze top origin and destination combinations
- provide quick insight views to top marketing executives
- supply daily updates
- analyze year-over-year comparisons for the same weekends and holidays
With the problem areas identified, LiveLogic consultants handpicked the best technologies to meet the
client’s needs. The system was built around an Analysis Services Cube, SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services for production reporting, and Data Transformation Services to easily move and manipulate data, and a web user interface to view the data.
This new system vastly improved the client’s marketing and pricing capabilities. The client went from a very limited set of static reports to an open, dynamic reporting and analysis platform. 30 million records are updated nightly. Detailed analysis of passengers carried, revenue, passenger miles and yield metrics by origin, destination, promotion, sales agency, passenger class, discount codes, year-quarter-month-date, and day of week is readily available. One report requested by the CEO that had taken a month to manually build now takes two hours. Worker productivity increased as a direct result of the work that LiveLogic consultants
performed.
With success depending on quality and timeliness of reports now more than ever, we are glad to have been able to help our client stay ahead of the game and gain a competitive advantage in its industry.
