CONTINENTAL AIRLINES RE-ENGINEERS PROCESSES WITH HPFor most of us, taking a plane trip involves little more than finding the best fare, choosing a comfortable seat and hoping someone will be there to pick us up at our final destination. For the airlines, however, a three-hour jaunt from Houston to New York involves much more work: Cost-per-ticket projections, scheduling comparisons, flight planning, maintenance reviews and fuel allocation analyses - just to name a few operations. Without such detailed information, an airline is at a distinct disadvantage in a super-charged environment where service is the only differentiator. Continental Airlines decided to re-engineer its processes by creating its Systems Operations Coordination Center (SOCC) and upgrading its Flight Profitability System (FPS). It turned to a trusted partner, Hewlett-Packard Company, to provide proven mission- and business-critical solutions. SOCCChallenges:
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A Strong Force in the SkiesHouston, Texas-based Continental Airlines is the fifth largest airline in the U.S., offering more than 2,200 departures daily to 135 domestic and 89 international destinations. Continental Airlines operates a fleet of 364 jets and its Continental Express flies 83 turboprops and 67 regional jets. Operating major hubs in Newark, Houston and Cleveland and Guam, Continental has extensive service throughout the Americas, and to Europe and Asia. Additionally, the company has a strategic global alliance with Northwest Airlines. Continental's Winter of DiscontentIn the early 1990s, a severe blizzard barreled through the Northeastern United States, paralyzing roadways, grounding aircraft and stranding travelers across the country. At the same time, Newark, NJ, Continental's second largest hub, certainly felt the freeze - the airport was closed for two days. Once the airport reopened, it took an additional 3 days to get back to 100% operations. "We could not service our customers and we experienced a huge loss of revenue," explained Dan Wiesner, director of Technology for the Systems Operations Coordination Center and Flight Operations. "For several days, we had planes in Newark that couldn't leave; planes due in that couldn't land; crews in Newark with nowhere to go. The storm created a ripple effect throughout our system. Because an airplane route covers more than one destination, the shut-down caused problems throughout the country, as well as our company." Piloting Continental's New ProcessesSince there is no sure way to control Mother Nature's seasonal whims, Continental needed to put new processes in place to insure it could service its customers and protect its revenue streams. In 1994, Continental assembled a re-engineering team to spearhead the creation of the Systems Operations Coordination Center (SOCC). First on the agenda was replacing the company's mainframe environment with a client/server architecture. "In the old environment, to find information on a single problem you had to go into terminal emulation mode for each of five different mainframes," said Wiesner. "To solve this time-consuming problem, we custom built graphical applications so our users could go to a single place to get the information they needed. Initially, we implemented this new interface using NCR servers - which we outgrew in 18 months. Originally HP 712, 715 and 725 workstations were the client of choice for that implementation, and more recently HP B- and C-Class ones have replaced them. We are pleased with this choice because the capacity and performance of the HP workstations allows them to study logistical issues more comprehensively." He continued, "We were impressed with the reliability and scalability of the HP 9000 Enterprise Server hardware - too with their specified path of upgrades within the chassis. The competitor's solution was a forklift box-swap approach. This is the reason why we decided to upgrade our solution in 1997 to the HP 9000 K570 servers." Helping Solve Problems ProactivelyAfter more than three years, Continental's HP 9000 K570 servers are still running strong. "They've been able to handle our growth," said Wiesner. "Before we made the purchase, we sat down with HP and EDS and sized the servers based on our projected growth. All in all, the HP 9000 K570s have really served us well." So well, in fact, that Continental's SOCC now uses its new graphical environment to see where a given airplane is scheduled to fly. "The old system required that we work off pieces of paper that had to be manually updated. With the HP servers and workstations, 140 users across 3 locations are able to determine, with a click of a button, just what ramifications a delay on any one of our planes would have - up to 10 days out. HP has helped give us the ability to see into the future and become proactive in solving problems before they actually impact the customer," Wiesner said. Continental's SOCC solution also features a mission-critical Oracle database residing on one of its production HP 9000 K570s. "It's a proactive function," noted Wiesner. "We do request some of the more non-essential data, but as far as the critical data that we use in the SOCC to make decisions, that data is broadcast from the mainframes. The Oracle database, in turn, knows what applications are out there and what they require. It then broadcasts that same information to the various clients." Keeping Continental in the AirIn the airline industry, high-availability, mission-critical capabilities are as vital to a company's operations as aircraft and fuel. "Most of our SOCC applications are affecting the flight within three hours of departure, so it's very important that they are available," explained Wiesner. "One of the FAA's regulations is that an airline must continuously know where all of their planes are. If the SOCC is down, then the people responsible for the airplanes won't know where they are, and the planes don't fly. Overall, our HP servers have been very reliable and our downtime has been minimal." Continental relies on HP's 24x7 support and four-hour on-site hardware repair to maintain this mission-critical environment. Additionally, HP Consulting helped architect Continental's failover environment, working with EDS to set up the initial HP MC/ServiceGuard scripts. Blue Skies AheadWith the success of its re-engineered processes, Continental's SOCC continues to bring new applications online. "We've just centralized our load planning function with a graphical user interface, which has resulted in substantial savings for the company," noted Wiesner. "The reliability of our HP system has helped us provide better service to our customers and has saved us a significant amount of time and money, giving us a competitive advantage. We also have some optimization applications coming online that will further refine our processes and provide cost benefits." New FPS Takes FlightWhile re-engineering their processes with the SOCC, Continental identified another area within the company that needed reorganization. For almost a decade, Continental Airlines had been using a Flight Profitability System (FPS) to provide various monthly management reports. FPS is used primarily by Continental's scheduling department, revenue management, pricing and marketing areas to make a wide range of decisions, such as fleet allocation or to benchmark the success of a marketing campaign. In February 1996, Continental embarked on a new FPS, breaking the project into two phases. The first phase involved migrating from the old mainframe environment into an HP 9000 K-Class client/server environment. "That part of the project was completed in October 1996," said Dan Morales, Continental Airlines' Director of Flight Profitability "After implementation, we were able to store 25 months of history, whereas in the mainframe environment, we could only store the current month's history. That meant we could make 'apples-to-apples' comparisons year after year, month after month, and better decide how to allocate costs to each flight." First Class All the Way from K to VThe airline then began reviewing its company-wide new systems projects. Continental started with its data warehouse project, which stores revenue information on a coupon basis, by ticket number. "The project involved some massive processing -going through every coupon, every ticket we had to figure out flight revenue. Our data warehouse was pretty powerful, however the HP K-Class servers we had at the time weren't able to handle allocated expenses at that level," noted Morales. Working with HP, Continental conducted benchmarking tests on the HP 9000 V2500 at HP's Capacity Planning Center in Cupertino, California, to make sure that the new FPS solution would scale as desired. Continental subsequently moved off the K-Class systems to an HP 9000 V2500/8, as well as upgraded its HP-UX from 10.2 to 11.0 and its Oracle database from Oracle 7.3 to Oracle 8.0. Flight Testing HP's Solution"We have 200 people utilizing the FPS across the company, so for us, it's a very business-critical application. It was challenging to have new hardware and software all once," Morales said. "An instrumental factor in our decision to go with HP was that HP allowed us to use its Capacity Planning Center to test our solution before implementation. We were able to try HP-UX 11.0 and Oracle 8.0, and found that the solution worked with minimal effort. As a result, we knew that it wasn't going to be a showstopper when we got back to Continental and tried to do it ourselves. We learned a lot up-front in Cupertino. HP also worked with us to ensure that the solution met our needs with a no-obligation return deal. HP really helped us to mitigate the risk of a new solution." Additionally, Morales brought in HP Consulting to help fine tune the solution. "When we put in the V-Class, I wanted to make sure we got the biggest bang for the buck, so I asked HP Consulting to help us with HP-UX 11.O and to really utilize the V2500," he said. HP Helps Continental's Profitability SoarTen years ago, Continental was only able to determine if two out of five flights on any given route were profitable. Now their new HP solution allows the airline to make quick decisions in their flight schedules without substantial losses. "We're currently making adjustments in our FPS application because of the power of the HP 9000 V2500," explained Morales. "Not only are we getting to a lower level of detail on the cost side, but we'd like to be able to close our flight profitability books weekly or daily. It will give us a huge competitive advantage to know the day after a flight exactly how much we made on that flight." Paying for Itself in the First UseWhile Continental is now better able to project costs, Morales notes that due to the numbers of users, it is difficult to identify any hard measures of success. "It's tough to put a dollar figure on it. If you just change one flight-say a jet flying Newark to Washington, D.C., the results might say that we'll losing $1 million a month. Our scheduling department could adjust the fleet at a greatly reduced cost. We do know that HP's FPS solution paid for itself in the first year of operation. I've heard many times from our scheduling department that the solution actually paid for itself after the first schedule changes that they made based on the new FPS data." Beyond the HorizonAs Continental's commitment to improving their systems and analysis tools continues, the company's next step is education. "The tool is so powerful and Continental is growing so rapidly, that we need to get our users educated about what FPS is and how they can best use it," explained Morales. "We want to be sure that FPS keeps up with Continental's changes to meet our user's needs. With HP as our partner on the project, I know we'll be able to meet that challenge." About Continental AirlinesHeadquarters: Houston, Texas; Founded: 1934; Employees: 51,500; 1998 Revenues: $7.9 billion; Telephone: (713) 324-5000; URL: www.continental.com; Main products: Continental Airlines is the fifth largest airline in the U.S., offering more than 2,200 departures daily to 135 domestic and 89 international destinations. Continental Airlines operates a fleet of 364 jets and its Continental Express flies 83 turboprops and 67 regional jets. Operating major hubs in Newark, Houston and Cleveland, Continental has extensive service throughout the Americas, and to Europe and Asia. Additionally, the company has a strategic global alliance with Northwest Airlines. Technology Highlights:SOCC
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