Established in 1989, InterGlobe Enterprises is a player in aviation, hospitality and travel related services and its businesses include IndiGo (InterGlobe Aviation)‚ InterGlobe Technologies‚ InterGlobe Air Transport. Headquartered at Gurgaon, IndiGo is a low-cost and the largest airline in India in terms of passengers carried. The airline operates 679 daily flights to 40 destinations and is the second largest low-cost carrier in Asia.
The aviation company wanted to employ analytics to bring in an enhanced decision-making process as one of their top IT agenda. Using collaborative business intelligence and self-service BI, they wanted to ensure that their day to day process activities are based on factual insights. The rationale behind this move is to enhance their operational efficiency across the organization and gain competitive advantage.
The collaborative BI initiative
IndiGo launched a collaborative initiative called Business Intelligence Centre (BIC) with the goal to have right information at the right time and to the right people. They identified key BIC champions from different departments to lead the change management.
To ensure the solution rightly matches their requirements, they identified the key parameters across budget planning, technology planning and other business parameters. And accordingly the company has designed their own BI framework, for both corporate and department level, using a mixed of both top down and bottom up approach.
The stakeholders were divided into three groups -CXO – strategic level, HODs - functional level, and department – MIS /cross functional analytics/business process – operation Level. For each department, KPIs were defined for both leadership and operation level. For each department, they have further defined all the business functions and for each business function, they identified the reports/alerts/MIS/ analytics.
‘This is the first time we have implemented the Tabular technology based on Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM) methodology, says Pankaj Khare, Director IT, InterGlobe Aviation. ‘This is fast and simple compared to the old business intelligence methodology of developing the ETL and working in MDX, he adds.
The cost incurred in the development and implementation of the project is Rs two crores.
Business benefits
The top areas that are impacted by this implementation are operational excellence and business management. Now they can set their action plan priority based on the emerging trends. Plus, with trends available on weekly and monthly basis, they can do the correlation analysis of how various agencies are performing region and channel wise. This also redefined how they access information, analyse real-time data, and manage the overall data pool.
‘The impact is so profound that it is changing the way IndiGo is working,’ says Pankaj. It has changed roles of many employees in the organization. With every department using the BI/MIS reports, productivity of the employees has enhanced across departments. There are around 50 reports that get generated automatically by BIC which go to concerned stakeholders at the defined schedule.
Not only corporate, every airport manager today gets to see his own parameters every morning which they call ‘Good Morning Airport Dashboard’.
What next?
‘Introduction of the business intelligence platform was a challenge and the initial struggle was to come up with successful business case,’ says Pankaj. Now we are moving to the next level where we are dividing the complete analytics into four parts:
- Descriptive Analytics-What
- Diagnostic-Why
- Predictive-Could Be
- Perspective –Should Be
‘Also we are integrating the same with our digital program initiatives, where we are planning to use machine learning logic for various business scenarios, adds Pankaj. The aviation company leverages the tool to hire pilots. The tool identifies who is at what stage (considering that the pilots have to pass 13 trainings), why are delays happening, and much more.
