Continental's desire to improve its ranking in a competitive industry drove it to build a real-time EDW. When the EDW was first being developed in 1998, its initial purpose was to bring data from some 27 systems together so that the company could more accurately forecast revenue. Since then, the company has used it to determine if customer loyalty initiatives really affect revenue. By testing a sample of 30,000 customers who experienced delays, Continental found that those individuals to whom the airline sent a letter of apology and some sort of compensation (either in the form of a free cocktail on their next flight or extra frequent flier miles) forgot the event and didn't hold a grudge. In fact, Continental says that revenue from those passengers who received letters jumped 8 percent.

With their strategic objectives in mind, these companies then proceeded to identify the existing business processes that they'd need to change, and to develop new ones in order to better exploit their customer and enterprise data.

Identify the customer needs
To get value out of your back-end data, you have to clearly explain to employees how they can use the information and how it will make their jobs easier.

When members of Continental's data warehousing staff first approached gate agents with freshly minted info on the company's most valuable customers, the airport staffers didn't understand how they could use this information, and the data warehousing staff didn't know what to tell them. So after doing some research, the data warehousing staff went back to the drawing board armed with new insights about the work the gate agents do and the pressures they're under.

Using operational and customer data in the EDW, the data warehousing team developed a solution to one of the biggest headaches gate agents face: accommodating passengers inconvenienced by a cancellation or delay. The team created a program that automates the rebooking process. Before the program was developed, gate agents had to figure out on their own how to reroute passengers. Now, when a cancellation or delay occurs, the system does the work for them. For example, when the system identifies a high-value customer whose flight has been cancelled, the gate agent may decide to put that traveler on a competitor's flight just to make the individual happy and to get him on his way as fast as possible.

Currently, Continental is trying to use customer and operational data in the EDW to come up with a way for flight attendants to get information about baggage that's been mislaid and to inform passengers while they're still on the plane that their luggage has gone astray. The airline thinks being proactive will mitigate passengers' annoyance over their bags being lost. If flight attendants have a way to tell an individual not to bother going to baggage claim and to take the person's address so that Continental can send her suitcase when it arrives, the airline will save that person the time and frustration associated with filing a claim for lost luggage.