CIO — When you’ve got a luxury travel service that caters to the likes of Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, it pays to keep tabs on what your customers want.
That need inspired NetJets—a company that provides paying customers "fractional ownership" of private aircraft—to build a custom CRM system that monitors a fleet of more than 500 jets and tracks 2,800 pilots as they make a quarter-million flights this year for patrons who pay millions of dollars for guaranteed anywhere, anytime air travel.
The system, called IntelliJet 2, is the third generation of an application originally written for DOS. But where the old system required considerable manual tracking, the latest version tracks details of every flight and can quickly and automatically adjust as customer needs change, even at the last moment (such as requiring a larger plane, changing destinations or even wanting a particular bottle of wine on the flight). "We’re very flexible in the way that we allow our customers to use our service," says NetJets CIO Mike Midkiff. "We allow them to make changes at any time, up to and even after the departure."
The system combines custom code built around Persistence Software’s Data Services platform, which guarantees that users always have the most up-to-date information, regardless of their location. IntelliJet 2 can even push last-second information to flight crews via BlackBerry pagers. And future upgrades will allow NetJets suppliers, such as limo services and travel agencies, to receive automatic updates to itineraries.
