Continental Airlines BI Case Study

As per figure 1 above Data warehouses and data marts first appeared to provide a centralized system for accessing data and making tactical decisions. Such systems were considered as to fall under the classification of BI. The main goal of a business intelligence system is to support the decision making process. A BI system can be defined as a process of turning data first into information and then into knowledge‘(Golfarelli, Rizzi, & Cella, 2004, p.1). A BI system provides managers and executives with in-depth information and a systematic understanding of an organization‘s operations (Thierauf, 2001). BI systems helps in identifying problems encountered in any project and provides an analysis related to any variant in the project (Olszak & Ziemba, 2006).

A 2006 report by Davis (2006) discussed a case study of Continental Airlines, which implemented a BI system to optimize their business decisions and processes. The main problem faced by the company was the information flow between the different departments in the organization. There was no specific system to keep track of historical data and analyse them. Continental Airlines required a system to consolidate the data from different departments at a higher level, which would make accurate information available throughout the organization.

In his research, Singh shows that data mining tools are capable of discovering patterns in data in few hours those expert human quantitative analysts might not find in years of work to help make decisions in a complex supply chain management, customer relationship management collect and analyse transaction records continuously. It is focused mainly on automated methods for extracting patterns or models from