Case Study - Malaysia Airlines Uses Qubole To Enhance Their Customer Experience And Drive Profitability
- 1. As with most airlines in the past few years, Malaysia Airlines faced increasing pressure to improve profitability and cut operational costs to compete with low-cost carriers in the region, all while dealing with the challenges of a rapidly changing and diverse market. With their existing infrastructure, the company realized that many departments were hampered by a lack of data availability — IT was experiencing access, time, and resource bottlenecks that prevented the distribution of vast amounts of data. On average, the team required 48 hours to access data. Furthermore, Malaysia Airlines had historically captured transactional data within silos, creating yet another barrier to the data expediency and flexibility that end users demanded. CASE STUDY Malaysia Airlines Uses Qubole to Enhance Their Customer Experience and Drive Profitability 1 About Malaysia Airlines Berhad Malaysia Airlines Berhad (MAB), branded as Malaysia Airlines, is the national carrier of Malaysia. Founded in 1947 as Malayan Airways, the company currently serves more than 60 destinations across Southeast Asia, North and South Asia, the Middle East, Australasia, and Europe. Exploring the Business Problem Aspiring to a Data-Driven Future Company leaders sought to transform Malaysia Airlines into a fully data-driven organization able to more effectively support enterprise-wide goals. The company’s ability to deliver on two key objectives to return to profitability by 2019 and to enhance the traveler experience through personalization hung on the success of their digital transformation. In conjunction with shifting to a new, cloud-based infrastructure, executives turned to Qubole to help close the data accessibility gap. Streamlining Data Processing in the Cloud Malaysia Airlines undertook an internal restructuring project for the first stage of their data-driven initiative. To improve flexibility and scalability, IT migrated all workloads to Microsoft Azure and revamped core IT systems including their reservations system, website, and mobile application. By incorporating Qubole as a key layer of this new infrastructure, the company increased its data processing and analytics capabilities and reduced data ingestion time by more than 90 percent. Customer-facing personnel gained complete visibility of passenger reservations information in less than 20 minutes, down from approximately six hours. The business impact has been significant, as Malaysia Airlines now has a near real-time dynamic pricing process.
- 2. 2 Qubole is able to help us to process the data within a 15-minute time frame rather than multiple days so that we can distribute the information to end users less than 20 minutes after the data has been received.” “ Ng Kim Hoe Head, IT Strategy and Architecture Addressing Data Inaccessibility Under their previous technology stack, teams at Malaysia Airlines had to wait days to access data, and departments frequently waited even longer for access and insights to be delivered. The company’s new cloud-based infrastructure offers a much faster data turnaround based on Qubole, which provides a scalable platform with adaptive processing power to quickly prepare data for analytics, machine learning, or artificial intelligence uses. Now the entire organization can access data via their tool of choice, available within two hours a drastic improvement from the previous duration of two days. Increasing cross-departmental availability of data led to the realization of new revenue-driving projects and personalization features such as: • Delivering personalized packages on the basis of passengers’ past purchase patterns and routes traveled • Improving financial visibility into cost, price, and revenue levers • Optimizing schedule development and fleet assignment • Sending timely, personalized offers to increase redemption • Offering customized pricing on ancillaries such as upgrades, leg room, and meals Increasing Cost Efficiency Building a Culture of Big Data In support of their cost-savings initiative, Malaysia Airlines looked for more affordable solutions to control analytics project and cloud maintenance costs. Qubole’s timely delivery of analytics led to millions in savings compared to the existing system. In addition, the switch to Azure and Qubole allowed IT to redistribute workloads so that a single administrator manages the big data project. The IT team was able to enact all of these changes with zero investments in retraining, resolving executive concerns about spiraling costs. Looking to the future, the company plans to continue leveraging big data to enhance operations and profitability. Two top-of-mind areas of focus are building out their cloud environment and driving operational efficiencies, both of which will help Malaysia Airlines to optimize data processing and IT operations costs. As the company moves forward in its digital transformation journey, Qubole supports the data team in managing and scaling new and more complex workloads in a cost-effective and resource-friendly way. CASE STUDY
- 3. CASE STUDY The Business Value of Qubole for Malaysia Airlines Powerful analytics deliver personalized customer experience while lowering costs Reduced infrastructure costs • Saved thousands on analytics spend by leveraging Qubole • Reduced big data project oversight to a single administrator Timely data availability for analytics • Business users can access data within 2 hours instead of 2 days • Decreased data ingestion time by more than 90% • Data now made available within 20 minutes of receipt About Qubole Qubole is revolutionizing the way companies activate their data — the process of putting data into active use across their organizations. With Qubole’s cloud-native big data platform, companies exponentially activate petabytes of data faster, for everyone and any use case, while continuously lowering costs. Qubole overcomes the challenges of expanding users, use cases, and variety and volume of data while constrained by limited budgets and a global shortage of big data skills. Qubole offers the only platform that delivers freedom of choice, eliminating legacy lock in — use any engine, any tool, and any cloud to match your company’s needs. Qubole investors include CRV, Harmony Partners, IVP, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Singtel Innov8. For more information visit www.qubole.com. FOR MORE INFORMATION Contact: Try Qubole for Free: [email protected] https://www.qubole.com/products/pricing/ 469 El Camino Real, Suite 205 Santa Clara, CA 95050 (855) 423-6674 | [email protected] WWW.QUBOLE.COM Before we partnered with Qubole, we had to wait a minimum of 48 hours to access our data, and that was not sustainable in our pursuit of profitability.” “ Abdul Rahman Mohamed Head of Information Technology