Empowering Pricing & Revenue Management with Actionable Data

A highly experienced Pricing & Revenue Management department was unable to capitalize on revenue opportunities because they couldn’t move from raw data to actionable insights fast enough to make an impact. Although they were armed with terabytes of data and sophisticated business intelligence and statistical tools, extensive manual effort was required for them to combine historical and forward-looking bookings with both sold and flown revenue sources. The department was spending an excessive amount of time stitching data together with fragile, nightly processes on end-user desktops. At least once a week, a part of these processes would fail, leaving revenue managers without critical daily reporting and diverting data science resources from analytics to fixing errors and rebuilding reports. Meanwhile, IT support that could be allocated to solving these tactical issues was limited due to enterprise focus on multi-year-long data infrastructure and architecture projects.

What Does Your Team Spend More Time Doing: Managing Data or Acting on It?

BKS Consulting worked closely with the client’s PRM Intelligence team to develop a consistent, unified data model across inventory, forecasting, and sales data. BKS also built new automated ETL to replace problematic desktop processes, and all available historical data was reprocessed to deliver a completely cleansed and unified data layer. The data layer was automated with multiple intra-day updates based on source availability, keeping reports fresh and providing analysts with direct access to any and all underlying data for ad-hoc, deep-dive investigation. BKS consultants comprehensively documented each solution so IT could provide ongoing support and PRM leaders could easily onboard new team members.

In four months, the airline accelerated its PRM data strategy. By sunsetting dozens of local user databases and moving to a unified Commercial Data Layer, they gained access to higher quality insights that were previously unavailable. The PRM Intelligence team could now innovate, frequently adjusting seasonality profiles and other forecasting inputs to capitalize on new optimization strategies. Forecasting became more accurate. The ability to monitor forecast accuracy became sharper. Through organizational efficiencies and improved revenue optimization, the client realized a 9.5x return on its initial four-month pilot investment in BKS Consulting.

An Accelerated Solution. A More Valuable Team.

Eighteen months later, the client’s PRM Intelligence team has grown more valuable to the airline, and with that value has come additional investment. A data science team that started with only a manager and a few analysts is now a team of twelve and growing. Since the original data layer project, BKS Consulting and the client have deployed multiple rapid enhancements: they’ve added new sources like market share and competitive pricing data, and they’ve integrated the Commercial Data Layer with other data warehouse subject areas such as Loyalty and Operations.

All of these enhancements and integrations were designed and deployed in a matter of months, not years. In the end, BKS not only accelerated the client’s ability to act on their data but also helped set a new standard for the speed at which the company could expect future commercial BI solutions to be mobilized.