Empire Airlines Takes Off with Turnkey BI Appliance

Customer Profile

Organization Empire Airlines is a passenger and cargo airline based in Hayden, Idaho that operates more than 120 scheduled cargo flights a day in 18 states and Canada.

Empire Airlines

The Challenge Find a powerful, yet affordable BI and analytics environment designed to meet the needs of small to midsize service businesses. The Strategy Supplement an Excel-based reporting Empire Airlines Takes Off With Turnkey BI environment with a turnkey BI appliance that includes interactive reports and Appliance dashboards, giving employees control over their data, with proactive alerts to Scale Computing’s Analytics Appliance Combines flag important developments within their purview. WebFOCUS BUE Software With HC3 Virtualization Platform The Results Fresh, relevant, real-time data to executives, As Empire Airlines grew and its operation became more complex, senior managers managers, and operations-level personnel – saw the need to acquire a software platform for business intelligence (BI), analytics, in a form that they can act on immediately and reporting. Simply put, Empire Airlines wanted more than BI. The ideal product – with minimal involvement by IT would be a hardware platform that could support several virtual environments, professionals. including BI and analytics, e-mail, a domain controller, and a terminal server to Information Builders Solution support workers at remote locations. Scale Analytics Appliance built with Scale HC3 virtualization platform and WebFOCUS The Idaho-based company also owns Empire Aerospace, which provides heavy Business User Edition. maintenance services to the airline industry, and Empire Unmanned, which provides unmanned aerial surveillance and analysis services for agriculture and other industries. The company provides air cargo services in 18 states and operates an inter-island passenger service for Hawaiian Airlines.

One of Empire Airlines first inquiries was with Scale Computing. Melanie Ellingson, Information Builders helps director of IT at Empire Airlines, liked Scale’s HC3 Virtualization Platform, a “datacenter- organizations transform data into in-a-box” with server, storage and virtualization integrated into a single appliance. business value. Our business Best of all, the appliance included WebFOCUS Business User Edition. intelligence, integration, and data integrity solutions enable smarter Ellingson and her colleagues evaluated all the leading BI tools, but she determined decision-making, strengthen that none of them were quite right for her organization. “We knew BI would customer relationships, improve streamline our operations, but we had a hard time finding something that our small performance, and drive growth. company of 350 employees could relate to,” she explains. “We looked at quite a few vendors, but their enterprise solutions were too big and expensive for us.”

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According to Ellingson, the partnership between Scale Computing and Information Builders created the perfect analytics solution. “The appliance was easy to set up and use right away and the installation was a breeze, ” she noted. “They gave us an image that we installed directly on the device. The support and training were great, along with the learning tools they provided. Having our data on premises is important for us and this new appliance helped make that a reality.”

WebFOCUS for Real-Time Status Alerts Empire Airlines’s BI footprint is expanding quickly as Ellingson and her team discover all the things the Analytics Appliance can do. For the inter-island flights that Empire Airlines operates in Hawaii, it generates reports about flight delays, cancellations, and mechanical issues. “Previously we received e-mail messages about the expected length of each delay and which aircraft were involved,” Ellingson recalls. “The Analytics Appliance delivers additional information to key individuals.”

Some of this data populates dashboards and historical reports, with actions triggered by automatic alerts. “The Analytics Appliance has powerful alerting capabilities that we plan to use extensively going forward,” she says. “It has become an important reporting program for monitoring our high-level KPIs.”

WebFOCUS to Enhance Microsoft Excel Empire Airlines services its fleet at a maintenance repair overhaul (MRO) facility in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. This facility also service planes for other airlines. Previously Empire Airlines used Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to orchestrate many aspects of its MRO contracts – everything from performing structural work to creating composites to ordering parts and scheduling inspections. Now Empire Airlines is importing this data into the Analytics Appliance to give workers an expanded set of capabilities. “The support and training were great, along with the “Planes are often here for six to eight weeks for MRO contracts,” says Ellingson. “These are huge learning tools they provided. jobs with hundreds of parts and thousands of lines on a work order. The Analytics Appliance Having our data on premises uses HTML5 to package the data in an interactive format, complete with charts and graphs and is important for us and this visualizations.” new appliance helped make that a reality.” HTML5 is the engine of WebFOCUS Active Technology, a unique form of BI that combines data and interactive controls into self-contained HTML files. Active Technology reports, charts, and Melanie Ellingson Director of IT dashboards deliver analytic capabilities in a completely portable and disconnected environment. Empire Airlines Also referred to as In-Document Analytics, it provides portable BI in standard documents that are easy to distribute.

Users can slice, dice, and filter the data to get what they need. Instead of having to peruse an Excel spreadsheet to stay abreast of a complex job, authorized personnel can click, sort, summarize, and visualize the data by client, plane, work order, timeframe, part, and many other variables. Empire Airlines plans to create customer-facing applications to allow clients to directly monitor the work being done on their aircraft. “The Analytics Appliance makes it easy to appropriate all the work we have put into our Excel spreadsheets,” Ellingson explains. “We drill into the data to see the underlying detail. We considered Microsoft BI for this purpose, but the Analytics Appliance is much easier, and the performance is exceptional. Both programs hit the SQL Server database, but the appliance is much quicker than Excel,” she adds. “The Analytics Appliance, and its embedded instance Applause for Predictive Analytics of WebFOCUS Business User Ultimately, Empire Airlines plans to use the MRO data not only to examine historical trends, but Edition, has everything also to look ahead to the future. Its goal is to create predictive analytics that will allow managers we need for reporting, BI, to see potential problems and forecast important developments, from estimating maintenance and analytics. We are very requirements to predicting parts shortages. “We need to look ahead to potential problems so we pleased with what we have can change course when needed,” Ellingson says. “The Analytics Appliance helps us concentrate been able to accomplish in a resources in the areas that need attention.” short period of time. Empire Air now has one set of BI Empire Airlines is also using the Analytics Appliance to create HR dashboards that help with tools to analyze all types of recruiting – an important function during occasional pilot shortages. Dashboards reveal the data.” number of applications Empire Airlines receives from pilots, broken down by location and qualifications. “Who have we replied to, how many interviews have we set up, and what are the Melanie Ellingson Director of IT trends going forward?” Ellingson says. “We use the dashboard to monitor recruiting and retention Empire Airlines statistics as we grow the company.”

Analyzing All Types of Data Ellingson believes WebFOCUS will become increasingly important for analyzing data stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other cloud sources, including a training system that tracks the skills and certifications of maintenance personnel and a scheduling system for pilots. “We tend to be very efficient in our IT purchases,” Ellingson concludes. “The Analytics Appliance, and its embedded instance of WebFOCUS Business User Edition, has everything we need for reporting, BI, and analytics. We are very pleased with what we have been able to accomplish in a short period of time. Empire Airlines now has one set of BI tools to analyze all types of data.

The Scale Analytics Appliance

The Scale Analytics Appliance combines WebFOCUS Business User Edition software from Information Builders with Scale Computing’s HC3 virtualization platform to address the broadest range of business intelligence and analytic needs – from data preparation and integration to self-service reporting and data discovery. Customer Profile

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