| Author: | Chan, Kwok-cheung |
| Title: | Constructing a data warehouse model to enhance customer data access for Cathay Pacific Airway |
| Degree: | M.Sc. |
| Year: | 1998 |
| Subject: | Cathay Pacific Airways Airlines -- China -- Hong Kong Decision support systems Data warehousing Database management Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Computing |
| Pages: | 154 p. : ill. ; 30 cm |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Data will not be useful unless it can be transformed to information. However, only a piece of information will not help much especially in this competitive business world. To fully utilise the data available in an organisation which enables the company to provide better services and products and hence higher revenue, it will probably one of the key objectives of having information system in place in an organisation. In Cathay Pacific Airways, data are disparate and stored under heterogeneous systems. These systems can only support limited analysis and no data integration can be provided (Introduction & Chapter One). The core of the solution is to have a centralized systems using data warehouse technology, which will eventually contain most of the data identified based on users' need (Chapter Two & Three). The data warehouse will enable many new decision support systems to be developed and rolled out to various business units of the airline. The data warehouse involves linking together each individual customer's demographic profile, travel and booking patterns, history of contact with the airline, and revenue, in order to gain an understanding of the factors that drive loyalty and assess the projected future revenue contribution of each passenger, or passenger group. The process of a data warehouse development could be huge by involving in-depth user requirement analysis (Chapter Three) including interviews and meetings with potential users such as route managers, planning managers, analysts etc. and the corresponding personnel who will maintain the data warehouse. With identified data sources, data/database will have to be converted and integrated under the same platform (e.g. Sybase) using data transformation (Chapter Four) technology from data extraction, restructuring, translation to data recasting and data loading. Data transformation is an essential process to ensure that data in the data warehouse are compatible to each others. After having the data refined, translated and loaded into the data warehouse, the most critical step comes next is data modeling (Chapter Five). In this report, both the common and traditional modeling method - Relational Technology and the latest and popular for data warehouse modeling - Dimensional Data Model (Star Join Schema) will be discussed. In view of the user requirements as well as the potential future development in Cathay, the Dimensional Data Modeling has finally been recommended as the data model for setting up the enterprise data warehouse. This new concept has also been viewed as a future trend for developing corporate data warehouse by most of the industry experts. To make the data warehouse more useful to the company, data mining is necessary. Therefore at the end of the report, data mining will be defined and various data mining theories applicable to Cathay will be discussed (Chapter Six). In short, it is expected that the data warehouse will enable the airline to align marketing, sales and service investment with the expected return, and target potentially high-value passengers for recruitment which the current systems with heterogeneous database usage cannot support. The information available will also improve the decision making processes in many departments - specifically Revenue Management, Route teams, Service Delivery, Sales and Marketing and others. Due to the keen competition of the business and the increasing volume of data needed to handle by the airline, this report will also serve as a pilot for data warehousing development in similar industry with a multinational perspective. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
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| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| b14391739.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 4.3 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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