Global Business Air Carrier: Analytics Initiative

For more than a century, this large logistics and transportation organization has evolved to meet the demands of changing times while maintaining its commitment to service.

The organization has faced an unprecedented environment in recent years. Declining volumes and revenues, new competitors and a global economic recession have meant rethinking how it works, from cost-cutting measures to revenue-generating programs. This trusted institution has a vision for the future—focusing on customers, using its strengths for improvement and driving change across the business.

The organization relies on private air carriers to meet its international shipping requirements to serve individuals and businesses. Service delivery performance failures among these air carriers impacted service quality. Service-level agreements around outbound deliveries had degraded to 40 percent on-time delivery. The organization knew that it must address this problem and drive better performance among participating carriers.

The air carrier took an innovative approach to this challenge, calling on Accenture to help drive improvements. Accenture was well suited to the initiative because we brought global industry experience and familiarity with the organization’s systems, processes and culture from a decade of collaboration.

Moving from reactive to predictive problem solving, the team began an analytics initiative to analyze carrier performance data and develop carrier scorecards. Grading performance gave the organization and carriers valuable new insights. As a result, outbound on-time performance rose to 80 percent.

To build on this achievement, the organization looked to Accenture for guidance to avoid carrier performance plateaus with continued enhancements.

With an understanding of the organization’s business and operational challenges, Accenture began another analytics initiative focusing on outbound deliveries for its global alliances. The goal was to identify statistically proven service performance drivers by separating failures from non-failures and identify opportunities where air carriers were most likely to fail on the highest volumes of deliveries.

The Accenture team drew on its familiarity with the organization’s systems to collect the carrier data, and from Accenture’s capabilities in analytics and logistics to apply the appropriate advanced analytic techniques to the business of results.

The analysis findings led to actionable insights by:

• Creating a discrete focus.
• Pinpointing specific drivers.
• Driving performance outcomes.

Two months after this initiative had begun, Accenture shared its initial findings with the client. And just five months after the organization shared the insights with the carriers, outbound on-time performance reached 80 percent, an all-time high.

Beyond this significant improvement of service to its important overseas customers, the program also helped the organization improve operations by:

• Gaining unprecedented visibility into carrier process performance.

• Helping improve decision-making by providing actionable, fact-based insights tied to specific strategic metrics.

• Lowering risk of unmet service-level agreements with carriers to help reduce financial risk.

• Targeting specific corrective actions for carriers to help improve efficiency and service.

• Building stronger business relationships with carriers based on information sharing and collaboration that can improve outcomes for all parties.

The results of the global business air carrier analytics initiative are fueling additional initiatives with the organization, including applying advanced analytics techniques to its domestic operations with a focus on maritime and highway routes.