Manchester Airport Tests Reporting AppManchester Airport Tests Reporting App

Along with lost luggage and coffee and tarmac runoff, an airport generates a whole lot of information, from the average number of passengers on a particular flight, to the weight of the aircraft with those particular passengers on it, to the total those passengers have paid to be on that particular aircraft at that particular time. For the person responsible for setting the prices the airport will charge its airline customers, these numbers are important.

At Manchester Airport in the United Kingdom, that person is Chris Moore. "We have massive, massive amounts of data on every flight," he says -- more than 70 carriers running 200 flights a day. "I have a budget of 140 million [pounds] per year, and if I'm above or below budget, people want to know why."

Those people, of course, are the airport's managers and board of directors. Manchester had been using Crystal Decisions' Crystal Reports to cull and codify all the disparate numbers the airport uses to determine prices. But for presentation to the bosses, the reports just weren't easy enough to comprehend, Moore said.

So in January, Moore’s department -- airport pricing -- decided to ditch Crystal and try out the Business Intelligence Platform of MicroStrategy Inc. The airport’s other departments continue to use Crystal Reports. MicroStrategy remains a kind of pilot scheme, Moore said -- not intending to pun -- but one that he believes is likely to become permanent.

The original source for Manchester’s BI reports is a database called AMOSS, or Airport Management and Operation Support System, which collects, stores and distributes raw information on each outgoing and incoming flight. (AMOSS is also responsible for, among many other things, the arrival and departure schedules that appear on the terminals’ TV screens.) From there the information moves to a manually-built database, its information imported from Microsoft Excel.

The previous application, Moore said, had a user interface almost like a programming language that forced users through a learning curve. "It was quite technical, quite cumbersome. It was old software, basically, and the problem with that was that people didn't see instant results. There was a bit of a learning process to get to know how to use it effectively."

And then there is the ever-important look of the report that's handed to executives, perhaps the most significant reason that Manchester’s pricing department decided to check out MicroStrategy. "The bottom line is, the new system is more user-friendly. It has a graphics interface, so we can present those nice sort of smiley faces and dials and colored bars to our board," Moore said. "This sounds a bit daft, but we have the ability to express all our data as gas gauges, like in an aircraft, a dashboard, and people can instantly see if we're doing better than budgeted or worse than budgeted."

Moore has tried to condense the report onto one page. It shows what the airport has determined to be its seven key performance indicators for each of those approximately 70 carriers. The indicators, generated on a monthly basis, include number of takeoffs and landings per carrier, passengers per flight, number of seats on the plane, load factor, the income the airport earns from each takeoff and landing, and income per passenger. A seventh report, not retrieved by the MicroStrategy software, is the airport’s market share, which it gets from the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority.

MicroStrategy also produces ad hoc reports for Moore’s department, with the ability to drill down into individual flights and routes -- such as the morning Manchester flight to Heathrow, the airport's busiest business route, or Manchester to the Costa del Sol of Spain, the airport's busiest holiday route. Understanding and using this information has become increasingly important to the airport over the last three years, Moore says. The post-9/11 travel falloff, the rise of low-cost carriers (which knock ticket prices down, causing airlines to renegotiate their contracts with the airport) and competition from new, smaller airports -- all of these factors have put a lot of pressure on Manchester's bottom line.

"Airlines can be quite fickle," Moore says. "Sometimes it's hard to influence their behavior no matter how much information you have."

At the moment, only Moore and one or two other colleagues are using the MicroStrategy application, though they have 10 licenses, he said. This would put the cost of the software for Manchester in roughly the quarter-million dollar range, according to Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s chief operating officer.

"We're the guinea pigs," says Moore of the MicroStrategy rollout. "We're seeing how powerful and useful it is, and seeing if we can roll it out elsewhere." The airport also wants to use the BI software in its retail department (MicroStrategy's biggest clients are retailers), to eke as much income as possible from the duty free shops, newsstands, restaurants and car parks that lease space there. Manchester has an unofficial target of six months for that installation.