Peeter Kivestu Director Global Industry Solutions Travel, Transport & Government, Teradata

AM: What does Teradata do and what is enterprise data warehousing (EDW)?

Kivestu: Teradata provides integrated, optimized and extensible technology for a single application-neutral repository of your current and historical data, creating the framework of the business intelligence architecture.

AM: Can you please rephrase that in layman’s terms?

Kivestu: This is an information intensive business. We help people who choose to compete on the basis of information. It doesn’t matter if you are in the cockpit or the hangar. Data warehousing gives the greatest number of people access to business intelligence as possible. There are organizational boundaries. Teradata helps companies make data accessible across the boundaries. The best and simplest way to do that is data warehousing. We’re not talking about averages. We’re talking about what happened yesterday. It can be difficult to get at the info you need. How am I going to get at it? Data warehousing.

AM: Like a hub for information from all sources in the business?

Kivestu: Yes, one place. Take FEDEX; they send all packages to Memphis. It is the most efficient way to distribute across the country and world. The most efficient way to find information is data warehousing. It works. We built an architecture that makes it feasible to get at the information you need quickly. It is scalable and adding more information doesn’t require the hub to be reorganized, just add processors. Data warehousing is all we do. We contribute to speed of growth

AM; Why is this process relevant to the airline business?

Kivestu: Airlines have multiple networks. Passenger info is on one network. The maintenance base is connected to a different network. Ground services to another. If you are trying to understand how one area impacts the others, you need integrated data. For example, airlines maintenance shops like Delta TechOps or Continental want to improve component reliability. They need data. They wanted to find out "Why over the long haul do we have this kind of delay?" Crews write up a discrepancy, line maintenance service checks and findings in the shop, these all create pieces of information — and line maintenance is different than the shop. So they wanted to see if a small piece part was actually causing a delay and how many passengers were impacted. We are able to help answer reliability questions with facts. Airlines make reliability improvement business cases that consume millions of dollars. This data can help businesses make informed decisions, and then close the loop to make sure the results are achieved. There are lots of applications for this data: in the brake shop, engine shop, and parts/logistics.

AM: Can EDW help carriers with supply chain concerns?

Kivestu: Maintenance environment is very constrained, both operationally and financially. Data warehousing can help answer questions about specific parts and inventory, but it is helpful to think about the different kinds of questions. There are the "what" questions, such as how many parts do we have, where are they, and when can they be made available — these are questions that need to be answered from legacy or ERP systems; then there are the "why" questions which arise because of this highly constrained environment. For example, do I really need this many parts, when will I run out of parts again? When forecasting future parts requirements based on past usage, it is helpful to distinguish between unscheduled removals and those inventory draws related to supporting, say, part modification programs. EDW is also the place to integrate data from multiple systems, for example schedule or flight operations systems, or labor or other financial data. If you are analyzing the impact of the supply chain on operations dependability, you want to be able to directly measure the nature and cost of delays, cancellations, passengers inconvenienced, aircraft downtime, etc. With EDW you can find the answers to these questions.

AM: Can EDW marry data from different sources that comes in different formats?

Kivestu: Our EDW is flexible to take data any way it comes. Outsourcing is one reason a company needs to have a way to manage data. Information flow back and forth between companies is one reason why you may need a capability to manage information that won’t choke on the formats and that stores data anyway it’s created. This allows you to catch mistakes. For example, to make sure you don’t pay for fuel you never got or parts charged to the wrong aircraft. But until you have all the data, and make it fit together you don’t know. In reality, second order questions lead to third order questions you would never think of asking until you had the facts.