Impact Of IT On Qantas Airlines: A Case Study

Analysis

Qantas Airlines is one of the oldest airline in the world founded in 1920. It runs both international and domestic flights. It primarily manages its operations from Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane Airport. Jetstar Airways, which is one of the low cost airlines, also comes under Qantas group. It is the largest airline by fleet size and international destinations. It is quite evident from the size of the Qantas Airlines that operations that it generates at every day level will be very huge and almost impossible to manage without using technology.

If anyone have experience of traveling through Qantas, he is aware that how person can check in in the flight via mobile phones. QR code is generated which will be then used throughout. All these technologies are possible by use of Information technology. The purpose of this case study is to analyze the Qantas airlines and its operation and why IT is important for its survivals. It also discusses about the key concepts related to IT like risk management and security management.

Does Qantas Airways need IT?

• If anyone browse through the QANTAS airlines (https://www.qantas.com/in/en.html), he/she will be amazed by the services that Qantas provides. Apart from the transportation, it provides activities for tourists at various destinations, manage car bookings, manage hotel bookings, manage frequent flyer program, and collaborate with many partners for loyalty points and many other things. Effective management of so many services at all the location of the world can only be possible though the IT. There is no doubt that Qantas Airlines need IT, in fact it needs the best of technology to keep the pace with its services (Culler, & ANderson, 2016).
• As the business scale is increasing and people are traveling more for business as well as leisure purposes, there is definitely a need to serve more passengers with better services and that will be possible only by using IT infrastructure.
• Also, in this age of digitalization, it also has to be very active on social media to connect with its customers and get the traction. Not only this, by storing cookies from the systems that are visiting its websites, it can also show the appropriate advertisements to them on various other sites to increase the sales (Yao, Yuan, Qian, & Li, 2015).
• Many people who are planning to travel generally looks for the end to end services which means hotel and accommodation planning, local sight-seeing planning and thus Qantas also has to collaborate with the various other vendors to provide its customers more unified and better experience. All this needs Information technology.

• Just imagine for a moment that customer calls at Qantas customer care to know the status of flight and if its scheduled on a right time, how does the customer care team will determine this in a fraction of seconds without using the technology. They cannot tell their customer that they will get back to them after checking with air controller team in this age of speed and competition. The only way is to use the information technology and by using the interface that provides them with the data of Air traffic controller and gives them real time information about all the flights. This is 1 example of why Qantas needs survival (Rasolofo, & Savoy, 2003).
• People are booking flights from overall the world. They need to see the available seats in a particular flight in order to book. Without the IT systems, it is difficult for the company to show the real time seat availability. And thus, IT systems are needed for the Global airlines like Qantas airlines.
• Apart from it, this is the age of social media and organization need to have IT systems for digital marketing and all such online campaigns. Apart from it, organization cannot spend too much time in focusing on their operations which are not adding value but to keep the records and hence automation is the need of the hour and IT automates the business processes so that the businesses can focuses on their core competency rather than spending too much time on operational things.

There are many things to implement the IT systems in Qantas. First, Qantas has to detailed out its business processes and then check the feasible software/AIS systems/ERP systems that can provide solution to its requirements and automate the business processes. Once software selection is finalized, hardware selection needs to be done. Organization needs to decides if its choses on premises systems or cloud systems (Law, & Leung, 2000). Once the hardware and software are finalized, below are the other things that also needs to be planned:

• Timeline, scope and key resources and cost of the project
• Selection of consulting partner like Deloitte, Accenture to implement the software systems
• Risk identification and risk mitigation strategy
• Training needs of the people
• Testing strategy
• Go live strategy whether it has to phased wise approach or big bang approach. In phase wise, company can go live in 1 country and then roll out the new systems in other locations while in Big bang approach, all offices go live in 1 shot, there is more risk but less cost involved in big bang strategy.

How Qantas can use IT for its employees: Employees can see the real time information about the flight statutes, seat availability, ongoing discounts and this helps the customers. Also, each organization has workflows where some processes needs approvals. Such approvals can be made online and this expedite the processes. Employees can manage their leave, time hours, insurance information and other company provided perks.

How Qantas can use IT for its customers: Customers can see the status of their flights online without depending on customer care. This will save the time for customers as well as for the company as company can reduce its expenditure on its customer care. Customers can checkin from the comfort of their home and no need to understand queues. Customers can redeem their loyalty points from other airlines and many more. Customers can book the hotels, taxi through the preferred vendor of Qantas on its website.  

• IT helps the organization to reduce its expenditure on customer care as consumers can see the information, status, seat availability by themselves on the mobile app
• IT helps the company to automate business processes by using QR codes which will increase the efficiency of the processes.
• IT helps the company to cross sell more services like Hotel booking, Taxi booking, and sight-seeing packages by collaborating with local vendors and showing them on its website.
• IT will help the company to leverage digital marketing and thus in reaching to more number of customers which will eventually be converted to sales.

• WannaCry malware has become famous very recently as it attacked on multiple businesses worldwide and demanding a ransom for unlocking the systems. NHS hospitals, UK are very badly attacked by this malware and there is risk of data theft for hundreds of customers, suppliers and employee private data. Such kind of risks IT bring into the businesses because huge amount of data is maintained and residing on the software. As a result, Company has to be very proactive and think ahead of attackers in securing its systems as well as always apply the latest updates, patches as released by the software vendor.  
• Another risk is related to compliance issue. Some geographies have rules like that the local data of employees, suppliers should not go outside the country and in this age of cloud computing, software companies have their back up servers in multiple geographies to ensure that calamity at 1 geography don’t impact the backup. In such cases, landing into compliance issues and paying penalty may be another risk and company has to ensure that all the Business laws are honored by it.

Business can use the cloud systems for Infrastructure, platform and software as a service and in such cases, all the responsibility of maintaining and monitoring the servers against any attacks, ensuring updates are installed in time are owned by the software vendor. In case business choose to go for on premise systems, they need to have dedicated IT team consisting of database administrators, security experts who could ensure the Maintenance of IT systems.

Conclusion 

In this case study, IT systems are studies with respect to Qantas airways. While IT systems were considered as enablers sometime back, they are seen as differentiators in this age of cloud computing and digital revolution. There is no doubt that Qantas needs IT systems, in fact they are necessary for its survival and managing its scale of operations at a global level. Thus, IT invite certain risks but still the benefits provided by IT are far more and justifiable and company can have a strategy to mitigate the risks.

References

Law, R., & Leung, R. (2000). A study of airlines’ online reservation services on the Internet. Journal of Travel Research, 39(2), 202-211.

Cui, Q., Wei, Y. M., Yu, C. L., & Li, Y. (2016). Measuring the energy efficiency for airlines under the pressure of being included into the EU ETS. Journal of Advanced Transportation.

Culler, D. E., & Anderson, N. D. (2016). A Paradigm Shift towards Personalized and Scalable Product Development and Lifecycle Management Systems in the Aerospace Industry. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Mechanical, Aerospace, Industrial, Mechatronic and Manufacturing Engineering, 10(4), 726-734.

Rasolofo, Y., & Savoy, J. (2003, April). Term proximity scoring for keyword-based retrieval systems. In European Conference on Information Retrieval (pp. 207-218). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Yao, B., Yuan, H., Qian, Y., & Li, L. (2015, June). On exploring airline service features from massive online review. In Service Systems and Service Management (ICSSSM), 2015 12th International Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE.