The various sectors of the transportation industry are faced with many challenges. For example, the airline industry faces both strategic and tactical challenges ranging from soaring costs, international competition pressures, to IT challenges related to mergers and alliances.  The collection, analysis and storage of huge amounts of data is a huge challenge to an industry that is reliant on high levels of customer satisfaction for its profits. The inherent infrastructure itself poses challenges, with most prime location facilities and slots now taken and many of the desirable aircraft models on backorder. The Irus Group works with companies in this and other transportation sectors to help them turn their large amounts of data into information and information into knowledge to help them make better business decisions.

Our solutions help transportation companies more effectively integrate their corporate performance management solutions with their business intelligence solutions. We have helped our clients figure out not only the passenger/receivable side of the business, but the vendor/payable side as well. We have helped some of the industry’s most successful companies streamline their financial operations significantly.

We help our Transportation clients answer questions such as:

• Do we know who our most profitable business and leisure customers are?
• Have we formed the right alliances with the right partners?
• Are we budgeting enough for our major programs to ensure that we meet our profitability goals?
• Is our product mix performing per our forecasts?

The Market’s Need for Integrated BI and CPM

The wealth of challenges facing the sectors in this market highlights the need for integrated business intelligence and corporate performance management solutions that can help a company turn its data into information and its information into knowledge in order to make better business decisions. Some of the critical factors where better use of business intelligence might lead to better decisions need to be made might be around:

• Improving efficiency
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Controlling costs
• Optimizing operations
• Providing information to internal customer groups

The Oracle and other vendor solutions that we work with support the three dimensions of effective governance for transportation companies:

• Visibility: business information is timely, relevant, accurate and available throughout the enterprise
• Control: implement strategies, enforce policies and detect and correct exceptions and violations before they spiral out of control
• Efficiency: visibility and control without adding significantly to the administrative overhead

The Irus Group has a clear understanding of the business challenges our customers face and why this is important to them. For our transportation and other commercial customers, it’s about revenue and profit growth.  To help them achieve this, we do the following:

• Monitor key metrics that affect pipeline, close rate, and revenue performance
• Measure sales against pricing, geographies, competitors, channels, and customer demographics
• Assess customer value over time and segment the customer base for targeted marketing and intelligent cross-sell and up-sell execution
• Track key financial indicators from units across the business
• Improve budgeting, planning, and forecasting through structured methodologies and common analytic framework
• Increase revenue cycle efficiency and optimize quote-to-payment processes
• Build flexible "what-if" models through proactive, predictive analytics