Field Trip to British Airways: 27 October 1989

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 70

Introduction¶

British Airways staff gave presentations and demonstrations of four of their mainframe computer systems to about 50 members of the Association.

AIMS: Airline Information Management System¶

AIMS has approximately 120 users. It was originally intended for top management only but has extended down the chain. It was a Marketing Department initiative but has since widened its scope. The system has about 30 menus covering revenue, traffic, manpower, timetables, market share and a snapshot summary of BA performance updated daily, weekly and monthly. PF keys are extensively used by expert users for a quick change of menu.

Statistics are presented as absolute values or PF4 converts to graphics. Updating is fast - last weeks performance is ready by Monday morning. All screens are in full colour and the colours are given a common meaning (e.g. green for actual, blue for budget and so on) over all BA systems.

The information is shown at all levels of breakdown of the hierarchy and broken down for remote sites. The Manpower Menu gives access to costs, job breakdown, overtime etc. The Customer service menu includes statistics on punctuality. Marketing includes capacity, future orders, Budgets, Audit reports and 5 Year Plan and so on.

The top 150 managers are given a presentation of half year result figures but none of this information is printed and normal access is limited to a few users. All menus are independently controlled to give various users access to some and not other menus.

The data is collected from many sources including public airline databases (for competitor information) and aviation news. Users can extract information to highlight trends e.g. Japan is a big growth market. The system includes a mailbox for sending messages to other users and for public news items and an on-line phone book.

The system users are charged quarterly based on a proportion of the data storage (130 Megabytes) and support staff (2). Training in the use of the system takes one hour. The data files are made available to other computer users where appropriate.

LOOK (acronym unknown)¶

This is a database of 20 million records, used by 40 Departments.

The system is an historical product database. The product is passenger-kilometres broken down by class, aircraft type, route/legs, revenue, costs, load factors and so on.

LOOK is an enquiry, extract, match and reporting system based on a data dictionary of the fields available. PF1 from any point gives help with the syntax to be used to manipulate the data. The system is entirely full-screen. New fields can be created from user formulae and used in any enquiry. Any suitable output can be shown in graphical form. Screens are full colour. All sessions are logged and enquiries can be saved in order to run them automatically against new data. Extracts can be exported as new files.

MARS: Multi Dimensional Array Spreadsheet¶

This is a mainframe based multi-dimensional spreadsheet. The demonstration was of a Revenue/Budget array of 5 dimensions - passenger revenue by station-pairs (500 flight legs) by 129 sales areas by 5 classes by 12 months. This 7.74 million numbers would require 31 Megabytes to store but it is a sparse array and reduces to 4 Megabytes when techniques are used to remove zeros.

MARS is combined with a flexible editor MEDAL which allows formulae to be input to add calculated fields. During what-if enquiries field changes are distributed immediately to show the effect of the change. The editor allows multi field changes from simple input (e.g. increase dimension by a factor or change sub-totals and distribute back pro-rata). Values can be shown as % or scaled to change field width and can be left justified for input or right justified for display. Changes specified for more than one field can be applied while holding selected fields constant. A graphics package is incorporated. Consolidations are selective and the selection can be held for future use. There are some pre-defined system consolidations.

MARS is a general purpose package/file structure. BA have used up to 11 dimensions. Extracts from the dimensions can be laminated to give new file structures. There is a sort facility. There is a development in hand to capture a command set from the Session Manager and thus allow enquiries to be run in batch mode.

FILLUP (acronym too contrived to be worth remembering)¶

BA spend £500 million a year on aviation fuel and have contracts with many suppliers to deliver the fuel directly to the aircraft. The contract is legally binding to take a given quantity of fuel to within 0.05% of contracted quantity, regardless of price.

The manual schedule for the deliveries to the aircraft for a given timetable used to take 4 days and now takes 2 hours. This will make it possible to reduce the span of the contracts from half-yearly to some shorter period and already makes it possible to react much faster to price changes to optimize the take up from cheaper suppliers while staying within contract constraints. The system produces a daily or on demand schedule for each supplier giving time, position and aircraft type and capacity. It matches smaller suppliers to small aircraft and spreads the suppliers load as evenly as possible over the day to optimise their manpower and tanker usage. This makes for happier suppliers and smoother running of flights.

Conclusion¶

The impression we received was that BA had a good commitment to modelling systems which they have been developing over at least 7 years. They emphasised a concept they called 'branding'. This is a means of helping the users to identify a particular computer service with a name e.g. AIMS, LOOK, MARS, FILLUP. The users associate this with a particular style of facility and support and know where to go for information or to ask for additions. BA also try to standardize certain aspects of the systems such as the significance of colours and certain screen styles and key usages. It was notable that these systems had been refined over the years instead of being replaced. This probably arises from a good basic design together with a supportive computer department.