How data drives Air Canada’s cargo business

Data-driven business

A data strategy is often driven from the top down as a transformational initiative, as well as from the bottom up to identify the low-hanging fruit or “quick wins” that have an immediate business benefit.

“Since the start of this year, my mandate has been to focus on insights and linking with Salesforce,” says Riboulet. “But we also want to provide tactical solutions for the business. These are smaller-scale projects that have an impact on the business.”

For instance, within the cargo business, it is useful to project volumes in terms of kilograms of cargo by the hour, which can be used to derive an estimate of the manpower required. “In our warehouse in Toronto, we handle freight and need to understand how much is coming in and how many staff will be needed, based on historical data,” he says. “It didn’t take long to build the model. We then use BI tools to present the information.”

“In our warehouse in Toronto, we handle freight and need to understand how much is coming in and how many staff will be needed, based on historical data. It didn’t take long to build the model. We then use BI tools to present the information”

Herve Riboulet, Air Canada

Discussing how data is being integrated with the company’s Salesforce CRM system, Riboulet says it wants to give salespeople the right information at the right time. “They don’t need to know about the last 50 shipments. They just need to know which ones went wrong or where there is more opportunity, without having to go through all the data,” he says.

Air Canada is looking at using Mulesoft’s application processing infrastructure (API) management tools for integration, along with Snowflake’s data exchange product, which offers an external data marketplace to enable other companies using Snowflake to share data.

For business intelligence, the airline has been a long-term user of WebFocus from Tibco. It also uses Microsoft PowerBI. Riboulet’s reason for using two BI platforms is because  “they complement each other”, each having different functions it finds useful.

For example, WebFocus offers Air Canada the ability to push out reports via email, a feature not available in PowerBI. Riboulet says this is useful for people working in operations, who may only have access to their phone and need to see embedded reports. Also, the data team noticed that many business users require similar datasets and attributes, which can be pulled together into pre-built reports.

The company also uses the data grid feature in WebFocus to aggregate data in a way that can easily be customised by users and can be exported to Microsoft Excel. It has also deployed WebFocus Hyperstage, as a staging area for data, to avoid direct access to its on-premise database systems.

Riboulet views the data team at Air Canada Cargo as internal consultants who discuss data requirements with businesspeople. “It is important to understand the business goals,” he says. “If we identify gaps, we can add another field or, depending on the gap, build a new report.

To support its new e-commerce offering, for instance, one of the bigger challenges the data team needed to figure out was how to integrate with retailers that require information such as shipping updates and delivery dates for their customers.

But Riboulet also believes there are times when the value a given dataset delivers to the business may not be large enough to justify its use. As an example, he says weather patterns for a given route may mean a flight takes 30 minutes longer. The consideration is whether to pull in that data and what extra value that variable brings. While it may make the data model for estimating delivery times a bit better, the question is whether this improvement is marginal, given all the other factors at play.