IBM IMPACT 2010 ConferenceSession ID : BBA-2291A

Agile Decision Management:How British Airways Increased Revenue Opportunities In 18 Months

British Airways Richard BuchananTechnical Consultant

3

Richard Buchanan

Current challenge • Evangelising the benefits of Jrules across BA commercial

areas

4

Presentation Agenda

• The British Airways Vision• What Does The Vision Mean For IT• Path To Effective BRMS in BA• Case Study 1: A New Type Of Upgrade• Case Study 2: Providing Advanced Seat Reservation• Achieved Benefits• Essential Tips• On-going Challenges

5

British Airways

• BA is a world leading brand• Total group turnover for 2007/8 of £8.75 billion• IT department employs over 1000 staff• ba.com is now the largest single revenue channel for BA• ba.com rated as one of the leading industry websites

BA’s Vision is to be the ‘Leading Global Premium Airline’

6

The British Airways Vision

Global Providing consistency of serviceProviding regional propositionsSatisfying local regulations and laws

Premium Knowing our customers and offer what they valueIdentifying when things go wrong and fix them

Airline Improving revenue in a highly competitive industryContinually controlling costsSatisfying continually changing tax and legal rulesBeing 110 % secure in operation and data protectionBeing corporately responsible

To be the ‘Leading Global Premium Airline’

7

For IT The Vision Means …the standard challenges of:

• Improving IT productivity• Flexibility / Extensibility of design• Efficient support and maintenance

• Providing a 24*7 robust reliable service• Providing comprehensive audit and traceability• Providing a secure service

+ the new challenges of:

• Reducing the exploitation time of commercial opportunities• Enabling significant policy shifts quickly and cost effectively• Sophisticated customization and contextualisation capabilities

8

The Role Of JRules BRMS

• Provides a flexible tool for implementing key decisions• Enables fast, safe* changes to business logic• Allows reuse of common business decisions• Allows for default business rules to be overridden

• EG. With regional specific rules, based on customer profile

• Informs and empowers business policy owners• By exposing previously hidden rules

• Reduces testing overhead through• Tools to guide and manage development• Better targeted testing

• * Subject to corporate policy

9

Path To Effective BRMS In BA

• One Message• Publicised Senior Management Buy-In• Establish as a component of the strategic architecture• Embed in your standard delivery lifecycle

• Deliver the basic capability• Hardware and Processes• Operational and development support

• Pool of development environments• Evangelise and Institutionalise

• Be prepared to ‘sell’ the technology to project managers• Publicise successes• Form a Centre Of Excellence• Document clear suitability criteria

Case Study 1A New Type Of Upgrade

11

The ChallengeTo• Provide the customer with a more accessible upgrade option• Improve utilisation of available inventory• Increase revenue from upgrades

HowUse ILOG JRules to:• Model Eligibility and Price calculation criteria• Expose the decision as a web service accepting booking and passenger

data

Key Challenges• Weekly rule changes varying in complexity• Simple, robust, non disruptive deployment strategy• Decoupled from the main ba.com platform• Sufficient performance to support real time online transactions

12

13

Special upgrade offer only available

on the Inbound flight

14

Route

Departure Dates

Cabin Of Travel

Class Of Travel

Type Of Booking

Booking Channel

Passenger Mix

Customer Loyalty Tier

…

15

Orchestrate Types Of Rules

- Not Specific Rules

16

Example Pricing Criteria

Case Study 2Advanced Seat Reservation

18

The ChallengeTo:- Allow passengers to reserve a specific seat up to 360 days before departure- Provide a mechanism to restrict this capability to subsets of the market- Increase revenue by providing a light weight, flexible pricing strategy based on type

of seat

How:Use ILOG JRules to:

- Model Eligibility and Price calculation criteria- Expose the decision as a web service accepting booking and passenger data

Key Challenges• Weekly rule changes varying in complexity• Simple, robust, non disruptive deployment strategy• Decoupled from the main ba.com platform• Sufficient performance to support real time online transactions• Complex structure of the decision data

19

20

Some Free Seats Are Available

21

Preferential Seats Available At A

Charge

Complex Legal Rules Apply To

Exit Seats

22

Orchestrate Types Of Rules

- Not Specific Rules

23

Keywords Indicate Special Passenger

Requirements

24

Achieved Benefits

• 400,000 additional upgrades flown to date• 500,000 new seat reservations to date• Fine grain control allowing specific flights on specific days to be

targeted• Coarse grain control allowing larger ‘chunks’ of the market to be

targeted quickly• Reduction in lost revenue due to finer control during exceptional

commercial scenarios• Allow for new rules to mitigate against ‘features’ in other areas of

the system• Better exploitation through improved visibility of business policy• Improved time to live due to reduced IT involvement

25

Business OwnershipCommercial Pricing Executive

IT Support

Business Policy Owner

Identify RevenueOpportunity

Raise Request

Perfom RuleChange

Review &Confirm Change

CreateBaseline & Test

Deploy(Prelive then Live)

Demand & Yield ForecastsInventory

Existing Rules

RequestDeployment

Deploy to integratedbusiness test area

Including high levelconsistency checks &

integrity tests

26

Faster, Cheaper ChangeBA Change Type

Groups Involved Average Elapsed Time To Live(deployment only)

% Of Rules Changes Covered(76 total changes)

Standard Change

(x3) Business Rule Authors (OR Project Dev Team), IT Rules Support, Change Mgmt

2 days 72 %

Non-Standard Change

(x3) Business Rule Authors (OR Project Dev Team), IT Rules Support, Change Mgmt(sometimes Technology Support)

5 days 16 %

Platform Release

(x9) Business Rule Authors, Project Dev Team, Technical Consultant, IT Rules Support, Technology Support, DBA, Release Mgr, Release Testing Team, Change Mgmt

10 days 7 %

Emergency Change

(x3) Business Rule Authors (OR Project Dev Team), , IT Rules Support, Change Mgmt

0.5 days 5 %

77% of changes implemented under the most efficient change category

27

Change TypesBA Change Type

Criteria

Standard Change Changes supported by Rule Team Server-Content change to an existing rule (condition or action)-Creation of a new rule (subject to initial rule flow design)-Data already passed to rule service (no interface change)

Non-Standard Change

As standard change +Changes not supported by Rule Team Server-Rule flow changes, Business Object Model changes (vocab))-Service interface or other non-backward compatible changes (new service version)

Platform Release Software upgrade / platform configuration changeCommon / Utility module changes (EG. logging framework)JAVA changes (currently only logging framework)Extended test window requiredMultiple projects consolidated into a single release

Emergency Change As standard change – higher priority with support workload.

28

Essential Tips• Establishing a Decision Service Platform

• Present a single united message

• Deliver the platform upfront• Including Hardware, Processes, Organisation, Skills …

• Document patterns and best practice

• Exploiting the Decision Service Platform

• Gain individual policy owner buy-in from the start• Absolutely include them in the development process

• Understand how individual user groups will manipulate the rules• Number of users, frequency and lifecycle of a rule change

• Identify ALL potential data relevant to the decision being implemented

• Identify rule re-use early and design accordingly

• Adopt an effective change process relevant to that project

29

On-Going Challenges

• Enabling Genuine User Empowerment• Providing an efficient user oriented testing solution• Balancing user entry validation against authoring

efficiency• Supporting larger numbers of parallel rule authors

• Distribution & Presentation of rules• Managing ‘Data Rich’ business rules• Re-use of Business rules• Tracking and analysing the results of decisions