How corporate Australia battles information overload

By David Braue, ZDNet Australia

26 June 2006 02:48 PM

Tags: storage area network, cms, government, european union, emc, jetstar, case study, cio

	Introduction
	Jetstar CIO Stephen Tame explains why information management is critical to the airline.
	Family Court of Australia Information management officer Paul Taylor recounts the overhaul of FCoA's paper-based records management system.
	Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority How Virginia Orr led the charge for a massive digital document and information repository.
	Count Wealth With profits well into the millions, IT lead Stephen Aguilera-Mendoza decided it was time for some (document) spring cleaning.
	MBF Online manager Michael Valaris on why content management is crucial to the success on any business.

Editor: Fran Foo
Copy Editor: Stephen Turner
Design: Melissa Siu

Jetstar: Information management for the long haul

Just two years after it elbowed its way into the discount airline market, Jetstar Airways recently celebrated the carriage of its one-millionth passenger and will soon begin flying long-haul trips to various international destinations. It's exciting times for the company, but one that has forced it into a period of IT introspection to make sure its information management infrastructure is up to the task.

As a new company, Jetstar initially found itself in the enviable position of being able to choose its own technological direction with no legacy data to worry about. In keeping with the company's overall mantra of cost-effective investments, however, a minimalist approach saw investments approved on a case-by-case basis with fully manual processes as the benchmark -- and, often, the result.

For the past two years, many of those processes have remained largely manually driven. For example, Jetstar has broken with rival Virgin Blue and parent Qantas to check passengers manually onto the plane; a series of numbered paper tickets, rather than boarding pass scanning systems, is used to ensure the right number of people are onboard.

-Everything we do is focused on managing the business as usual, and any other activity needs to be funded, costed and built individually," says Jetstar CIO Stephen Tame. -A lot of our systems are premised on the idea that if we needed an airport to go totally manual and run on paper, we could do that."

Manual processes have also predominated in the maintenance of crew records -- folders that maintain personal and professional details about the airline's 1,200 domestic staff. Within those books, critical information such as training experience and individual skills certifications is readily available -- but requires someone to manually search through what is often 30 pages or more to find the necessary document.

This meant that regular audits and information requests by CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) could be quite burdensome. So, too, was the ongoing process of checking and updating the information in the books. -With most of the information we had, we thought about process," says Tame. -A staff member would fill in a [skills] test, someone signed it, then faxed it across so it could be filed into their book. We had paper on one end generating paper on the other end."

Flying away from paper
In a stopgap measure, Jetstar adopted Telstra's FaxStream FaxBank service, which allows incoming faxes to be digitised and managed electronically via e-mail -- although printed versions were still added to employees' books.

Burdensome as it was, careful attention to process had kept the system working relatively smoothly. However, it soon became clear that the company's move into long-haul flights was going to vastly increase the burden of manual processing: an additional 1,500 employees are expected to have joined the company by the time its first long-haul services kick off in November.

Jetstar recently began exploring options for streamlining the management of that information. Investigations led the company to Tower Software's TRIM document management system, which is now being implemented across the company.

The business case for the TRIM system was built on its ability to consolidate and improve management of four key types of information. The first was the crew books, which have been entered into TRIM through a massive scanning process that will allow those critical records to be accessed easily by employees and auditors.

Next to move to TRIM were the company's invoices and other financial operational data, which were recently added to the system to smooth the flow of relevant reports and information throughout the company. Although most organisations would approach the integration of financial systems with a system like TRIM by writing complex integration routines, Jetstar has opted for an easier, less painful and far more intuitive method of moving data around: e-mail.

In the company's new workflow environment, incoming invoices are scanned into TRIM, then vetted by Accounts Payable staff and e-mailed within a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to the appropriate person for approval. That person opens the Excel spreadsheet, checks the relevant document image in TRIM, then enters a code to indicate what expense account they want to post the charge to. That spreadsheet is e-mailed back to Accounts Payable, where the relevant information is keyed into the company's accounting system.

-We've got TRIM and systems that we've developed supporting the accounting process to the point of generating what needs to be filled in," says Tame, -but we don't need to have it 100 percent integrated into the accounting or ERP system. It's in that integration that most of these projects fail. A purist might question how we're bringing two systems together [without integrating them], but we're not purists -- we're realists."

We had paper on one end generating paper on the other end.

Stephen Tame, Jetstar CIO

To make the transition even easier, Jetstar hasn't migrated any of its old financial data into TRIM. The ease of that migration will speed the company's progress towards the next phase of the implementation: scanning of more than 4,000 customer service files. Each of these files involves large volumes of paper as customer service staff manage complaint letters, requests for special consideration, lost baggage claims, and other correspondence with the company's customers.

Also due to be incorporated into the system are human resources records -- resumes, employment records, occupational health and safety reports, medical reports, and other information. -All of these are generally documents that have to be sourced, filed, processed and reviewed by the company," says Tame. -They're a prime candidate for TRIM."

More passengers, same staff
As Jetstar begins selling tickets for its long-haul services, it will begin a process of rapid growth that will bring the effectiveness of the information management system to the fore.

With key business information stored on TRIM and readily accessible to the 25 or so users that need it regularly, Tame is confident that the system and associated processes will allow the company's administrative employees to handle the increase in customers without needing to bolster their numbers.

-If passenger numbers increase by 100 percent, complaints will probably increase by 100 percent too," says Tame. -By putting in the document management system, we're giving our staff the tools to cope with that. The three people in our Accounts Payable department, who process domestic volumes at the moment, could also process the volumes associated with international services without having to increase their headcount."

One of the nicer benefits of this is improved IT efficiency: as revenues increase but IT expenditure stays the same, Tame expects the company's IT expenditure will drop from its current 1.4 percent of revenues to just 1 percent (its startup IT costs were 1.6 percent of revenue). With an industry benchmark of around 3.5 percent and 1.6 percent for budget airlines, that projection represents budget that can be freed up for expansion in other parts of the business.

The key to successfully streamlining the business in this way, says Tame, is designing business processes appropriately.

-You need to review your business process and look at how electronic document management is going to work within that process," he explains. -Once you've done that and run the departments through it, you generally find extremely positive outcomes. Then we work with the business to work out what rules they want, deliver it to them, they agree and off we go."