Measuring market orientation of Muscle Pharm Corp. (MSLP:US) REAL LIFECASE STUDY – REACHING NEW HEIGHTS | Page 4
Reaching new heights - Open source software application SabreSonic® Res.
Critical success factors in the airline industry are load factor (all seats booked) and strict control of
input costs (Kirby, 2014). In April 2014, a blackout in American Airlines automated reservation and
booking system led to delayed flights across the airline’s fleet, abandoned passengers at gates and
planes waiting on airstrips across the U.S. Consequently, passengers voiced their frustration about
the chaos on twitter and other social networks. American reacted quickly to the problems and
announced through its legitimate Twitter account “Our reservation and booking system is offline.
We are working hard to fix the issue as fast as we can. We regret any disruption” (Ewalt, 2014)
We believe a solution is due as soon as possible and we are convinced that this is a real life case
within the ISM course content. We believe that the successful merger of the two reservation
booking systems will lead to significant improvement in operating margins, higher customer
satisfaction and will offer new opportunities to build on existing solutions around the reservation
booking system, especially since e-commerce for airlines is becoming more and more important. The
key issues we want to address are:
To choose an appropriate open source software that will best enable American Airlines to
overcome the described problems and increase long-term operating margins
To give specific recommendations to the existing CIO of American Airlines to enable her to
transform this merger into a success from an ISM perspective and to avoid mistakes from
the past
1.2 Definition of project success criteria
Regarding our case study description, we recommend that Beverly Goulet, the new CIO, define
specific project success criteria to make the purpose of the integration of SabreSonic Res clear to all
staff and to define related key performance indicators (KPI) in order to measure the progress
accordingly.
KPI: Increase customer satisfaction level by 15% by merging the reservation booking systems
successfully.
Project goal: Minimize the number of customer complaints related to reservations due to
the current reservation booking systems and overcome the misalignment of various prices.
Project success criteria: Reservation booking systems should be completely merged by
December 2015 and customers should be able to book flights using US Airways and
American Airlines webpages without differences in fares.
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