Comair: Issues to Address in Building a New System

Comair needs to consider management changes in their organization and what kind of people needed to run and get their new system implemented. They also have to consider if their information system is equipped to handle what they need it to do and how adjustable it is if they have to make important changes to the system. They have already had to deal with all of these issues in trying to implement their new IT system.

As of March 2005, they had not yet implemented their new plan because of numerous delays caused by management changes, pilot strikes and September 11th. What they ended up doing was continuing to use their SBS legacy system. It was split into two modules to allow for a monthly limit of 32,000 each for pilot schedule changes and flight attendant schedule changes. The volume of transactions is also being monitored more carefully.

Comair: Influence of People, Organization, and Technology Issues

For the nearly 10 years leading up to the system crash in 2004, the company was looking for a way to gain a competitive edge after other airlines had starting using jets that it had itself began using 3 years earlier. The Bombardier CRJ regional jets were first used by Comair and gave them an edge over their competitors, but after other airlines started using them, they had to look elsewhere for a competitive advantage. One of the first areas they looked at was their information system. Their IT system ran different applications for aircraft maintenance, crew scheduling, and passenger booking that were not interrelated and were becoming outdated. By 1997 the IT department talked about replacing the SBS legacy system being used for flight management. The system was 11 years old and written in Fortran. This was a programming language that dated all the way back to the 1950s and no one at the company was an expert in it. It also used their old UNIX operating system instead of HP UNIX.

SBS, who created their legacy system, presented them with new software known as Maestro. A crew supervisor already knew about the product and gave it negative reviews so the company passed on the software. Jim Dublikar, the director or risk management and information technology in 1998, met with SABRE Airline Solutions to come up with a long-term strategy for handling their legacy system and IT infrastructure.

Comair Management Solutions

Comair had many solutions available to them, they just had to go looking for it. They ended up choosing the plan that they developed with SABRE Airline Solutions, a company in Texas that provided airline software and consulting services. What they came up with as a solution was a five-year plan that would evaluate the capabilities of the existing systems and retiring, replacing, or adding to the systems if needed. The replacement of the flight crew management system was one of the major components of the five-year plan.

This seemed to be the best solution because Comair’s IT system was outdated and badly needed a major overhaul if the company was going to keep up with its competitor’s and gain the competitive advantage it were hoping for. Comair was moving in the right direction in trying to find solutions that would help the company solve its problems and preventing future problems caused by their system. Due to the nature of their business, an information system that is updated and equipped to handle issues caused by new and advance technology is a top priority.

Comair IT System Problems

In December 2004, a glitch developed in Comair’s flight crew scheduling software known as the SBS Legacy System. This forced the company to down all operations during the busy holiday season. 1,100 flights were cancelled and 30,000 passengers were grounded. During the disaster the company maintained that the winter storm that came to the Ohio Valley was main part of the problem and not their IT system. This storm caused Comair to cancel or delay more than 90 percent of their flights between December 22nd and 24th .The storm though was only part of their problem and not the single cause of it. On Christmas day the SBS legacy system, which was nearly two decades old, crashed. What no one at the company knew was that the reason the system crashed was that it had reached its limit. The system had an antiquated counter that logged schedule changes and by that day, it had logged more than its monthly limit of 32,768 changes. The weather caused so many schedule changes that the system had finally reached its limit and shut down. All the flights for December 25th were wiped out and most of those for the 26th. They had no backup system and their software vendor needed to take one full day to repair the system.

By the time the problem was resolved, the damage had already been done. Delta, which acquired Comair in 2000, lost almost all the profits earned by Comair in the previous quarter. They lost $20 million from the system failure.