Apology accepted hoipolloi.
Originally Posted by
arf04
Unwarranted. Aerobod shares interesting and valuable insight from a former insider's perspective and doesn't deserve to be knocked for it. He has since, indeed, worked for another airline (as far as I recollect), so has good comparison. No need to get personal about your displeasure with WS.
Yes, it is fair to be critical of Westjet's IT, which really needs to be much better. My take on it is that senior management does not recognize the opportunity they have to be better than AC in the customer service department and that it will require significant investment in IT infrastructure and people to accomplish that.
From the outside looking in, it should be easy, but if you've ever worked on software and hardware development you would know that everything that seems like it should be easy turns out to have a series of unexpected problems associated with it. In my world, I have a couple of developers that work for me so I see firsthand what stuff crops up. For one of our applications, we switched hardware and software vendors. The new stuff needed to interface with our own custom programs and we were confident it would (and so, of course, was the vendor...), but it turns out that there is a glitch in the way our code deals with their code and it is taking lots of time to resolve between their team and our team. We ended up going back to our original vendor and buying more hardware and software to keep operations going, so a cost overrun, and we have invested too much valuable time working on the issue with the new stuff. It is frustrating, but it is what happens--and that is on a very, very small scale compared to an airline's needs.
Well put.
The customer facing system decisions at WestJet while I was there always ended up being a bit short on ROI payback relative to the backend system investment. One example is the ROI on running 787s 16 hrs a day (that would be an industry record compared with a more normal 12 hours) was months, using IT analytics and realtime data collection from the aircraft in flight to allow pre-emptive maintanance. On the other hand most self-service customer options have paybacks measured in years. Bearing in mind that a self-service option aimed at business customers would only hit 20% of the people that the same option on Air Canada would (based on available business seat miles), but would cost the same amount to develop, so what would have a payback in 1 year at AC could be 5 years at WS. If you look at self-serve investment at WS, it is all about the operation efficiency at airports, with flow-through check-in, bag self-tagging and bag drop, this is due to the demographics of customers still being business-traveller light.
Perhaps the new CEO will find ways to fund more customer front-end automation or just decide that the company will eat the cost without a suitable business case (with Onex approval), but in the past even though Gregg and Ed wanted to see more front-end automation, they still had to keep within the corporate wide approval process and board approved funding bucket that typically saw 50-75% of project requests from the Business (such as Loyalty, Sales and Marketing depts) being sidelined due to higher priority and ROI projects from the Operations area. This pragmatism in the past has given WS a cost base 20% or so lower than AC, enabling more profitable operation, but who knows what the rejigging Onex will want to see once things stabilise again post-Pandemic.