Establishing a Self-Service Data Warehouse
Liverpool John Lennon Airport sees thousands of passengers each week, many of whom visit the airport’s car parks, restaurants, and retail locations during their time at the airport. Since these visitors interact with multiple departments or business areas, it is critical for LPL to measure how flight schedules and passenger volumes affect sales, inventory levels, staffing needs, and more.
Before TARGIT, this essential information was stored in an externally hosted data warehouse. This meant LPL’s analysts had to send requests for data modifications and staging updates to their outside partner, then wait for the changes to go through before they could generate reports or analyze the latest insights.
Sarah Marconatto, the airport’s Senior Analyst, explains the value of replacing this data warehouse with TARGIT’s all-in-one BI solution: “With TARGIT, we can do everything internally. We know where all our data is coming from, we can update it easily at any time, and we can build dynamic visualizations promptly and swiftly.”
Sarah manages Liverpool John Lennon Airport's reports, dashboards, and data visualizations for all business areas – all the insights that inform decisions across the airport. She does most of her work directly inside TARGIT Decision Suite, thanks to the solution's seamless integration with LPL's various data sources, like the systems that collect flight data, sales figures, and more.
Creating Dynamic Visualizations With TARGIT
Sarah creates and maintains reports for aviation, business operations, finance, HR, and commercial teams. She works with TARGIT daily and explains that the solution's visualization capabilities are the most impactful for her and her colleagues.
"Visuals are the biggest thing for me – I can create a clean dashboard with custom fonts and colors in ways other tools haven't allowed me to do."
The reports and dashboards Sarah manages are developed primarily from data TARGIT pulls in automatically from various systems. However, there are a few figures Sarah still inputs or updates manually, such as the number of passengers on board each flight.
At the start of each workday, Sarah reviews the latest imports from all of LPL’s data sources and completes all necessary manual inputs. Then, she chips away at the list of requests from managers for new dashboards and updates to existing ones.
The airport uses TARGIT to measure day-to-day performance and inform forecasting within many departments, including the car park, food & beverage locations, and aviation operations. TARGIT's ability to pull data directly from multiple sources saves Sarah a significant amount of time and gives managers high-value insights into critical metrics like passenger volume.
“From car park pricing to staffing for the control tower – TARGIT helps us see it all in a single view.”
Improving Cross-Departmental Visibility Across the Airport
TARGIT has transformed the way LPL forecasts and adapts to meet changes in demand.
As Sarah explains, “The system we use to see flights coming in only allows us to export data from a seven-day period. Before TARGIT, I had to export seven days' worth of data over and over to get a complete picture. Today, TARGIT’s direct integration automatically pulls in data, allowing us to build out a six-month forecast of flight and passenger volumes.”
Airport staff uses these insights to estimate how much inventory they should stock in retail locations, how many employees they need to schedule for each shift, and which services to offer throughout the airport at different times of year.
Sarah is the local ‘TARGIT expert’ at the Liverpool John Lennon Airport, but she is far from the only employee who works inside the solution.
Many users access TARGIT regularly to review the latest insights or configure their reports to fit their unique needs. What's more, TARGIT's intuitive report-sharing tools allow even employees without direct TARGIT access to see the daily and weekly reports via email.
"In the past, we had to download reports and share them with stakeholders and partners one by one. With TARGIT, everyone receives reports and dashboards directly to their email. This saves me a lot of time and ensures everyone has access to the information they need to make informed decisions."
Reaching New Heights in Data Analysis
Sarah is currently forecasting for the rest of 2023 inside TARGIT. She explains that the airport plans to integrate additional data sources to fortify this effort and their routine reporting processes.
Next, Sarah hopes to integrate TARGIT with the system that measures customer satisfaction inquiries so airport staff can better understand the current airport customer experience and identify opportunities for improvement.
Decision-makers at Liverpool John Lennon Airport often rely on the same data for multiple purposes. For example, the airport collects flight data to identify passengers’ point of origin, then uses those insights to inform commercial decisions – like which restaurants to open based on how long passengers have been in the air or which items to stock in retail storefronts near the gate.
“We would like to integrate additional systems with TARGIT to further advance our cross-functional visibility and planning. The better we can connect data between departments, the more we will learn about how to best serve our passengers and grow our business.”
