The Five Year Plan That Wasn't
Today, Cincinnati-based Comair is a regional airline that operates in 117 cities and carries about 30,000 passengers on 1130 flights a day, with three or four crew members on each. But back in 1984, when Jim Dublikar joined the company as director of finance and risk management, Comair had just 25 planes and not a jet among them. Dublikar, who served as Comair's director of risk management and information technology from 1992 until 1999, explains that back then, flight crew managers did all their scheduling with pen and paper. But in 1986, Comair leased software from SBS that kept track of crews, the flights they were assigned to and how many hours they were flying, in order to be in compliance with union and federal regulations.
The system worked just fine.
In 1993, Comair bought a jet - the first Bombardier CRJ regional jet in the industry, in fact. The company grew swiftly. But by 1996, other regional contenders such as American Eagle, Mesa and Continental Express acquired their own jets, and Comair lost its competitive advantage. "At that point, the playing field had got pretty even," says Dublikar, now an airline consultant. "So we had to start looking at ways of doing things better and more efficiently."
Over the years, Comair, like most airlines, had acquired a hodgepodge of applications - from crew scheduling to aircraft maintenance to passenger booking engines. "We had several systems that were getting pretty long in the tooth - around for seven, eight, nine years," Dublikar says.
Unfortunately, you can't see a crew management system age the way you can see a plane rust. But they do. "These systems are just like physical assets," says Mike Childress, former Delta CTO and now vice president of applications and industry frameworks for EDS. "They become brittle with age, and you have to take great care in maintaining them."
In 1998, Dublikar and his IT steering committee brought in consultants from Sabre, the Southlake, Texas-based airline software and consulting company, to create a long-term IT strategy to address the issue of legacy systems and architecture. The consultants spent five months meeting with IT's various constituents in the business to find out what their needs were. They examined the airline's existing IT infrastructure and suggested a five-year strategic plan outlining (among other things) which systems needed to be retired, replaced or added, and a time line for doing so.
The crew scheduling system was marked for retirement. SBS was no longer "the only game in town", recalls Dublikar, and the case for replacing the system was pretty easy to make. "The application was getting old. There was risk there, and there was new technology out there," he adds. "There were even financial benefits to replacing the system in terms of crew productivity and expenses that could be controlled better in a new system."
But this was 1998, and for the next two years, Y2K absorbed most of IT's attention. By 1999, a significant amount of the work that had been laid out in the five-year plan (including Y2K remediation) had been completed or was under way - including implementing an e-ticketing system, upgrading the corporate network, replacing the maintenance and engineering system (another high-risk legacy system written in Cobol), and implementing a revenue management application.
The replacement of the crew scheduling system was among those next on the list. But after nearly 15 years in use, the business had grown accustomed to the SBS system, and much of Comair's crew management business processes had grown directly out of it. Just look at a pilot's contract at Comair; the definition of a workday is lifted straight out of the old SBS crew management application and expressed in Julian minutes the way the system did. (There are 44,640 Julian minutes in a 31-day month.) "That's the reason why it's almost impossible to replace these systems," says John Parker, former airline CIO and 17-year Delta veteran, now CIO of AG Edwards & Sons.
But systems requirements had been defined, and the IT department was in the software selection process. Final vendor selection was slated for 2000, according to Dublikar.
But then, in the middle of 1999, Dublikar left Comair, and shortly afterward, Delta announced its plans to acquire Comair.
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