Carnival Australia
Cruising ahead with TM1 ... Carnival can now work out total cruise costs and individual elements in less than an hour
Formed in 2004, Carnival Australia is a branch of Carnival plc, and is the backbone of the cruise industry in this region with the P&O Cruises brand, sailing from Australia since December 1932.
Carnival represents six of the international cruise brands operating in the local market: P&O Cruises Australia, P&O Cruises World Cruising, Cunard, Princess Cruises, Holland America Lines and Seabourn.
Carnival Australia operates six ships sailing year round from Sydney, Melbourne, Fremantle and Auckland under the local brands of P&O Cruises and Princess Cruises. A seventh, Carnival Spirit, arrives in October 2012.
In recent years, cruising has been the standout success of the Australian tourism sector, recording annual growth of nearly 20 per cent for each of the six years to 2010. According to statistics compiled by the International Cruise Council Australasia (ICCA), more than 465,000 Australians took a cruise holiday in 2010 and Carnvial Australia’s CEO Ann Sherry predicts 1 million Australia passengers will be sailing by 2020.
With more bed nights than any hotel chain in Australia, extremely high occupancy every time they sail, a fleet of ships that need constant attention and the need for efficient supply chain management, Carnival had a diverse range of operating challenges.
Challenge
Carnival needed a platform that was flexible enough to cater for individual components of its' operations whilst integrating the cross business functions. They needed to have the insight and accuracy required to drive efficiencies and provide analytics for their service and product offerings.
The Strategy
Matthew Stephens, Director, Information Systems at Carnival, outlines their strategy to meet these challenges:
“Budgeting, Forecasting and Financial Reporting are critical functions within our business given the high number of variables, many of which are outside our control. We required a solution that could model our Budgets based on a combination of multiple historical information sources, user defined criteria, future comparisons at monthly intervals, as well as Forecasting future expectations. As our legacy solution was not integrated into the processes within our organisation, most of the analysis was completed outside of the system in Excel.
We assessed multiple products and selected TM1 for a number of key reasons. TM1 is perfect for an agile development cycle, particularly enabling users to efficiently develop analysis based on multi-dimensional cubes, therefore allowing them to interrogate information with ease.
We selected Cortell as a strategic business partner, providing technically competent consultants who assisted to guide the business in migrating our financial modelling into a multi-dimensional solution.
The results of the choice in the IBM Cognos analytic platform, TM1, have been nothing short of stellar since day one.”
Post Implementation
Carnival initially started with an itinerary based budget, forecast and planning framework, incorporating all costs and revenue on a cruise based allocation.
Carnival can now assess the impact of local and macro events on its business model down to an individual cruise level and with visibility across the entire organisation.
With such level of detail and control, Carnival can now work out total cruise costs and individual elements in less than an hour if a port destination is altered due to a storm or major global event, or assess the impact of fuel increases or delayed port times.
Extending the solution to link market planning analytics and ticketing analysis to the detail within the core financial system has allowed far greater understanding of Carnival’s clients and services and thus provided the insight to further improve on the quality of the products they offer.
Survey data is also being captured to further refine this process and with the plan to gather on board spend, the next step of the whole customer life cycle will be complete.
Further projects to focus on executive dashboards and maintenance management are next in line along with predictive analytics and social media integration to compete the entire picture for carnival.
Key Benefit Areas
Carnival have realised significant benefit from implementing IBM Cognos TM1 with Cortell.
Improved integration, with greater visibility and accuracy across the business has helped drive significant personnel and technology cost savings. The real time analytical framework that TM1 provides has allowed Carnival to look at the products and services offered to clients to further extend the tailored customer experience.
How ROI was calculated & derived
Variables that were calculated for the ROI included:
- increased speed of delivery for budget and forecast analysis across business analysts and the business
- increased accuracy across budgeting and forecasting processes
- increased transparency for management analysis and decision-making
- increased productivity for Financial Business Analysts
- reduction in headcount.