This document summarizes how British Airways used a business rules management system (BRMS) called ILOG JRules to increase revenue opportunities. It describes two case studies where JRules was used: 1) To provide new upgrade options, increasing upgrades by 400,000. 2) To allow advanced seat reservations up to 360 days in advance, increasing reservations by 500,000. The BRMS enabled faster rule changes and new opportunities to be exploited in 18 months. It provided control over pricing and eligibility, improved time to market, and business ownership of rules.

1. IBM IMPACT 2010 Conference
Session ID : BBA-2291A
Agile Decision Management:
How British Airways Increased
Revenue Opportunities In 18 Months
British Airways
Richard Buchanan
Technical Consultant

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Richard Buchanan
Current challenge
• Evangelising the benefits of Jrules across BA commercial
areas

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Presentation Agenda
• The British Airways Vision
• What Does The Vision Mean For IT
• Path To Effective BRMS in BA
• Case Study 1: A New Type Of Upgrade
• Case Study 2: Providing Advanced Seat Reservation
• Achieved Benefits
• Essential Tips
• On-going Challenges

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British Airways
• BA is a world leading brand
• Total group turnover for 2007/8 of £8.75 billion
• IT department employs over 1000 staff
• ba.com is now the largest single revenue channel for BA
• ba.com rated as one of the leading industry websites
BA’s Vision is to be the ‘Leading Global Premium Airline’

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The British Airways Vision
Global Providing consistency of service
Providing regional propositions
Satisfying local regulations and laws
Premium Knowing our customers and offer what they value
Identifying when things go wrong and fix them
Airline Improving revenue in a highly competitive industry
Continually controlling costs
Satisfying continually changing tax and legal rules
Being 110 % secure in operation and data protection
Being corporately responsible
To be the ‘Leading Global Premium Airline’

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For IT The Vision Means …
the standard challenges of:
• Improving IT productivity
• Flexibility / Extensibility of design
• Efficient support and maintenance
• Providing a 24*7 robust reliable service
• Providing comprehensive audit and traceability
• Providing a secure service
+ the new challenges of:
• Reducing the exploitation time of commercial opportunities
• Enabling significant policy shifts quickly and cost effectively
• Sophisticated customization and contextualisation capabilities

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The Role Of JRules BRMS
• Provides a flexible tool for implementing key decisions
• Enables fast, safe* changes to business logic
• Allows reuse of common business decisions
• Allows for default business rules to be overridden
• EG. With regional specific rules, based on customer profile
• Informs and empowers business policy owners
• By exposing previously hidden rules
• Reduces testing overhead through
• Tools to guide and manage development
• Better targeted testing
• * Subject to corporate policy

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Path To Effective BRMS In BA
• One Message
• Publicised Senior Management Buy-In
• Establish as a component of the strategic architecture
• Embed in your standard delivery lifecycle
• Deliver the basic capability
• Hardware and Processes
• Operational and development support
• Pool of development environments
• Evangelise and Institutionalise
• Be prepared to ‘sell’ the technology to project managers
• Publicise successes
• Form a Centre Of Excellence
• Document clear suitability criteria

10. Case Study 1
A New Type Of Upgrade

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The Challenge
To
• Provide the customer with a more accessible upgrade option
• Improve utilisation of available inventory
• Increase revenue from upgrades
How
Use ILOG JRules to:
• Model Eligibility and Price calculation criteria
• Expose the decision as a web service accepting booking and passenger
data
Key Challenges
• Weekly rule changes varying in complexity
• Simple, robust, non disruptive deployment strategy
• Decoupled from the main ba.com platform
• Sufficient performance to support real time online transactions

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Special upgrade
offer only available
on the Inbound flight

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Route
Departure Dates
Cabin Of Travel
Class Of Travel
Type Of Booking
Booking Channel
Passenger Mix
Customer Loyalty
Tier
…

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Orchestrate Types
Of Rules
- Not Specific Rules

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Example
Pricing
Criteria

17. Case Study 2
Advanced Seat Reservation

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The Challenge
To:
- Allow passengers to reserve a specific seat up to 360 days before departure
- Provide a mechanism to restrict this capability to subsets of the market
- Increase revenue by providing a light weight, flexible pricing strategy based on type
of seat
How:
Use ILOG JRules to:
- Model Eligibility and Price calculation criteria
- Expose the decision as a web service accepting booking and passenger data
Key Challenges
• Weekly rule changes varying in complexity
• Simple, robust, non disruptive deployment strategy
• Decoupled from the main ba.com platform
• Sufficient performance to support real time online transactions
• Complex structure of the decision data

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Some Free Seats Are
Available

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Preferential Seats
Available At A
Charge
Complex Legal
Rules Apply To
Exit Seats

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Orchestrate Types
Of Rules
- Not Specific Rules

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Keywords Indicate
Special Passenger
Requirements

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Achieved Benefits
• 400,000 additional upgrades flown to date
• 500,000 new seat reservations to date
• Fine grain control allowing specific flights on specific days to be
targeted
• Coarse grain control allowing larger ‘chunks’ of the market to be
targeted quickly
• Reduction in lost revenue due to finer control during exceptional
commercial scenarios
• Allow for new rules to mitigate against ‘features’ in other areas of
the system
• Better exploitation through improved visibility of business policy
• Improved time to live due to reduced IT involvement

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Business Ownership
Commercial Pricing Executive
IT Support
Business Policy Owner
Identify Revenue
Opportunity
Raise Request
Perfom Rule
Change
Review &
Confirm Change
Create
Baseline & Test
Deploy
(Prelive then Live)
Demand & Yield Forecasts
Inventory
Existing Rules
Request
Deployment
Deploy to integrated
business test area
Including high level
consistency checks &
integrity tests

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Faster, Cheaper Change
BA Change
Type
Groups Involved Average
Elapsed Time
To Live
(deployment
only)
% Of Rules
Changes Covered
(76 total changes)
Standard
Change
(x3) Business Rule Authors (OR
Project Dev Team), IT Rules
Support, Change Mgmt
2 days 72 %
Non-Standard
Change
(x3) Business Rule Authors (OR
Project Dev Team), IT Rules
Support, Change Mgmt
(sometimes Technology
Support)
5 days 16 %
Platform
Release
(x9) Business Rule Authors,
Project Dev Team, Technical
Consultant, IT Rules Support,
Technology Support, DBA,
Release Mgr, Release Testing
Team, Change Mgmt
10 days 7 %
Emergency
Change
(x3) Business Rule Authors (OR
Project Dev Team), , IT Rules
Support, Change Mgmt
0.5 days 5 %
77% of changes implemented under the most efficient change
category

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Change Types
BA Change
Type
Criteria
Standard Change Changes supported by Rule Team Server
-Content change to an existing rule (condition or action)
-Creation of a new rule (subject to initial rule flow design)
-Data already passed to rule service (no interface change)
Non-Standard
Change
As standard change +
Changes not supported by Rule Team Server
-Rule flow changes, Business Object Model changes (vocab))
-Service interface or other non-backward compatible changes (new
service version)
Platform Release Software upgrade / platform configuration change
Common / Utility module changes (EG. logging framework)
JAVA changes (currently only logging framework)
Extended test window required
Multiple projects consolidated into a single release
Emergency Change As standard change – higher priority with support workload.

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Essential Tips
• Establishing a Decision Service Platform
• Present a single united message
• Deliver the platform upfront
• Including Hardware, Processes, Organisation, Skills …
• Document patterns and best practice
• Exploiting the Decision Service Platform
• Gain individual policy owner buy-in from the start
• Absolutely include them in the development process
• Understand how individual user groups will manipulate the rules
• Number of users, frequency and lifecycle of a rule change
• Identify ALL potential data relevant to the decision being
implemented
• Identify rule re-use early and design accordingly
• Adopt an effective change process relevant to that project

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On-Going Challenges
• Enabling Genuine User Empowerment
• Providing an efficient user oriented testing solution
• Balancing user entry validation against authoring
efficiency
• Supporting larger numbers of parallel rule authors
• Distribution & Presentation of rules
• Managing ‘Data Rich’ business rules
• Re-use of Business rules
• Tracking and analysing the results of decisions