Southwest acquired AirTran, expanded its fleet, and expanded globally, so they needed self-service analytics and bespoke business intelligence to scale with the business
and respond faster to rising data sets. To maximize on-time performance (OTP) and customer happiness, business groups needed timely and accurate
information about customers' booked and flown journeys and their arrival times. Southwest needed a real-time enterprise-wide
Southwest would manually gather data from ancient systems, Access, Excel, Oracle, SQL Server, and Teradata, its enterprise data warehouse,
assess fleet performance. Data from 28 departments was fragmented, making it hard to assess their effectiveness. Uneven data access caused confusion and varied opinions.
“Our enterprise data was siloed all over the place,” said Data Science Center business consultant Tom Laney. It was diverse, complex, different
degrees of filthy and tidy, and found in remote regions across the company.” IT connected everything with SQL queries, which were hard to update,
maintain, and distribute. Business organizations struggled to integrate, cleanse, analyze, and consume data.
Southwest engaged Tableau to scale self-service analytics from centralized data management due to rising demand. Three Tableau Desktop users
published reports to Server. More than 2,900 active Tableau Server users and 400 Tableau Desktop licenses were organically grown in four years by socializing their experience.