JetBlue uses Tableau Cloud and Snowflake to drive upskilling and sustainability programs company-wide

JetBlue is well known in the travel and transportation industry as an affordable, customer-friendly commercial airline. Based in New York, with more than 100 domestic and international destinations and a current ranking as the sixth largest U.S. airline, JetBlue thrives on a potent blend of great people and superior technology. As recent economic challenges have wreaked havoc in the travel market, JetBlue deftly upgraded its technology and upskilled its people to remain active and competitive — all without losing sight of its sustainability goals, including a goal to reach Net Zero by 2040, ten years ahead of the rest of the airline industry.

The airline uses Tableau Cloud to support its multiple lines of business, including sales and marketing, customer service, system operations, and IT.

Cloud-scale data analytics empowers organizations to improve and grow their business and achieve their mission while saving time and money. At JetBlue, Tableau Cloud helps drive growth on several distinct fronts:

• Stability. “With Tableau Cloud, there’s a very low maintenance burden,” Carol Clements, Chief Digital & Technology Officer at JetBlue. “This means that instead of spending our time maintaining the platform, we can use that time to drive value with data organization-wide.”
• Scale. Transitioning to the cloud from an on-premises solution, Clements pointed out, better enables her organization to streamline its technology platform and bring more users and cloud-based applications on board.
• Security. Any new platform JetBlue integrates must comply with rigorous security standards. “Tableau Cloud has been refreshing because it’s cloud-native and gives us the security features we need,” Clements said.

The efficiency gained from these investments also had a positive impact on users’ workloads by reducing time spent on unnecessary tasks. “Through using Tableau Cloud, we’ve been able to eliminate a great deal of duplicate work, which has made our people much more self-sufficient,” said Clements. “When you combine this with our lower maintenance costs from being cloud-based, the cost and time savings have been substantial. And freeing up work cycles has led to opportunities for driving changes in our business based on the data we see and the ability to make different decisions that have a meaningful impact.”

Performing an economic recovery while doubling down on analytics investments was no easy task. Chris Gottlieb, Business Intelligence Manager at JetBlue, said it all boiled down to achieving ROI that was previously untapped within the company’s people and data resources. Using data to drive the recovery is a matter of finding and realizing operational and resource gains that were previously hidden from view.

“A lot of our recovery success has come from finding new opportunities for efficiency,” said Gottlieb. “Take fuel efficiency, for example. At a thousand flights per day, if we can find a way to lessen the weight of each plane by 100 pounds, we can save the fuel needed to carry 10,000 pounds in the air each day, all day, 365 days per year. Analyzing data in our Tableau dashboards leads us to discovering those chances to save.”

The impacts of these changes, Gottlieb said, can lead to whole new areas of growth. “When you tweak one thing to get a better ROI, that’s money you can put into adding more pilots, more routes, more cities. These are the capacity measures that are enabling us to bounce back from hard times.”

As always, an analytics platform is only as successful as the data it relies on, and at JetBlue, the legacy systems were fragmented, siloed, and from a variety of providers. The company needed a way to untangle this web and provide a unified pipeline for data that all users could depend on, using trusted data and established shared metrics. Once again, the solution was in the cloud: connecting Tableau Cloud to Snowflake, a cloud-based data platform that now serves as the authoritative repository for all curated data sources in the JetBlue environment.

“All of this transformation with the people and analytics wouldn’t have been successful without a solid underlying data platform,” said Gottlieb. “We took all of the data sources we had on-premises and put them into Snowflake to create a single source of truth for all analytics at the company.”

Centralized access to Snowflake means that teams running Tableau Cloud anywhere at the company — flight dispatch, fuel management, or any other department — can draw insights for their own business purposes without worrying about making assumptions that might be incompatible with work done by other teams.

The key to growing data analytics competency and adoption rapidly across the JetBlue workforce was to upskill all employees and provide ongoing support to those who needed extra help. “We actually didn’t focus much on success stories at first. We wanted to know where people were being unsuccessful, so we could help them out,” said Gottlieb. “We’d sit with them and create a visualization or help them with any other areas they were stuck.”

This approach helped familiarize employees with Tableau, transforming and empowering them to become more data-driven in their work. Gottlieb’s team also added multiple other methods of support, including monthly calls, an issue tracking system with follow-up protocols, and a community Teams channel called JetBlue Insights Network, or JIN.

“What we’ve really created now is a learning culture at JetBlue,” said Gottlieb. “Our analysts and BI leadership truly listen to what our community needs, down to the last team and individual. When you listen, you can teach, and you can learn.”

Leading the way in JetBlue’s critical transformation to a more data-centric culture was Tableau’s easy-to-learn, easy-to-use interface. “Our previous analytics solution wasn’t very intuitive,” said Gottlieb. “We could spend up to 20 hours showing a single person or team the best way to derive value from a simple calculation. Tableau Cloud changed all that. If it hadn’t been so easy to use, we might never have succeeded at getting everyone on board.”

Once Gottlieb’s team began training users on Tableau Cloud, adoption soared. “It was just so quick — everyone caught on really fast,” said Gottlieb. “It wasn’t like installing new equipment. It was just Tableau Cloud, right there: Here’s the link, here’s your single sign-on, now start dragging and dropping to create the tools you need. We knew we made the right decision on Tableau Cloud when we saw more and more people using it in their everyday job.”

This adoption wave reached every business unit at the company. For example, the airline’s systems operations center (SOC) is currently modernizing and combining three major data platforms: the crew management system, which assigns crews to flights; the aircraft movement system, which assigns flights to aircrafts; and the flight planning system, which generates flight plans for the pilots. To build this complex, newly integrated platform, JetBlue uses Tableau Cloud to both push information to crews and also display dashboards where the dozens of subject matter experts involved with the transition can get critical insights on progress.

“Our operations teams have visibility into the business that no one else has because they need to identify issues and communicate them to the right people,” said Lucie Bloom, System Operations Center Managing Director. “Tableau Cloud lets us consolidate all of this information into one place and make it relevant to each individual person involved.”