EL Al & Tableau: taking data-based decision making to new heights with one central analytics platform

As a major international airline, El Al relies on effective data analytics and information flow to ensure smooth operations in every area of its business, from ticket pricing and passenger details to aircraft refuelling and crew assignment. However, when Ido Biger joined the company as Chief Data Officer in 2018, one of the first things he noticed was how many of the company’s individual departments were operating in silos, making collaboration difficult and causing conflict between teams.

“From a data perspective, El Al felt like seven different companies,” says Ido. “Key departments such as Engineering, Customer Service, Operations and Revenue Management all had their own data sources and analytics tools, resulting in a fragmented ecosystem that made effective information sharing very challenging.”

Ido knew that a central analytics platform would be key to solving this issue, consolidating all existing data sources into one single source of truth that the whole company could work from. He began by creating a shortlist of potential leading analytics solutions, including Tableau. He then worked with business champions from across El Al to collectively identify the best solution for the company’s needs.

“We tackled a current data use case in each of the shortlisted solutions, before deciding which was most effective,” says Ido. “Tableau was unanimously chosen thanks to its ease of use, powerful visualisations and fast, effective data analytics capabilities.”

With Tableau now in place, employees throughout the company can be confident they are all working from the same data sets, making collaboration easy and eliminating the confusion that previously led to conflicts.

“Duplicate data sets are now a thing of the past, which means there’s no more arguments in meetings about who’s report is the correct one,” says Ido.

Uptake of Tableau has been extremely high across all departments as well. Dashboards are receiving over 700 views per day, less than six months after implementation, while many of its biggest users are at the most senior levels of the company, including the VP of Operations, VP of Commerce and the CEO himself.

“Tableau’s rich visualisations have a big ‘wow’ factor when people first see them,” says Ido. “One of the first main advocates we had was the VP of Operations who quickly saw the potential. We created a great dashboard for him to show to other VPs and it wasn’t long before everyone wanted it for their department.”

Using Tableau, El Al has been able to identify several new areas of its operations where significant monthly and annual cost savings can be made. Ido cites excess water supplies on flights as a great example of this.

“By combining multiple data sources such as log files from the 787 Dreamliner, an Excel spreadsheet from our engineering department, DWH tables and a few web sites for the current USD/ILS and Brent Fuel price in Tableau and visualising the data, we immediately saw how much money was being wasted through overfilling water supplies on our Boeing 787 Dreamliners,” says Ido. “Excess water adds weight to the planes, which burns more fuel. Fuel is the largest operational cost for every airline, so even small savings per flight can quickly add up to significant amounts of money over the course of a year.”

Closer Tableau analysis of specific overfilled planes and the airports where overfilling was taking place has allowed El Al to virtually eliminate the issue across its fleet.

“If we were still using Excel, we would never have identified this issue in the first place,” says Ido. “But thanks to Tableau, we’re expecting to save up hundreds of thousands of UDS annually on our operational costs.”