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

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.”

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.

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.”