Case Study: Southwest Airlines achieves increased BI delivery and 45% lower project costs with Hitachi Vantara

Southwest Airlines business intelligence change leadership

Southwest Airlines, a major U.S. carrier, faced underperforming Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities that hampered delivery of meaningful insights—root causes included a siloed organization, poor business–IT partnership, weak governance and prioritization, and inconsistent technology and data architectures. Southwest engaged Hitachi Vantara (drawing on Hitachi Process Intelligence Solution and Enterprise Intelligence services alongside Hitachi Consulting expertise) to diagnose the issues and lead a multi-stage change to centralize and professionalize BI leadership and execution.

Hitachi Vantara restructured and centralized Southwest’s BI organization, reset strategic direction, strengthened governance and prioritization, improved business partnerships and delivery methodologies, and helped implement the first release of the Enterprise Data Warehouse. The program increased strategic projects delivered from three to eight per year, reduced average strategic project costs by more than 45%, and delivered self-sufficient BI leadership, higher ROI, dramatically improved internal customer satisfaction, and better morale and productivity for the IT BI team.

Southwest Airlines