Dublin Airport's Analytics Journey

When we discuss the TARGIT journey to analytics excellence, it’s impossible not to mention Dublin Airport Authority (daa). daa operates Dublin and Cork airports, the two largest airports in Ireland. The organization adopted TARGIT Decision Suite in 2010 to help them better manage their duty-free retail shops. Since then, daa has completely transformed their analytics strategy organization-wide to become a data-driven powerhouse.

No one knows their story better than Ray Cleary. Cleary, BI Manager at Dublin Airport, has been with the company for 38 years, and has been instrumental in the organization’s transformation. Today, Dublin Airport is the 11th largest airport in Europe. Last year, they served 29.6 million passengers traveling to 191 destinations in 42 counties through 47 different airlines.

Dublin’s Analytics Goals

There’s no question of the importance of data in helping Dublin Airport maintain steady growth and continuously improve the passenger experience. Since implementing TARGIT Decision Suite, Cleary’s goal has been to build a data-driven culture across the entire organization. All airport operations—car parks, security, duty-free shops, and commercial—generate valuable data that must be tracked and analyzed.

Cleary considers daa’s analytics strategy as an investment in people, processes, and modern data and analytics technology. The team of users is working to grow the data culture across all levels of the organization with evidence-based data-driven decision-making the norm. Due to the sensitive nature of airport data, that involves creating a trusted and compliant environment that promotes responsible use of data.

Cleary and his team are working to increase agility, speed to insight, and the democratization of data through investment in a modern data platform and new data science lab. Currently, there are three data scientists working on advanced analytics so daa can look to the future with advanced predictive analytics.

What Are They Looking at?

Today, daa’s TARGIT system updates a staggering amount of data pulled from all of airport operations every two minutes. With this near-real-time access to data, daa is able to look at yesterday, today, and tomorrow. TARGIT’s self-service capabilities make it easy for users of various technical skill levels to find the answers they need in operational and commercial data. But that’s just the beginning. 

daa is also analyzing data from customer car parks, security, the baggage journey, global ARI retail insights, and live flight and passenger views. TARGIT’s data governance and permission levels make it possible for daa to share reports, dashboards, and analyses with one of their largest airline partners. The airline accesses TARGIT Decision Suite in their control room to see the entire passenger check-in sequence so administrators know where passengers are at all times. Knowing this helps them improve their on-time departures.

All of this data helps daa with decision support, such as demand planning and employee rostering for different shifts throughout the day. Airfield performance analytics help daa ensure they are making the most of their existing assets as they build a new runway. And retail has access to data to help them up sell passengers for various programs throughout the airport.

Cleary joined us on a TARGIT webinar to discuss daa’s full analytics story. In the webinar, he maps out:

• Implementation of data & analytics process and business areas 
• Methodology and why daa is moving to an agile approach
• BI Champion Models, which create Competence Centers in each business area such as car parks, security, and airport operations.