Airlines Reporting Corporation and Centric Consulting Work Together to Transform the Industry Leader

Enter Centric: Rethinking Business Transformation for a More Agile Organization

ARC partnered with our Louisville office due to a previous relationship with one of its team members at a different client. Initially, the company approached us about Enterprise Project Management, but the more we worked together, the more we knew a transformation was imminent.

Our approach to ARC’s transformation focused on two major components: technological infrastructure and company culture.

1. Technology Transformation

ARC needed to transition three significant systems:

• Its internal infrastructure to allow everyone to work more cohesively
• Its settlement engine, which settles the transactions between agencies and airlines.
• Its data products group, which generates most of the revenue from the data and information collected after transactions, are settled.

To start, we worked on proof of concept projects to present to ARC’s leaders and help them decide on the technologies they needed to move into the future. Once they chose what the new infrastructure would look like, and planned out how the transformation would work, they brought us back in to help manage the program in its entirety.

This included moving, building and configuring everything within AWS, keeping security in mind along the way. And, we are currently assisting in transforming the company’s technology workstream by helping implement new customer reporting tools, business intelligence applications, and other products to AWS.

2. Cultural Transformation

In any transformation, company culture plays an important role. As a legacy organization, ARC’s team members preferred their traditional ways of working, so adopting new technologies wouldn’t be easy. In recognizing this, ARC changed its internal terminology from a “technological transformation” to an overall business transformation.

As a result, we’re working with ARC to adopt a culture of agility. With one in place, everyone can successfully embrace today’s new infrastructure, be prepared for future transformations as needed, and rapidly identify potential new products and services based on the data it’s gathering.

To do so, we’re introducing an agile mindset to everyone within the company while working with its organizational change management office to help them understand how to carry out changes in the future.

We regularly meet with ARC’s leaders to help ensure teams reach their milestones and evangelize the company’s changes. We also hold ourselves accountable to our metrics and benchmarks because the way to change everyone’s hearts and minds is by showing them the benefits of those changes.

As we help ARC strategize and take on these changes, we’re also:

• Bringing in training developers and coordinators to ensure everyone understands the new systems
• Reengineering business processes to align people, processes and technologies along the way

The Results: Business Transformation Will Save Company Millions While Preparing for an Even Stronger Future

Airlines Reporting Corporation saw the need to have something that worked better. They decided to work with us to help them choose a toolset that would shift its technology in the direction it needed to go, And, along the way, we’ve helped transform its company culture as well.

Now, the company can quickly turn around and create custom reports for its customers. Anyone using its business intelligence tools can now evaluate opportunities within the data at a much faster pace than before. And while working faster has already improved the organization’s abilities to meet and exceed customer expectations, it’s only halfway done with its business transformation.

In a couple of years, ARC will complete their transformation. With it, ARC will not only embrace the business realities of today, but will also be prepared for future business transformations, stabilizing its presence in the airlines’ industry for years to come.