In 1839 Samuel Cunard created The British and North American Steam Packet Company, known as the Cunard Line, to provide Royal Mail to Canada and the U.S. (Cunard, n.d.). Originally made up of 4 paddle steamer ships, it would not be until the late 1940’s though that the Cunard name would be etched synonymously with fine quality transatlantic passenger cruises. By the 1950’s, Cunard had a total of 12 cruise liners in service accounting for a total of 1 third of most transatlantic crossings (Cunard, n.d.).
With its greater speed and less expensive, air transit was quickly emerging as preferred way of transatlantic travel through the 1960’s (Wikipedia, n.d.). The Cunard cruise liners that clearly dominated the cruise industry ten years earlier were quickly becoming outmoded remnants of a bygone era. With the increased costs associated in operating the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, and confronted with stiff competition from rivals like French Line’s newly built SS France, Cunard was reluctant to capitulate entirely on the cruise industry (Wikipedia, n.d.).IT-Service Düsseldorf
Cunard found a success in an $80 million gamble (Wikipedia, n.d.) through an alternative to the Queen Elizabeth called the Queen Elizabeth 2. On May 2, 1969, the Queen Elizabeth 2 made her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City and instantly became the flagship for Cunard. Not only renowned as among the fastest seagoing vessels for her size, the Queen Elizabeth 2 was cheaper and smaller to operate than her pre-war predecessors (Wikipedia, n.d.). Cunard managed to dynamically capitalize upon its lengthy historical brand recognition alongside the lowered costs associated with operating the Queen Elizabeth 2. The Queen Elizabeth 2 ultimately won a dire competitive advantage and reigned as the conventional of transatlantic passenger crossings until 2004.
In spite of the notoriety of the Queen Elizabeth 2, Cunard gradually weakened in each successive decade and became a company with a fleet of old disparate liners by the 1990’s. Carnival Cruises acquired the outstanding 32% curiosity about Cunard in 1999 (Cunard, n.d.). The acquisition represented a marriage between refined British sophistication and the American wanderlust spirit. The prosperous Carnival Cruise Corporation revived the ailing legacy of Cunard by selling off older liners and conducting needed overhauls on others.
Underneath the new leadership of Carnival Cruises, Cunard also began construction on a liner that was of unprecedented proportion. Dubbed the Queen Mary 2, at a cost of over $800 million and a gross weight of over 150,000 tons, she was probably the most expensive and heaviest vessel ever. Receiving much fanfare on her behalf maiden voyage from Southampton, England to Fort Lauderdale, Florida on January 12, 2004, the Queen Mary 2 was celebrated as simply the grandest ocean liner in the world (Wikipedia, n.d.).
The Queen Mary 2 was made to be an all-inclusive fully functioning entity unto itself, having the capability to function such as a self-contained city (Datz, 2004). Providing every possible comfort available on land and without forfeiting modern technology, The Queen Mary 2 evokes the opulence of a previous era for the 21st century. Naturally, the incorporation of the data technology infrastructure of the Queen Mary 2 is just second to none.
From the moment that guests first arrive for his or her departure, they have the capability to have their photograph taken at the port’s hotel, the terminal or the purser’s office up to speed the ship. Additionally, their credit cards and passports may also be scanned in to the ship’s property management system. Their cards then in turn may be automatically used as their room key, a way of payment up to speed the ship, and identification for landing and boarding in place of carrying passports (Datz, 2004). All fall beneath the broad sounding information technology as Transaction Processing Systems or TPS (Laudon & Laudon, 2006). According to Jeff Richman, director of business solutions and applications development at Cunard, the Queen Mary 2 is the initial cruise liner to offer those capabilities in an intelligent card (Datz, 2004).
In every stateroom the Queen Mary 2 also incorporates a dynamic television system running Linux on set-top boxes from German multimedia company, IDF. These televisions enable passengers to send or receive email at $1.50 per transaction, order on-demand videos and choose from a total of 11 functional aspects of interests such as classes, restaurants and shore excursions. The stateroom television point of sale (POS) system enables passengers of the Queen Mary 2 never to only book reservations, but in addition to shop online and keep a working total of the quantity of money spent onboard (Datz, 2004). The capability to shop via an interactive television integrates the TPS system to the Queen Mary 2’s finance and accounting information system to track cash flow (Laudon & Laudon, 2006). This technique ultimately benefits Cunard because it needs less people to steadfastly keep up than would a normal system of crew handling individual transactions and reservations. Also, the device creates the opportunity to generate additional revenue for the ship (Datz, 2004).
The Queen Mary 2 has its operations center divided among three discrete sites that back one another up within the ship. Individual systems of the ship are linked to the primary organization operations center housing many servers, a PBX communications system and a public address system that serves whilst the ship’s principal safety system (Datz, 2004). The core of the Queen Mary 2’s information technology system may be the property management system which deals with both crew and passenger information. The property management system controls the ship’s credit based invoice system along with the boarding and disembarking manifests. Every individual onboard information technology system ultimately links to the property management system (Datz, 2004). The property management system lets the ship forward crew and passenger rolls to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which involves airliners and cruise liners to submit that data prior to leaving and following arrival (Datz, 2004). This enterprise system or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system enables a lone data structure serving business wide incorporation and synchronization of important business procedures (Laudon & Laudon, 2006).
Aboard the Queen Mary 2, Cunard also provides a system called AVO for Avoid Verbal Orders. The ship’s crew has the capacity to record matters aboard the ship and never having to pick up a phone or physically track someone down. Using individual personal computers, crewmembers can report faulty machinery aboard the ship directly to maintenance. Passengers likewise have the capability to inform maintenance of any troubles they could be encounter via their stateroom televisions. From either, it’s directly assigned to a maintenance worker where he or she can examine a schedule of repairs that really must be prepared for that day. Repairs are completed in the order where they’re received, and afterward customer support personnel can directly contact passengers to see if problems were solved for their satisfaction (Datz, 2004). Yet again this aspect is an example of a TPS onboard the Queen Mary 2, due to the inputting of events into the device and the coordination of operational level actions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006). The AVO system up to speed the Queen Mary 2 can be associated with the ship’s planned maintenance and purchasing system. Supervisors can determine from the information which repairs must take precedence over others (Datz, 2004). This aspect of the AVO system therefore serves as a Decision Support System or DSS because utility in allowing managers to produce critical decisions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006).