In 1839 Samuel Cunard created The British and North American Steam Packet Company, referred to as the Cunard Line, to supply Royal Mail to Canada and the U.S. (Cunard, n.d.). Originally composed of 4 paddle steamer ships, it wouldn’t be before the late 1940’s though that the Cunard name would be etched synonymously with superior quality transatlantic passenger cruises. By the 1950’s, Cunard had a complete of 12 cruise liners in service accounting for a complete of one third of most transatlantic crossings (Cunard, n.d.).
Having its greater speed and lower cost, air transit was quickly emerging as the preferred method 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 winner in a $80 million gamble (Wikipedia, n.d.) through a replacement for 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 just renowned as one of many 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 were able to dynamically capitalize upon its lengthy historical brand recognition alongside the lowered costs related to 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.
Notwithstanding the notoriety of the Queen Elizabeth 2, Cunard gradually weakened in each successive decade and became a business 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 relationship 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.
Under 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 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 this is the grandest ocean liner on the planet (Wikipedia, n.d.).
The Queen Mary 2 was designed to be an all-inclusive fully functioning entity unto itself, having the capability to function like 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. Obviously, the incorporation of the data technology infrastructure of the Queen Mary 2 is just second to none.
As soon as that guests first arrive because of their departure, they have the capacity to have their photograph taken at the port’s hotel, the terminal or the purser’s office aboard the ship. Additionally, their charge cards and passports may also be scanned in to the ship’s property management system. Their cards then subsequently can be automatically used as their room key, a technique of payment aboard the ship, and identification for landing and boarding instead of carrying passports (Datz, 2004). All fall under the broad sounding information technology as Transaction Processing Systems or TPS (Laudon & Laudon, 2006). Based on Jeff Richman, director of business solutions and applications development at Cunard, the Queen Mary 2 is the initial cruise liner to supply those capabilities in a good card (Datz, 2004).
In every stateroom the Queen Mary 2 also contains a vibrant 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 complete of 11 functional aspects of interests such as for instance 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 running total of the total amount of investment property onboard (Datz, 2004). The ability 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 requires less people to keep than would a conventional 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 principal organization operations center housing many servers, a PBX communications system and a public address system that serves because the ship’s principal safety system (Datz, 2004). The core of the Queen Mary 2’s information technology system could be the property management system which handles both crew and passenger information. The property management system controls the ship’s credit based invoice system along with the boarding and disembarking manifests. Each 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 just before 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 get a phone or physically track someone down. Using individual personal computers, crewmembers can report faulty machinery aboard the ship straight to maintenance. Passengers also have the capacity to inform maintenance of any troubles they may 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 done for that day. Repairs are completed in the order by which they are received, and afterward customer support personnel can directly contact passengers to see if problems were solved to their satisfaction (Datz, 2004). Yet again this aspect is a typical 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 aboard the Queen Mary 2 can be associated with the ship’s planned maintenance and purchasing system. Supervisors can determine from the data which repairs must take precedence over others (Datz, 2004). This aspect of the AVO system therefore serves as a Decision Support System or DSS due to its utility in allowing managers to create critical decisions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006).