In 1839 Samuel Cunard created The British and North American Steam Packet Company, referred to as the Cunard Line, to deliver Royal Mail to Canada and the U.S. (Cunard, n.d.). Originally consists of 4 paddle steamer ships, it wouldn’t be before the late 1940’s though that the Cunard name could be etched synonymously with good 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.).
Having its greater speed and cheaper, air transit was quickly emerging as the preferred way of transatlantic travel through the 1960’s (Wikipedia, n.d.). The Cunard cruise liners that clearly dominated the cruise industry 10 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 faced 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 within 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 just renowned as among the fastest seagoing vessels on her behalf 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 related to operating the Queen Elizabeth 2. The Queen Elizabeth 2 ultimately won a dire competitive advantage and reigned as the typical of transatlantic passenger crossings until 2004.
Regardless of the notoriety of the Queen Elizabeth 2, Cunard gradually weakened in each successive decade and became an organization 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 has been of unprecedented proportion. Dubbed the Queen Mary 2, at a high price 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 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 ability to function such as for instance a self-contained city (Datz, 2004). Providing every possible comfort on land and without forfeiting today’s technology, The Queen Mary 2 evokes the opulence of a previous era for the 21st century. Obviously, the incorporation of the info technology infrastructure of the Queen Mary 2 is just second to none.
As soon as that guests first arrive for their departure, they have the ability to have their photograph taken at the port’s hotel, the terminal or the purser’s office on board the ship. Additionally, their bank cards and passports will also be scanned in to the ship’s property management system. Their cards then subsequently could be automatically used as their room key, a way of payment on board the ship, and identification for landing and boarding in lieu of carrying passports (Datz, 2004). All fall underneath the broad category of 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 very first cruise liner to supply those capabilities in a smart card (Datz, 2004).
Atlanta divorce attorneys stateroom the Queen Mary 2 also contains an energetic 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 select 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 to not only book reservations, but also to look online and keep a working total of the total amount of money spent onboard (Datz, 2004). The capacity 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 method ultimately benefits Cunard because it takes less people to steadfastly keep up than would a conventional system of crew handling individual transactions and reservations. Also, the device creates the ability 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 attached to the primary organization operations center housing many servers, a PBX communications system and a public address system that serves since 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 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 person 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 ahead of 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 is able to record matters aboard the ship without having to get a phone or physically track someone down. Using individual personal computers, crewmembers can report faulty machinery aboard the ship directly to maintenance. Passengers also have the ability to inform maintenance of any troubles they could be encounter via their stateroom televisions. From either, it is 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 by which they are received, and afterward customer care personnel can directly contact passengers to see if problems were solved to their satisfaction (Datz, 2004). Once more this aspect is a typical example of a TPS onboard the Queen Mary 2, as a result of inputting of events into the device and the coordination of operational level actions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006). The AVO system on board the Queen Mary 2 can also be connected 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 facet of the AVO system therefore serves as a Decision Support System or DSS because of its utility in allowing managers to produce critical decisions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006).
