In this chapter, we are going to walk you through an Airline Compensation Management (ACM) system solution in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. During this walkthrough, we would like to show the new and improved features of CRM 2011. You need to understand the requirements to build a good solution.
- Vision and scope
- ACM system overview
- System architectural design
- Defining the ACM Data model
- Configuring the ACM system
- ACM system security structure
Air-X is an international scheduled airline company that is engaged in the passenger airline transportation business. Its principal activities consist of the provision of domestic and international airline services.
Air-X has over 10,000 employees globally; the company flies to more than 100 destinations worldwide. Air-X prides itself on their employee-care culture, together with their customer-care mission. The ACM system initiative is a part of the Air-X's Employee-Care platform, which has strong extensible capabilities and an intuitive user-experience.
Air-X would like to replace their outdated crew compensation system. The existing system was not able to show how the compensations are composed; some of the business processes required manual input of data which created more work for the administrative team and lead to inaccurate payouts to the employees. The Air-X management team and the crews would like to have a complete view of all of the flight activities and how each employee is going to get compensated. They came up with the following vision statement for this project:
"To create an advanced system that provides a 360 degrees view of all of the employees, flight activities and compensation information in order to improve accuracy and efficiency. To implement a system that is easy to use by the employees, easy to maintain by the Information Technology team, and that provides capabilities for expansion in order to satisfy the future business needs."
In addition to their vision, they have identified the following requirements:
- The system shall store the crew members, contact information, flight activities, and compensation.
- The system shall store the flight route, flight, and airport information.
- The system shall provide a way to capture feedback on the system.
- The system shall allow crew members to log on to the system via the Internet.
- The system shall allow crew members to see their monthly compensation details.
- The system shall allow the airline scheduler to the update crew members' flight schedule.
- The system shall provide reports to the management team to allow them to see the compensation for and performance of crew members.
- The system shall allow the import of existing data from the legacy systems.
- The system shall allow integration with external systems.
- The system shall use the Microsoft technologies, as all of the current systems are using Microsoft technology stacks.
Based on the requirements above, the Air-X team has identified Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 as a great fit for them, because it can be integrated perfectly due to the xRM capabilities.
The scope for this project is to implement the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 with a well-defined system customization for the initial taste. As well as to provide a integrated Crew Portal prototype in order to the further development. Integration of the current system is out of scope, and will be discussed in the next phase.
The Airline Compensation Management (ACM) system is to keep track of the compensation for the crew members. Each crew member is compensated differently based on their level and the length of their flight segments, so his or her compensation is composed of the basic salary, hourly pay, and the per diem for the layover in locations other than their base location.
Each crew member gets a basic salary per month. In addition to their basic salary, each crew member gets paid extra based on the number of hours they spend on the actual flight. The amount per hour is based on their level. For example, Crew Level 1's hourly payment is $5.00 and Crew Level 2's payment is $6.00, and so on... Crew members also get a per diem for each hour that they stay in a location other than their base location. For example, assume that a crew member's base location is London; if she flies to Chicago and stays for 10 hours, then she will get an extra $100.00 compensation, assuming the per diem for Chicago is $10.00 per hour.
So the per-flight compensation for each of the crew member is:
The formula to calculate the monthly total pay for each crew member is:
Air-X has selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to implement their ACM system because of its flexibility and integration possibilities. The ACM system needs to integrate with an extranet portal to provide the compensation information to the flight crews. Here is a component diagram of the system:
In the Airline Compensation Management system, we have identified the entities for the system: Airport, Flight Route, Flight, Crew Member, and Compensation.
- Airport is a custom entity that contains information related to the airport. Because the airport is in a specific location within the country, it also contains the "Per Diem" information, which we are going to use for the crew's compensation calculation.
- Flight Route is a custom entity containing the route template for a specific flight. It contains the flight number, departing and arriving locations planned departure time, and estimated flying time for the flight.
- Flight is a custom entity containing the actual flight information. It is an instance of the flight route. The Flight entity has the actual flight time and flight type information, which are used for the compensation calculation.
- Crew Member is going to leverage the out-of-the-box Contact entity to store personal information for a specific crew member. Crew can see and update their personal contact data from the company portal website. This entity also has the crew member's hourly pay rate and basic salary information, which is used for compensation calculation. The crew's compensation information is only accessible by the crew member and Air-X's management team.
- Compensation is a custom activity, which is new in CRM 2011. It contains the total payment for a completed flight that the crew member worked on. The total compensation for the flight is calculated automatically after the flight record is imported from the Aircrew system.
The next screenshot shows the entity relationships in ACM. An airport can have many flight routes. For each flight route, it has many of the same flights operating at different times. Each flight needs to compensate many crew members since there are many crew members serving the passengers on the plane.
