In 1839 Samuel Cunard created The British and North American Steam Packet Company, called 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 Originally made up of 4 paddle steamer ships, it wouldn’t be until the late 1940’s though that the Cunard name could be etched synonymously with good quality transatlantic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 just one third of all transatlantic crossings (Cunard, n.d.).

Having its greater speed and lower cost, air transit was quickly emerging as the most well-liked method 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 in a $80 million gamble (Wikipedia, n.d.) through a replacement 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 work 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 typical 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 an organization with a fleet of old disparate liners by the 1990’s. Carnival Cruises acquired the outstanding 32% interest in 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.

Underneath 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 price of over $800 million and a disgusting 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 on the planet (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 available on land and without forfeiting modern technology, The Queen Mary 2 evokes the opulence of a prior era for the 21st century. Naturally, the incorporation of the info technology infrastructure of the Queen Mary 2 is just second to none.

From the moment that guests first arrive due to their departure, they’ve the capability to have their photograph taken at the port’s hotel, the terminal or the purser’s office aboard the ship. Additionally, their credit cards and passports are also scanned in to the ship’s property management system. Their cards then consequently can be automatically used as their room key, a method of payment aboard the ship, and identification for landing and boarding instead of carrying passports (Datz, 2004). All fall underneath the broad sounding information technology as Transaction Processing Systems or TPS (Laudon & Laudon, 2006). In accordance with 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 an intelligent card (Datz, 2004).

Atlanta divorce attorneys stateroom the Queen Mary 2 also incorporates 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 select from a total of 11 functional regions of interests such as for example 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 in addition to shop online and keep a running total of the amount of money spent 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 system ultimately benefits Cunard because it takes less people to steadfastly keep up than would a traditional system of crew handling individual transactions and reservations. Also, the system creates the chance 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 connected to the principal 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 is 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. 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 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 can record matters aboard the ship without having to get a telephone or physically track someone down. Using individual personal computers, crewmembers can report faulty machinery aboard the ship straight 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 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 to their satisfaction (Datz, 2004). Once again this aspect is a typical example of a TPS onboard the Queen Mary 2, because of the inputting of events into the system and the coordination of operational level actions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006). The AVO system aboard the Queen Mary 2 is also 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 of its utility in allowing managers to create critical decisions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006).