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 consists of 4 paddle steamer ships, it would not be before the late 1940’s though that the Cunard name could 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 one third of transatlantic crossings (Cunard, n.d.).

Having its greater speed and lower cost, air transit was quickly emerging as 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 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 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 merely renowned as one of many 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 was able to dynamically capitalize upon its lengthy historical brand recognition alongside the lowered costs connected 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.

Regardless of 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% fascination with 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 was of unprecedented proportion. Dubbed the Queen Mary 2, at a high 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 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 earth (Wikipedia, n.d.).

The Queen Mary 2 was designed to be an all-inclusive fully functioning entity unto itself, having the ability to function such as a self-contained city (Datz, 2004). Providing every possible comfort on land and without forfeiting modern tools, The Queen Mary 2 evokes the opulence of a prior era for the 21st century. Needless to say, the incorporation of the info technology infrastructure of the Queen Mary 2 is simply second to none.

From the moment that guests first arrive for his or her departure, they have the ability to have their photograph taken at the port’s hotel, the terminal or the purser’s office up to speed the ship. In addition, their bank cards and passports will also be scanned 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 instead of carrying passports (Datz, 2004). All fall underneath the broad category of 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 very first cruise liner to provide those capabilities in a good card (Datz, 2004).

In every 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 areas 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 never to only book reservations, but also to look online and keep a running 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 requires less people to keep up than would a traditional system of crew handling individual transactions and reservations. Also, the machine 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 linked to the principal organization operations center housing many servers, a PBX communications system and a public address system that serves while 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 handles both crew and passenger information. The property management system controls the ship’s credit based invoice system as well as 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 is able to record matters aboard the ship without having to pick up a phone or physically track someone down. Using individual personal computers, crewmembers can report faulty machinery aboard the ship right to maintenance. Passengers also have the ability to inform maintenance of any troubles they may 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 in which 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 machine and the coordination of operational level actions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006). The AVO system up to speed the Queen Mary 2 can also be connected with the ship’s planned maintenance and purchasing system. Supervisors can determine from the info which repairs must take precedence over others (Datz, 2004). This part of the AVO system therefore serves as a Decision Support System or DSS due to its utility in allowing managers to produce critical decisions (Laudon & Laudon, 2006).