SkyWest Airlines

The intranet site is being created to address two specific issues. First, employees need a more effective avenue to communicate with upper management. Second, we are trying to give employees improved access to information about their benefits and their jobs.

SkyWest Airlines needed a way to share critical company information with their 3,500 employees. A corporate intranet was an obvious choice, but SkyWest's IT department had little time to spare for developing it. Furthermore, SkyWest realized that their commitment to maintaining fresh information on the site would place an even greater burden on their IT staff.

SkyWest chose NoWalls as its strategic web development partner for this project. This partnership allowed SkyWest to maintain control over the project while outsourcing a third of the site modules to NoWalls.

The SkyWest and NoWalls teams stayed coordinated by following the Functional Requirements document written by SkyWest. The NoWalls team then wrote a Module Design Specification for their specific assignments. These specifications allowed NoWalls to present alternate development approaches and gain SkyWest's approval for each module before any coding was begun.

The development teams also collaborated at the beginning of each module to determine how best to share processes and reuse code. Our experienced developers then created style sheets, standards, templates, and modular code that could be reused throughout the site.

To solve the problem of maintaining fresh content on the site, NoWalls built in easy-to-use content management capabilities for several modules that let different SkyWest departments take ownership of various sections of the site. For example, staff members can add information on the latest travel packages, which are then available to all employees.

NoWalls also developed a module called CrewBid, which lets pilots and flight attendants bid on the routes they want to fly for the upcoming month. CrewBid completely replaces SkyWest's paper-based bid process and in addition lets crews bid on routes from anyplace with an Internet connection, not just the airport where they're based. The CrewBid module saved SkyWest tens of thousands of dollars compared to an off-the-shelf product used by several major airlines.

The finished site makes a wide variety of information available to SkyWest's employees through a single portal. NoWalls' well-managed development process allowed us to complete the development and testing phases in 13 business days and the entire project in only 12 weeks.