Customers

Sabre Holdings Corporation

Sabre"BusinessObjects has enabled us to save $30,000 a month and has helped improve service for our customers dramatically."

Alicia Gardner
Director, eServices, Sabre Travel Network
Sabre Holdings Corporation

Challenge

As a leading global provider of travel products and distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry, Sabre Holdings Corporation is committed to connecting people to the world’s greatest travel possibilities. The Texas-based company supports travelers, travel agencies, corporations, and travel suppliers with products from three major lines of business – Sabre Travel Network, Sabre Airline Solutions, and Travelocity. Products from Business Objects, an SAP company, support Sabre across the entire enterprise.

Before implementing the BusinessObjects™ business intelligence (BI) system, reporting was a time-consuming process. “Our reporting was all manual, and mostly done in Excel or Microsoft Access,” says Traci Sullivan, lead of the business intelligence center (BIC) at Sabre. “You’d have to wait for a database administrator to do an extract before you could even look at the data. And the tools were client-specific, so the data could only be shared via email.”

Reporting was also a challenge for Sabre’s call-center operations. As director of operations, support, and planning within the sales and customer care branch of Travelocity, one of Scott Quigley’s responsibilities is ensuring efficient call-center operation. Prior to adopting the enterprisewide Business Objects solution, Quigley’s team struggled with laborious, inefficient reporting. “Reporting out of the Siebel call-center system was limited, as it was done against the production database,” says Quigley. “This severely impacted the responsiveness of our front-line customer care agents, while customers were waiting on the line. BusinessObjects changed that by allowing us to extract data from the production system and move it into a data warehouse, from which we can safely provide our users with the reporting and analysis capabilities they need to be more effective.”

Refund processing was another challenge with the old system. “When customers call for a refund, it’s a critical time in our relationship with them,” says Quigley. “How we handle these requests makes a big difference in their view of us – and we weren’t doing as well as we could. Even though the Siebel database captured all the data on refunds, we couldn’t retrieve the information in a way that would allow us to understand and streamline the refund process. Not surprisingly, we were getting customer complaints.” Clearly, Sabre needed to make some changes.

Approach

Faced with the reporting and performance challenges, Sabre looked to BusinessObjects software. Management of the BusinessObjects license, application, architecture, and servers is centralized under BIC lead Sullivan, who says, “We implemented BusinessObjects after identifying an opportunity during an enterprise assessment of capabilities and architecture.”

Sabre’s vision encompasses enterprise information management (EIM). “Being able to manage information is a basic requirement of doing business,” explains Sullivan. “So we took a step back to look at how we could implement a system that would allow us to quickly, flexibly, and consistently flow information from any of our databases out to the people who need it. Our information infrastructure from Business Objects allows us to do just that.” Sabre deploys BusinessObjects XI Release 2, BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®, BusinessObjects Data Integrator, and a range of other BusinessObjects information, discovery, and delivery (IDD) and EIM software.

Using BusinessObjects IDD tools, Travelocity publishes reports to hotel partners and call-center locations, Sabre Travel Network runs reports on travel agencies for internal use and hosts an online website for subscribing agencies, and Sabre Airline Solutions presents reports via an external portal for airline customers, including major carriers and food service providers. Sabre’s tax department uses BusinessObjects when creating tax statements for audit purposes, and its purchasing team uses the software to monitor open purchase orders. In all, BusinessObjects connects to more than 180 individual databases – providing business insight to approximately 3,500 internal users and thousands more outside the company.

Results

Travelocity’s Quigley sees enormous benefit in the use of BusinessObjects software. “In my part of the business, the biggest difference has been with our Siebel data,” says Quigley. “We get the data out of the Siebel production environment and into a data mart, and then turn it into actionable information. The Business Objects solution helps protect our infrastructure, enhance call-center performance, and improve customer satisfaction.”

With reporting efforts reduced from weeks to minutes, Sullivan’s BIC staff receives plenty of positive feedback on the value of the Business Objects system. “It used to take the financial analysts several weeks to find our revenue apportionment for taxes,” says Sullivan. “Now they can run a report in BusinessObjects, and get the data they need to prepare the tax documents in a matter of minutes.”

The use of BusinessObjects software has also proven transformational in the area of refund processing. “With Business Objects, we have reports that show exactly how long each refund has been outstanding, and who owns it,” says Quigley. “We can understand the workflow and see exactly where the challenges are.” As a result, Sabre has adjusted processes and policies, including the development of incentives. “We’ve improved turnaround time significantly,” says Quigley. “At this point, we get very few refund-related escalations from customers.”

Alicia Gardner, director of eServices in the Sabre Travel Network, also appreciates the value of BusinessObjects. The eServices website provides self-service and support for travel agency customers. “We house airfare, car, hotel, tour, and cruise content from multiple suppliers in our system,” explains Gardner. “The travel agencies carry out reservations for the end consumer, and with eServices, they can easily check their booking levels to make sure they’re meeting contractual obligations for booking volume.” Prior to implementing the self-service model using BusinessObjects, eServices manually prepared and delivered approximately 5,000 reports every month. Gardner says, “Now, we can quickly give our customers the information they need to run their business, including booking information, system transaction counts, equipment configuration, help desk calls, and contract details. BusinessObjects has enabled us to save $30,000 a month and has helped improve service for our customers dramatically.”

Sabre plans to expand its use of BusinessObjects. “We have a performance management project in the concept phase, which will deliver key information to executives via a portal or even on their BlackBerrys,” says Sullivan. “And of course, we’ll continue to use BusinessObjects Data Integrator to consolidate data sources. Our BusinessObjects system gives everybody access to the same, consistent data – which is of immense value across the entire company.”

“Information is our most important asset, and the information infrastructure we’ve implemented using BusinessObjects allows us to leverage it inside and outside our organization,” says Sullivan. “From customer service to partner self-service, from tax auditing to purchase order monitoring – no matter which database the data resides in, we can get it out to people in a form suitable for each of them, to allow them to help drive our business forward.”

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