Dashboards provide senior management with a daily and intra-day snapshot of key performance indicators in a single application replacing the once-aweek, 8-hour process of generating the same report from various data sources. The use of dashboards is not limited to the external customers; Sabre also uses them for their assessment of internal operational performance.
The dashboards help Sabre’s customers to have a clear understanding of the data through the visual displays that incorporate interactive drilldown capabilities. It replaces flat presentations and allows for more focused review of the data with less effort and time. This facilitates team dialog by making the data/metrics pertaining to sales performance available to many stakeholders, including ticketing, seats sold and flown, operational performance including the data on flight movement and tracking, customer reservations, inventory, and revenue across an airline’s multiple distribution channels. The dashboard systems provide scalable infrastructure, graphical user interface (GUI) support, data integration, and aggregation that empower airline executives to be more proactive in taking actions that lead to positive impacts on the overall health of their airline.
With its ETDW, Sabre could also develop other Web-based analytical and reporting solutions that leverage data to gain customer insights through analysis of customer profiles and their sales interactions to calculate customer value. This enables better customer segmentation and insights for value-added services.
1. What is traditional reporting? How is it used in the organization?
2. How can analytics be used to transform the traditional reporting?
3. How can interactive reporting assist organizations in decision making?
What We Can Learn from This Application Case
This case shows that organizations that earlier used reporting only for tracking their internal business activities and meeting the compliance requirements set out by the government are now moving toward generating actionable intelligence from their transactional business data. Reporting has become broader as organizations are now trying to analyze the archived transactional data to understand the underlying hidden trends and patterns that would enable them to make better decisions by gaining insights into problematic areas and resolving them to pursue current and future market opportunities. Reporting has advanced to interactive online reports, which enable the users to pull and build quick custom reports and even present the reports aided by visualization tools that have the ability to connect to the database, providing the capabilities of digging deep into summarized data.