Questions One:

1. Explain the term prescriptive analytics? What kind of problems can be solved by prescriptive analytics? Explain the term Big Data analytics.

2. Application Case 1.1 Sabre Helps Its Clients Through Dashboards and Analytics

Sabre is one of the world leaders in the travel industry, providing both business-to-consumer services as well as business-to-business services. It serves travelers, travel agents, corporations, and travel suppliers through its four main companies: Travelocity, Sabre Travel Network, Sabre Airline Solutions, and Sabre Hospitality Solutions. The current volatile global economic environment poses significant competitive challenges to the airline industry. To stay ahead of the competition, Sabre Airline Solutions recognized that airline executives needed enhanced tools for managing their business decisions by eliminating the traditional, manual, time-consuming process of aggregating financial and other information needed for actionable initiatives. This enables real-time decision support at airlines throughout the world to maximize their (and in turn Sabres) return on information by driving insights, actionable intelligence, and value for customers from the growing data.

Sabre developed an Enterprise Travel Data Warehouse (ETDW) using Teradata to hold its massive reservations data. ETDW is updated in near-real time with batches that run every 15 minutes, gathering data from all of Sabres businesses. Sabre uses its ETDW to create Sabre Executive Dashboards that provide near real-time executive insights using a Cognos BI platform with Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Goldengate technology infrastructures. The Executive Dashboards offer their client airlines top-level managers and decision makers a timely, automated, user-friendly solution, aggregating critical performance metrics in a succinct way and providing at a glance a 360-degree view of the overall health of the airline. At one airline, Sabres Executive Dashboards provide senior management with a daily and intraday snapshot of key performance indicators in a single application replacing the once-a-week, 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 Sabres customers to have a clear understanding of the data through the visual displays that incorporate interactive drill-down capabilities. It replaces flat presentations and allows for a 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 airlines multiple distribution channels. The dashboard systems provide scalable infrastructure, graphical user interface 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.

Questions for Discussion

What is traditional reporting? How is it used in the organization?

How can analytics be used to transform the traditional reporting?

How can interactive reporting assist organizations in decision making?

1. Your company is considering opening a branch in China. List typical activities in each phase of the decision (intelligence, design, choice, and implementation) of whether to open a branch.