Holland America Sets Sail With WebFOCUS
Snapshot
| Organization Holland America Line (www.hollandamerica.com), the highest-rated premium cruise line in the world. |
| The Challenge Transform a cumbersome mainframe-reporting environment into a user-friendly information-delivery system tailored for key corporate domains. |
| The Strategy Automate ETL processes and create a flexible, Web-based business intelligence system that delivers current information to users on demand, in their choice of formats. |
| The Results WebFOCUS is boosting the efficiency of the sales, marketing, revenue management, and operations staff while making the report-writing team much more productive. |
| Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, iWay Software, and Consulting. |
Ah, the incomparable experience of life at sea. For sheer relaxation, unique adventures, and round-the-clock pampering, it's hard to top the cruise experience. Millions of people sign up for luxury cruises each year and some of them are lucky enough to sail with Holland America Line. With 12 luxury ships sailing to more than 280 ports of call on all seven continents – and more ships and tours being added each year – Holland America's commitment to providing the best in cruise vacations is confirmed by travel enthusiasts the world over.
"Our overriding aim is to make each journey an unforgettable experience for every one of our passengers," confirms Jon Dawson, a project manager in the information technology department at Holland America Line.
What does back-office technology have to do with onboard pampering? In a word, everything. Holland America relies on a diverse set of information systems to manage everything from reservations to revenue. Dawson's team is chartered with ensuring that employees can always get their hands on the information they need – whether it's statistics about ship-to-shore excursions or a summary of passenger preferences at the poolside bar. WebFOCUS from Information Builders is making their job a lot easier.
"As we roll out WebFOCUS applications, we are putting information directly in the hands of executives, managers, and operations personnel," says Dawson. "The better these employees can do their jobs, the better we can serve our customers."
Marking its 130th anniversary in 2003, Holland America offers virtually unlimited cruise and cruise-tour options that span the globe and satisfy every traveler's appetite for exploration. Over the course of the company's rich history – first as a shipping and passenger line, then as a cruise company – its fleet has carried nearly 10 million passengers on excursions of a lifetime.
While seafaring traditions have changed little during that time span, the technology behind Holland America's state-of-the-art cruise operation is continually improving. "In the past, my staff reacted to requests for information," admits Dawson, "whether it was a corporate revenue report or an analysis of shipboard expenditures for a certain class of cabin. With WebFOCUS, we are proactive for the first time ever. Instead of merely addressing a reporting backlog, we can ask ourselves, 'What is the staff going to need tomorrow?'"
An Enlightened Philosophy for Information Delivery
Dawson's view of end-user reporting echoes an ancient proverb about self-sufficiency: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. "Instead of just delivering reports, we are teaching employees how to get information for themselves," he continues. "They are no longer relying on us to provide them with reports."
This philosophy matches Information Builders' outlook for self-service reporting. The WebFOCUS Reporting Server, the hub of the WebFOCUS architecture, anchors a highly efficient business intelligence environment for end-user reporting, query, and analysis activities. With minimal training, employees can use the environment to access any data source on any platform. Intuitive drag-and-drop tools simplify the creation of richly formatted reports, and then automate their delivery in any format.
Holland America has been a mainframe shop for many years. Much of its operational data is stored in a relational database, formerly accessed via an ad hoc reporting tool that provides low-level access to data but is not very flexible or easy to use. "We lacked a central reporting hub, a way to easily combine diverse information sources in a cohesive way," Dawson says. "That's where WebFOCUS has been such a big help."
Holland America evaluated several reporting solutions before selecting Information Builders' WebFOCUS. "We were drawn to Information Builders for its extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tools and its comprehensive reporting environment," Dawson says. "WebFOCUS met our four primary criteria: It can access multiple data formats; it offers multiple information-delivery options; it enables multiple output formats; and it allows all levels of users to generate reports."
Smooth Sailing With Information Builders Consulting
Dawson dedicated one person on his team to spearhead the WebFOCUS implementation, enlisting help from Information Builders Consulting to get the project under way. "The consulting services were phenomenal," he recalls. "Information Builders helped with the ETL processes to migrate data from the mainframe and also helped us develop our first reporting environment. They were great to work with. It was a very fast and effective development cycle."
Dawson's primary objective was to improve access to information from the central reservation system. His secondary objective was to bring data from all existing applications and systems together into Microsoft Excel. To accomplish these goals, he set up domains within the WebFOCUS Report Server for individual departments like sales, operations, marketing, and revenue management.
Developers Bill Andersen and Hal Durden used the WebFOCUS Report Painter to create reports for each domain. In less than three months, they delivered an operational data store containing agency booking information from the reservation system. Then, in another six weeks, they used WebFOCUS to set up a reporting environment for booking Shore Excursions via the Web.
Most of the reporting data is staged from IDMS to an Oracle data mart on a UNIX platform. Developers used the IDMS adapter from iWay Software, an Information Builders Company, to create a direct path to these important mainframe data sources. "As we got further along with the project we wanted to download dimension tables," Dawson recalls. "If we didn't have the IDMS adapter, we would have had to write extracts to obtain that information. iWay made the job a lot easier."
Full Speed Ahead With WebFOCUS
Through WebFOCUS ReportCaster, Holland America is automating the scheduling, distribution, and storage of WebFOCUS reports as well as production reports and files generated on the mainframe. Each report can be automatically sent to Web browsers, e-mail addresses, fax machines, printers, or mobile devices.
"ReportCaster gives us exceptional control over when reports are run and how they are distributed," notes Dawson. "We can even use it to move our legacy mainframe reports into the WebFOCUS Report Library so users can find everything in one place." Thanks to its intelligent bursting capabilities, WebFOCUS can deliver different versions of the same report to many different users. "We've recreated many of the old reports and lots of new ones – all with fewer people," he adds.
Dawson is now working on a project to consolidate shipboard account information so managers can more easily track onboard spending. "In the past, we had a dual revenue formula: one for the initial booking and another for onboard purchases," he explains. "We lacked an integrated set of information systems for tracking and analyzing these two sets of results."
WebFOCUS can easily combine the two different information sources, making it much easier to determine the total value of each booking and generate statistics about successful promotions. "We want to be able to calculate total spending per category," continues Dawson. "For example, if somebody books a class-C cabin, we will have a pretty good idea what the average booking will cost and what the average onboard expenditures will be. This will give us advance insight into what various promotions will yield in the long run."
Into the Sunset
Dawson is pleased with the team's quick progress but says they have only scratched the surface of what's available with WebFOCUS. With each reporting application, they get a little smarter, a little more profitable, and a little better equipped to respond to the needs of the corporation. He sees a quick payback on their investment in WebFOCUS and iWay. "For a cruise line that moves about 500,000 passengers per year, I figure if we can improve our revenue by even two dollars per passenger, that will add an additional one million dollars every year to the bottom line," he says.
Dawson and his team look forward to using WebFOCUS Report Library to set up a report archive for senior management. They also plan to take advantage of the financial reporting capabilities of WebFOCUS 5 in conjunction with Oracle Financials. Finally, they hope to build a data mart of passenger information to enable new marketing initiatives.
"We're seeing increased demand as people catch on to how powerful this software is, so each project leads to several more," he concludes. "We have already boosted efficiency for our sales, marketing, revenue management, and operations personnel, and we're making our report writing staff much more productive as well. I'm confident we now have the reporting tools that we will need for many years to come."
