Sabre Holdings Takes Off With iWay Data Quality Center

Global Travel Solutions Provider Improves Reliability and Integrity of Its Airport Data Intelligence Solution

Sabre Holdings Corporation is a Texas-based company with approximately 9,000 employees. As a world leader in the travel marketplace, Sabre offers products, distribution, and technology solutions.

The company has made innovation its business. It built the first computer reservations system in the 1960s, blazed the trail for online travel in the 1990s, and delivered sophisticated, cutting-edge travel solutions – such as Sabre Airport Data Intelligence (ADI), which helps clients study trends over a seven-year period. For example, if an airline wants to open a new route, it can review origin and destination data. Or, an airport can analyze traffic patterns to predict flight capacities or plan connections.

Because hundreds of customers depend on Sabre ADI as an accurate, online source of demand and schedule information, data quality is of the utmost importance. Each month, a global database is populated with seven to eight million rows of historic and future passenger booking information derived from various booking and ticketing data sources, government entities, and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) Billing and Settlement Plan. The value of this information is inestimable, since it will impact the routes, schedules, and even the fares that travelers depend on when they book a trip. Yet, in spite of manual quality assurance processes conducted by Sabre employees, the database was plagued with discrepancies and other issues.

Information Builders' iWay Data Quality Center (DQC) was purchased to automate data quality control from end-to-end. The DQC includes a Data Profiler that conducts comprehensive analysis on the data to ensure its integrity and accuracy. With iWay, Sabre can take a proactive approach to data quality management, identifying common errors before information is loaded into the ADI database. Information is now more accurate and reliable, resulting in improved customer satisfaction. Additionally, the company has increased staff efficiency through the elimination of manual data quality activities.

Turbo-Charging Data Quality Efforts

According to Darren Rickey, vice president of solutions management, AirVision Marketing and Planning, Sabre Airline Solutions, Sabre devotes a tremendous amount of time and effort to ensuring data quality. Sabre's data quality efforts consisted primarily of focused, targeted analyses based on individual client needs.

"iWay allows us to take a proactive approach to data quality," Rickey states. "The objective is to identify and correct discrepancies as the data is loaded, so it has been scrubbed, audited, and certified as accurate before customers ever see it. This way, when clients contact us, it's not to tell us about problems, but to recommend enhancements.

"iWay Data Quality Center can cleanse many months of data in a fraction of the time of manually issuing SQL queries," he explains. "One analysis that formerly took 10 hours was completed by iWay in one minute. iWay is smart enough and flexible enough to either find and fix or find and alert us to issues, and it can self-correct problems so it doesn't hold up a load procedure."

Pre-Flight Check: Selecting the Most Capable Tools

Sabre selected iWay after a close examination of several integration vendors. As part of this evaluation process, iWay Software created a proof of concept using four months of data to prove that its data quality tools were up to the task. In just three days, the team installed the software, loaded the data, and wrote several audit procedures. "The proof of concept demonstrated iWay's sophisticated data-cleansing and data-enrichment capabilities by manipulating several million records in less than a minute," notes Rickey.

iWay DQC uses parallel data-processing methods to ensure scalability and enable incremental data processing for both batch and on-demand processing. The solution is also easy to configure. It uses bundled administration applications and does not require any external tools or third-party applications. The product ships with ready-to-use data quality modules for creating profiles, reports, and business tasks. Due to the unmatched breadth and connectivity of the iWay adapter family, it is easy to integrate with any existing IT infrastructure. The software helps Sabre create audits and business rules to resolve data discrepancies such as incorrect airport codes, missing revenue figures, and inconsistent or incorrect flight capacity numbers.

"iWay demonstrated a very intuitive drag-and-drop environment," sums up Rickey. "The Sabre personnel watching the demo found it easy to deploy and use."

Gaining Altitude With iWay DQC

After purchasing the software, Sabre employees attended iWay training, and then worked with Information Builders Professional Services to create a series of audits for scrubbing data and detecting data quality problems within the ADI database.

At the end of the six-week Professional Services engagement, 20 audits had been completed covering 90 percent of the audits that the Sabre team wanted to create. Those 20 audits touch 95 percent of the data that is loaded on a monthly basis. "We are extremely excited to have 95 percent of our database undergoing monthly audits after only six weeks," comments Rickey.

Once fully deployed, iWay DQC will serve as a centralized management hub for business rules, data quality, and data flows. Many clients are praising Sabre's commitment to data quality and its investment in an industry-leading data quality management solution. Because iWay DQC automatically audits its quality-control processes, Sabre can share these reports with clients to boost their confidence in the reliability of the ADI.

"We have an inherently good feeling about the accuracy of the data now that iWay is an independent guardian doing the work for us," Rickey concludes. "Clients often ask us to gauge the accuracy of the data, and now we can share iWay audit reports with them. The security that stems from good data quality pays for itself. We have never lost a client because of data quality, and our investment in iWay demonstrates our ongoing commitment in this area."