Johannesburg, 30 Oct 2003
Rennies Travel is in the process of rolling out a business intelligence project with IT infrastructure and solutions provider, Datacentrix. The project will provide the travel company`s corporate customers with a solution that will enable them to analyse staff`s corporate travel data, including car hire, restaurant and hotel information.
Rennies Travel has provided South Africans, and visitors to the country, with the full spectrum of business and leisure travel services for almost 50 years. The company has 26 branches nation-wide, 60 foreign exchange bureaux, and a further 57 in-house offices, supplying dedicated travel support to major corporate customers.
Lynn Howarth, general manager at Rennies Travel, confirms the company wanted to be able to provide customers with in-depth information in order to facilitate efficient tracking of corporate travel expenditure.
Wikus Combrinck, business intelligence manager at Datacentrix, adds that Rennies Travel needed a tool that would allow for greater flexibility and access to management information, was user-friendly and provided timeous information.
"Rennies Travel needed a system that could automate the process of identifying trends, empowering account managers to drive change leading to improved decision-making. The company also wanted to centralise all information and control the access centrally, doing away with the disparate process used before.
"Based on these prerequisites, it was decided that ProClarity`s Web-deployed analytical tool, ProClarity Professional, would allow both internal users and customers, regardless of location, to take advantage of the collective analyses and knowledge of the enterprise," says Combrinck. Rennies` clients will also be able to perform their own data analysis via the Web.
As a third-party OLAP analytical platform for Microsoft Analysis Services, ProClarity Professional is a solution that provides sophisticated data analysis to support the decision-making process. At Rennies Travel, 10 different OLAP cubes are used to analyse information. "The nightly data update of the cubes allows users access to the sales information of the previous day without impacting normal Rennies Travel operations," says Combrinck.
The second phase of the project will see the addition of further OLAP cubes that will enable Rennies Travel`s financial staff to take advantage of the solution, says Howarth. "Datacentrix won this contract based on a successful existing relationship with Rennies. The organisation`s quality, cost-effective service offerings, strong BEE profile and sound balance sheet were also key considerations in our decision-making," she adds.
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