South African Airways has embarked on a Sale Forced Automation project, which features the formation of sales based Data Warehousing "Proof of Concept" and a sophisticated global "virtual office" environment catering for the increasingly complex demands of sales staff at SAA`s 58 international offices.
The sales forced automation software developed by TeamBCA - a US-based company, revolves around the implementation of a distributed system that will facilitate the automation of SAA`s sale environment which will ultimately enable SAA`s global sales force to proactively effectively access large volumes of information provided by SAA`s MIDT (Market Information Data Tapes) data warehouse.
The MIDTs information features data acquired from several of the worlds major GDS`s (Global Distribution Systems) such as Galileo, Sabre and Amadeus, which are used by travel agents and industry for passenger reservations/bookings.
"SAA believes it will be one of a few airlines to use the MIDT data intelligently in an automated sales force environment."
The data warehouse which contains the MIDT information as well as pertinent SAA specific sales and revenue information is being housed on two NCR WorldMark 4300 Dual Pentium systems, provided by National Data Systems (NDS). This data warehouse will initially be loaded with approximately 20 Gigabytes of information on a monthly basis and could potentially expand to process up to 1 Terabyte of information per annum.
The WorldMark 4300`s are being run side-by-side with NCR`s LifeKeeper software, providing for load balancing under peak load processing, as well as fail-over from one system to the other functions in the event of systems failures. The decision to implement the WorldMark 4300 systems is in line with SAA`s data warehousing/mart strategy and will be tightly integrated in SAA`s heterogeneous systems environment, said Mike Re, marketing manager (IT & S) at SAA.
The implementation of this system is all about using the latest technology available to streamline operations, reduce costs and enhance the value added service we provide to our customers by creating a global virtual office environment. This will in turn assist SAA`s sales representatives in becoming totally mobile and proactive by ensuring that all their necessary information requirements, through the TeamBCA sales force automation solution, are on-line and easily accessible from remote locations. This service will facilitate the reduction of the administrative burden and allow them to concentrate on service delivery to their clients, added Mike Re.
Mike Re went on to described SAA data warehousing project, which incorporates a wide combination of technologies, as a "proof of concept for data warehousing" designed to provide SAA with decision-making ROI (return of investment) based information and provide conclusive evidence of the returns that can be realised from data warehousing systems, concept technologies.
"The primary concept is to create an integrated data warehouse, virtual office and distributed computing environment that will allow SAA`s sales representatives to become totally independent, and provide them with all the necessary information they require to do their jobs efficiently and keep them (in the field) as much as possible," says Mike Re. "Previously SAA`s sales staff operated very much in reactive mode, as they only had access to historical data. One of the key criteria of this project is to make them more and proactive and to minimise administrative time"
Mike Re adds "Following initial research completed in March 1997, the project is being implemented in two phases, with SAA`s South African and London branches going on-line initially, followed by a roll-out all international branches by the third quarter of 1998 and can/will be extended by including more in-depth analysis tools and functionality of the incoming MIDT data."
"Our primary objective is to improve productivity and customer service, and to identify hidden revenue opportunities and substantially reduce administrative costs.
"This new system will also allow SAA to use the data collection in the day to day business operations to maximise revenues, reduce costs while providing us with the flexibility to accommodate our changing needs and goals."
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