This customer success story discusses real business impact and ROI achieved through the use of Teradata solutions, and in particular, the dual active platform. Airlines Reporting Corporation is a carrier-owned service bureau that provides financial settlement and sales reporting services for the air travel industry. With deregulation of the U.S. airline industry in 1984, ARC was incorporated as an airline-owned financial clearinghouse. Today the firm serves 147 air and rail carriers and more than 21,000 accredited travel agencies and corporate travel departments.
Aimed at streamlining process and reducing costs, ARC had three primary business objectives, all achieved with Teradata solutions:
1. Reduce industry reliance on expensive paper-based ticketing
2. Reduce ticket fraud
3. Develop a shared business intelligence capability
ARC's Teradata warehouse has undergone two significant upgrades, the most significant by far being a complete technology refresh in 2005 that gave the firm a fully redundant dual active platform. The seeds of that transition were sown at the 2003 Partners conference. Over the next 18 months, the idea evolved into a detailed business plan to dramatically enhance the data warehouse's technical and financial performance by redesigning the architecture of the warehouse environment. The decision to proceed was based on three specific objectives:
1. Reduce operating costs
2. Improve the return on ARC's data warehouse investment
3. Enhance disaster recovery capabilities
The story provides further details of how the dual active implementation has allowed the ARC team to meet its financial, performance and strategic objectives.
