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TDWI Best Practices Awards

Airlines Reporting Corporation

Copyright © TDWI

Randy Black, ARC VP Technology Services and Richard Zbylut, TDWI General Manager.

2007 Category Winner:
Operational BI

Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) is an airline-owned company offering financial settlement solutions and data and analytical services to airlines, travel agencies, airports, and travel industry analysts. ARC’s cross-functional Data & Analytical Product team manages ARC COMPASS®, a data warehouse that captures and analyzes information related to air travel ticketing and holds 39 months of historical data.

Business Impact

ARC has centralized and simplified industry reporting in virtually every internal decision-making and workflow function. The result is significant tangible and intangible cost reductions.

ARC’s company’s first BI application, ARC Document Retrieval Service, helped the company realize $12.5 million in core cost reduction related to shipping fewer paper ticket coupons as the industry became fully electronic. In addition, ARC mines data on behalf of external customers. The results help travel industry customers create targeted marketing plans, assess incentive programs, and optimize promotions. ARC also offers insight for route and network planning, sales trends, customer behavior, demand forecasts, statistical profiles, point of sale analysis, and targeted marketing campaigns.

Maturity

While most data warehouses are internally focused on sales, customer behavior, and supply chain optimization, ARC’s vision was to provide a travel industry solution to customers and give them the resources of an industry data warehouse.

The Data & Analytical Products business line has experienced better than 100 percent revenue growth in each of the past two fiscal years. ARC offers more than 60 revenue-generating reporting products, and launches five new revenue-generating products each year.

Relevance

• ARC has implemented a comprehensive best-practice data governance framework through the assignment of data custodians and data stewards.
• The data provisioning team provides data integrity through modeling of the data across business, operational, and technical levels. This team also supports ongoing infrastructure initiatives.
• ARC develops many of its products and services through an iterative prototyping methodology. Prototypes of reports and even analytical front-end applications are developed very quickly and are easily modified.

Innovation

ARC was the first organization in the industry to comply with the payment card industry data security standard, and also complies with the European Union Safe Harbor program. With its entry into BI/DW solutions, ARC has expanded existing market segments and developed new segments. The company has significantly expanded its marketing list services with ARC COMPASS®. ARC can now provide highly customized marketing lists for destination marketing organizations, airlines, and various service providers.

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