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Chapter 1 • An Overview of Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Decision Support 47

taBle 1.3 Business Value of BI Analytical Applications

Analytic Application Business Question Business Value
Customer segmentation What market segments do my customers fall Personalize customer relationships for higher
into, and what are their characteristics? satisfaction and retention.
Propensity to buy Which customers are most likely to respond Target customers based on their need to
to my promotion? increase their loyalty to your product line.
Also, increase campaign profitability by focusing
on the most likely to buy.
Customer profitability What is the lifetime profitability of my Make individual business interaction decisions
customer? based on the overall profitability of
customers.
Fraud detection How can I tell which transactions are likely Quickly determine fraud and take immediate
to be fraudulent? action to minimize cost.
Customer attrition Which customer is at risk of leaving? Prevent loss of high-value customers and let go
of lower-value customers.
Channel optimization What is the best channel to reach my cus- Interact with customers based on their
tomer in each segment? preference and your need to manage cost.
Source: A. Ziama and J. Kasher, Data Mining Primer for the Data Warehousing Professional. Teradata, Dayton, OH, 2004.

Application Case 1.1

Sabre Helps Its Clients Through Dashboards and Analytics
Sabre is one of the world leaders in the travel indus- data from all of Sabre’s businesses. Sabre uses its
try, providing both business-to-consumer services as ETDW to create Sabre Executive Dashboards that pro-
well as business-to-business services. It serves travel- vide near–real-time executive insights using a Cognos
ers, travel agents, corporations, and travel suppliers 8 BI platform with Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle
through its four main companies: Travelocity, Sabre Goldengate technology infrastructure. The Executive
Travel Network, Sabre Airline Solutions, and Sabre Dashboards offer their client airlines’ top-level man-
Hospitality Solutions. The current volatile global eco- agers and decision makers a timely, automated, user-
nomic environment poses significant competitive chal- friendly solution, aggregating critical performance
lenges to the airline industry. To stay ahead of the metrics in a succinct way and providing at a glance
competition, Sabre Airline Solutions recognized that a 360-degree view of the overall health of the airline.
airline executives needed enhanced tools for manag- At one airline, Sabre’s Executive Dashboards provide
ing their business decisions by eliminating the tradi- senior management with a daily and intra-day snap-
tional, manual, time-consuming process of collect- shot of key performance indicators in a single appli-
ing and aggregating financial and other information cation, replacing the once-a-week, 8-hour process of
needed for actionable initiatives. This enables real-time generating the same report from various data sources.
decision support at airlines throughout the world that The use of dashboards is not limited to the external
maximize their (and, in turn, Sabre’s) return on infor- customers; Sabre also uses them for their assessment
mation by driving insights, actionable intelligence, and of internal operational performance.
value for customers from the growing data. The dashboards help Sabre’s customers to have
Sabre developed an Enterprise Travel Data a clear understanding of the data through the visual
Warehouse (ETDW) using Teradata to hold its mas- displays that incorporate interactive drill-down capa-
sive reservations data. ETDW is updated in near-real bilities. It replaces flat presentations and allows for
time with batches that run every 15 minutes, gathering more focused review of the data with less effort and
(Continued )

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