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48 Part I • Decision Making and Analytics: An Overview

Application Case 1.1 (Continued)

time. This facilitates team dialog by making the data/ What We can Learn from this application
metrics pertaining to sales performance, including case
ticketing, seats sold and flown, operational perfor-
mance such as data on flight movement and track- This Application Case shows that organizations
ing, customer reservations, inventory, and revenue that earlier used reporting only for tracking their
across an airline’s multiple distribution channels, avail- internal business activities and meeting compliance
able to many stakeholders. The dashboard systems requirements set out by the government are now
provide scalable infrastructure, graphical user interface moving toward generating actionable intelligence
(GUI) support, data integration, and data aggregation from their transactional business data. Reporting
that empower airline executives to be more proactive has become broader as organizations are now try-
in taking actions that lead to positive impacts on the ing to analyze archived transactional data to under-
overall health of their airline. stand underlying hidden trends and patterns that
With its ETDW, Sabre could also develop other would enable them to make better decisions by
Web-based analytical and reporting solutions that lev- gaining insights into problematic areas and resolv-
erage data to gain customer insights through analysis ing them to pursue current and future market
of customer profiles and their sales interactions to cal- opportunities. Reporting has advanced to interac-
culate customer value. This enables better customer tive online reports that enable users to pull and
segmentation and insights for value-added services. quickly build custom reports as required and even
present the reports aided by visualization tools
that have the ability to connect to the database,
Questions for Discussion
providing the capabilities of digging deep into
1. What is traditional reporting? How is it used in summarized data.
organizations?
2. How can analytics be used to transform tradi- Source: Teradata.com, “Sabre Airline Solutions,” teradata.com/t/
tional reporting? case-studies/sabre-airline-solutions-eb6281 (accessed
3. How can interactive reporting assist organiza- February 2013).
tions in decision making?

priority? You are given information about customers’ profiles and relationship with the air-
line. Your decisions might change as you learn more about those customers’ profiles.
Watch the video, pause it as appropriate, and answer the questions on which pas-
sengers should be given priority. Then resume the video to get more information. After
the video is complete, you can see the slides related to this video and how the analysis
was prepared on a slide set at teradatauniversitynetwork.com/templates/download.
aspx?contentitemid=891. Please note that access to this content requires initial registration.
This multimedia excursion provides an example of how additional information made
available through an enterprise data warehouse can assist in decision making.

the dss–Bi Connection
By now, you should be able to see some of the similarities and differences between DSS
and BI. First, their architectures are very similar because BI evolved from DSS. However,
BI implies the use of a data warehouse, whereas DSS may or may not have such a feature.
BI is, therefore, more appropriate for large organizations (because data warehouses are
expensive to build and maintain), but DSS can be appropriate to any type of organization.
Second, most DSS are constructed to directly support specific decision making. BI
systems, in general, are geared to provide accurate and timely information, and they sup-
port decision support indirectly. This situation is changing, however, as more and more
decision support tools are being added to BI software packages.

M01_SHAR9209_10_PIE_C01.indd 48 1/25/14 7:46 AM