Cruise Line Changes BI Tack

Computerworld - In an attempt to navigate rough economic seas, Holland America Line Inc. is trading its cumbersome old big-iron-based business intelligence reporting system for a Web-based one that end users can more easily and flexibly access.

The move was triggered by the Seattle-based cruise company's decision to use improved BI tools in order to make an additional $1 million annually through more efficient sales, marketing and revenue management. This required changes to its existing reporting and analysis system.

Prior to launching the upgrade to the new reporting system a year ago, the information systems staff needed to access operations information from the company's IBM S/390 mainframe and format it into reports, says Jon Dawson, Holland America project manager.

The reports included everything from small, ad hoc inquiries to major "canned" reports that were prepared weekly to assess the company's revenue and inventory performance, says Paul Grigsby, senior revenue manager at Holland America.

To improve this system, Holland America installed software from Information Builders Inc., a New York-based BI software maker. Dawson says the cruise company implemented Information Builders' WebFocus analysis tool to connect to the mainframe through an adapter and pull out the relevant information for queries and reports. The application, which runs on a Sun Microsystems Inc. box with a single CPU, uses extract, transform and load data-prepping technology for use with Microsoft Excel or Word. The system also includes WebFocus Reporting Server, which enables users to do analysis, reporting and querying.

Dawson says that turning around report requests previously took up to two days. Using the WebFocus BI dashboard, Holland America's IS staff can fine-tune parameters and turn over reports to end users almost immediately.

Some end users even make their own reports. But in order to do that they need to be trained and, as Dawson says, "spend the time to get to know the data."

According to Grigsby, WebFocus is primarily used by revenue management personnel for the smaller reports, whereas IS staffers working off the mainframe still handle the bigger ones.

Starting Slowly

"We're still growing the system," says Dawson. "It's the tip of the iceberg."

For instance, Holland America is working to define the data needed from the ships to analyze onboard spending by department and for specific excursion purposes. The company is facing limitations because of the size of the existing database system, says Dawson, so it plans to load the information into an Oracle Corp.-based data warehouse by December.

End users are already noticing a difference. A report that required coding and printing by IS staffers and took days to complete now takes just minutes to run with WebFocus on a PC, says Grigsby. "And this is where the flexibility comes into play," he adds. "If I wish to see a different view of the same information, I can simply change the sort sequence or introduce new fields into the inquiry without having to formally request a new report from the information systems department. It makes both my time and the information systems department's time more efficient."