Beyond the IT Department: Empowering business users to

leverage data

Lee Eckersley

Head of Business Analysis

alpharooms.com

About alpharooms.com

New RWD website released in Nov 2013

A simplistic view of how an OTA operates

Marketing

Overheads

Commission/Margin

Right Product

Right Price

Sales Funnel

Marketing

Attract the right people to the site at the lowest possible cost.

£

Never had a dedicated Business Intelligence Analyst.

Existing reporting designed and developed by DBA’s/Developers in IT.

Most reporting came from a single SSAS cube accessed through Excel, that gave a view of the company General Ledger.

No visualisation except for charts in Excel.

SSRS (2005) was used for some reporting but was found to be slow to develop and poor in visualisation.

Only people comfortable with Excel pivots could get any sort of performance reporting.

The Starting Point

BI Maturity Model

Alpharooms - Mar 2012

The first challenge – The Booking view of the Business

The General Ledger view of the business had a number of pitfalls, so a booking view of the business was required.

Reporting required on an individual, product sale level, taking generic information from the Itin and Booking Level, without the complications of financial comings and goings like cancellations and modifications.

This was only available through SQL queries, so a new platform for this data was required that would allow self service reporting.

The Selection Process

What I could findWhat I had used What I heard of

Too Expensive

Too Expensive

Too Expensive

Within Budget

But required

Consultants

Could not get

to grips with it

Why we chose SiSense Prism

Elasticube Manager provided an extremely easy way to connect to our database.

Report development environment was easy to use and extremely fast to build up dashboards and reports with instant results.

Two click publishing to the web, easy to share dashboards.

Crunched large amounts of data very fast.

Ease of creating Hierarchies with drill down and expand functionality.

No IT overhead required, no consultants required.

Elasticube Manager – Data Connectors

Elasticube Manger, allows you to access a number of sources of data without the need for any coding, just point it at your data sets.

Elasticube Manager

Once you have used the data connector you can then use drag and drop functionality to join all your data sets together, using the table’s Primary and Foreign keys.

This creates a full outer join between the tables, so when you use the BI studio to create dashboards, you can just link to one table, or retrieve data from multiple tables that have a relationship.

This was perfect for the booking view of the Business to allow reporting at the different levels required.

Self Service Reporting

A suite of interactive, self service dashboard style reporting was created for our overseas hotel contracting team, allowing them to look at several views of the data, to get the insight required from the data

Typical Self Service Report

Typical self service report allows a number of filters on the data, in this case so that the information can be filtered at a Destination Level all the way down to Hotel.

A range of date filters can be applied.

The user can choose which metric columns they wish to be displayed in the Pivot.

They key KPI’s are shown in graphical format.

The Pivot allows drill down/Expand functionality to look at the data at a deeper level.

Hierarchies – Drill Down and Expand

Hierarchies are created through just simple drag and drop, and allow you to drill down in to any data field you wish, you do not have to have pre-programmed specific Geographical and Channel hierarchies, in the below example the user can drill down through geographical hierarchies like Destination, Resort and Hotel and then jump in to rate provider details. It also allows you to jump from any level above to any level below, so for example you can see a breakdown of all vendors at a Destination level, you do not have to drill down to a specific hotel first.

BI Maturity Model Revisited

Alpharooms - Sep 2012

One Down Many to go

Web Analytics

Call Centre Sales

Marketing

Customer Services

Content

Competitor Pricing

Google Analytics/Dc Storm/Raw SQL

SSRS/Excel/Phone software provider

DC Storm/Google Adwords/SSAS/Excel

SSAS/Phone software provider

SSRS- List reports

Raw SQL/Excel

Further Empower the Business Users

All Business data imported into Data Warehouse and governed by the Business Analysis department.

Business Analysis department creates Elasticubes for most business units.

Business Users given access to the development environment.

UK based product employees who regularly travel given full install on their laptops, and carry a cached version of the data.

20 out of the 30 Users given access to Development environment.

Time for an upgrade

Business Intelligence data spread across 3 reporting servers, the main one was around 8 years old, which had a few sticky plasters attached,runningon Windows Server 2008 R2.

Prism was installed on a standard developer spec PC with just 8GB of RAM.

What we had

Now

New reporting server built, has multiple multi-core processors, 32GB of RAM, SSD drives, and runs on Windows Server 2012.

Prism reinstalled on this server and Elasticubes saved on the SSD drives.

Prism Web users updated from individual sign on to Active Directory access.

The right tool for the job

The right tool for the job

Whilst the rest of the company was seeing a bit of a data revolution, in a dark corner of IT a new report was being created, it was to interact with the Adwords API and our sales database.

MongoDB was chosen as the platform

A complete website was developed with the plan of multiple functionality.

The most important part was the reporting.

9 Months of development.

2 Month of attempted upgrades and bug fixing.

Approx Six Figure Development.

After all this was not delivering what was required.

The right tool for the job

Rethink was required.

Exported data from Adwords Client Reporting and created an Import routine into SQL tables.

SQL used to create reporting tables.

Prism used for Reporting UI.

Total development time, two days to get to what we had.

Backlog of nice to have’s completed in the third day.

Solution to automatically update the reporting completed by the fifth day.

IT project de-comissioned by day six.

The Impact BI has on an Alpharooms customer

Right Product BI helps to identify poor content (low image counts/short descriptions,

missing facilities) BI helps make sure we have every wholesaler which is available to the

Hotel. BI helps identify Hotels/Airlines/Routes missing from the site. BI helps identify Destination’s needing attention. BI helps identify issues with searches on site through conversion

monitoring.

Right Price BI helps the buying team to get the best rates available.

BI helps the pricing team set competitive rates, allowing checking of tens of thousands of prices daily.

After Sales Customer enquiries are being dealt with in sufficient time. Staffing levels are correct for shorter call waiting. Recurring issues are identified and resolved at source.

BI Maturity Model Revisited

Alpharooms –Nov 2013

Questions