Case Study: Reclaiming Reliability From a Fractured Reporting & Analytics System

Challenge This global online travel company faced a series of decision-making crises because of unreliable , reporting and analytics from one of its customer operations centers. Information problems ranging from quality and consistency to usability and availability eroded company-wide confidence in product selection, marketing and vendor management decisions. The operations center, contending with an information system pieced together at various stages of the organization’s development, contacted Point B to identify the causes of their data problems and propose solutions. Within three months the Point B team had them on a path forward with a functioning accountability process, technology and fixes and steps for achieving optimization of the enterprise’s and reporting systems.

Unraveling root causes architecture recommendations were Point B worked with business and implemented: technology leaders in the operations 1. Establish a data steward role to center and across the organization to “The Enterprise Data drive accountability diagnose specific pain points. We 2. Initiate transfer & consolidation of performed a deep assessment of the Warehouse consolidation data into the Enterprise Data associated data architecture, , effort is going particularly Warehouse to address integration, technology, management processes consistency and accessibility well and had Point B not and organizational operating models. 3. Employ a data dictionary (created come in and done what What we learned was enlightening to by Point B) as a reference point for data quality, format and purpose they did, the changes that our client—that their system was breaking down on multiple levels related Rapid gains have put this on a good to data quality, isolated silos of This organization’s data issues involved information, overly complex reporting track simply wouldn't have multiple business divisions as well as architecture and lack of an the operations center’s own technology happened. I credit our accountability system to address issues and processes. By accepting this view as they surfaced. success with this track to our client is now able to proactively Point B.” Clear path forward manage nearly all the factors that Working closely with the client to compromise data quality, thus reducing consider relevant perspectives— enterprise-wide vulnerabilities. VP OF REPORTING & business, technology and process—we ANALYTICS, GLOBAL ONLINE Within the first two months of following defined the information system’s ideal TRAVEL COMPANY our roadmap, the organization reports future state. We then created a significantly improved reporting roadmap for solving the most critical efficiency and accountability. They are problems in the short-term, continuing engaged in a fundamental redesign of through medium- and long-term steps to their source data, making considerable achieve the desired future state. In gains in their EDW consolidation efforts addition to outlining tactical fixes for and confidence in their decisions. specific data, ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process and source data problems, our governance and

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