Data Warehousing Fundamentals for IT Professionals

APPENDIX E

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES OF BEST PRACTICES*

This appendix contains a few typical examples of best practices in the application of data warehousing and business intelligence. Many more such examples may be found by researching on the Internet and elsewhere.

AIRLINES

American Airlines serves more than 250 cities in 41 countries, with 1100 airplanes and about 4400 daily flights. The airline processes about 125 million transportation documents on an annual basis. It is important for the company to detect fraudulent ticket processing, track ticket sales properly, and ensure that proper revenue is flowing in. But because of the complexity of the airline industry and the amount of data involved in ticket transactions, accomplishing this is no small task. With the amount of data created by all these ticket documents, American Airlines needed a more efficient system that would help ensure proper amounts of earned revenue on ticket sales.

American Airlines now has the data warehouse named RADAR (Revenue Account Data Access Resource) to detect fraudulent ticket processing, track ticket sales properly, and ensure that proper revenue is flowing into the company. RADAR enables expert business analysts to quickly query and sort through large amounts of data. RADAR has produced savings to American Airlines in millions of dollars through detection of fraudulent ticketing.

SPECIALTY TEXTILES

SAERTEX GmbH & Co. KG is a specialist manufacturer of high-tech textiles for the aviation, automotive, ...