Italian tourism group CIT (Compagnia Italiana Turismo) incorporates a whole galaxy of companies which offer products and services in the tourism sector. Well known as tour operators in Italy and abroad, CIT also manages hotels and holiday villages among other things.
Last year CIT embarked on yet another expedition and has recently arrived at their planned destination - a Business Intelligence platform with a distributed architecture, from which the group’s central offices and 85 travel agencies can get information, analyses and summaries relating to single indicators of company performance, monitoring of trends and sales forecasting.
Based on an AS/400 model 730 server equipped with release 4.5 of the operating system, the information infrastructure of the CIT group utilizes an intranet connecting the entire periphery so that all agencies of the network are able to dialogue directly with the Host. A two-pronged management system – Atlante and Tropico - supports both sales and brokering activities developed by the Siap software house. Atlante provides the management platform for the travel agency side, while Tropico provides the same for the tour operating business. To make effective use of this architecture and their Windows environment, CIT also needed a Management Intelligence tool that could receive information not only from the AS/400, but from other source systems as well.
Enter BOARD International’s Management Intelligence Toolkit, BOARD. The first true Management Intelligence toolkit designed for rapid development of both sophisticated reporting and analysis, as well as highly complex analytic applications. “The data we load into BOARD”, explains Andrea Scinardo, Business Intelligence manager for CIT Online, the company that supplies the group with the full gamut of ICT services, “can also come from a variety of external sources as well, in the form of Excel worksheets, Access databases or text files.”
CIT Online is currently setting up an office with a staff of three people who will be dedicated entirely to the development of Business Intelligence applications for CIT using BOARD Says Scinardo, “The installation, configuration and a substantial contribution to the process of building the first cubes and the definitive database have been provided by Pragma Inform. Today, on the basis of the inquiries we receive from users and after having verified the feasibility, we can put together multidimensional models in rapid time, regardless of their size and the source of the data.”
The cubes can also be built using projections of likely sales figures, after which the entire model can be subjected to periodic comparisons. Once available, processed data can be published on the company intranet in the form of HTML pages and displayed without difficulty. This means that both top management and individual agencies can scrutinize performance figures by line-of-business using sectional and detail views, and examine the exact state of sales activities by analyzing income and margins on brokerage by reference to standard coefficients.