Application Description
SSR Travel is a travel agency with over 280 employees in 17 locations. The company is a cooperative, owned by the employees, and it focuses primarily on student travel, with an objective of helping students learn about other lands, cultures and languages. The company has gross revenues of 300 Million sF per year, and books over 50,000 trips per year.

Customer Requirements
SSR Travel was interested in using their accumulated database to develop a marketing database for improving bookings and efficiency. A sales proposal was made jointly with an IBM Sales Representative, offering a solution using a new 40S and SAMAC MIT/400. The data from the operational application was loaded into the MIT/400 OLAP database. SAMAC then designed and built two data marts that allowed SSR Travel to perform analyses of their marketing and product data by providing views of the booking and travel arrangements, length of time before travel the trip was booked, airlines used, departure sites, destinations, time of year, and other variables.
With the Marketing data mart, SSR Travel has been able to change their business almost immediately, having discovered that their mailed advertisement was either too early or too late to impact potential customer's bookings, and this change will result in both improved bookings and reduced advertisement costs. This payback should be almost immediate.

Follow Up Business
In October, SSR Travel has asked SAMAC to build another data models to handle all of the financials dealing with their business, tracking business expenses and margin, to allow them to focus on improving their business and return.

Distinguishing Factors
Most important was the short time in which a new data mart can be designed and brougth to productive use. SAMAC offers initially a prototyping, in average about a week. During this prototyping a first datamart is built, populated with the relevant data, and the adaptions to the customers frontend of choice are done. The solution is then taken to the production environment.

Value to the Customer
"SSR's expectations towards IBM's ability to perform is always very high. After only 10 days, our sales and marketing database with MIT/400 was completely up and running. Advanced frontends and reports, built to our specifications were available, reducing the cost of training. SAMAC performed beyond our expectations, and I can highly recommend SAMAC's data warehouse."

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