Swissport, one of the largest infrastructure companies which serves 600 airlines at over 170 airports worldwide, announced it has signed a deal with open source business intelligence player Pentaho.
The firm said Pentaho will be its standard corporate management reporting environment. Beyond reporting, Swissport will also use Pentaho BI Suite for data integration and interactive analysis.
Uwe Geercken, IT manager at Swissport, explained the decision process: “We needed fully functional reporting and data integration tools but wanted to see if an open source alternative would give us a similar experience to Oracle. After looking at what was out there, Pentaho had the complete tool set, and after further testing, our users noticed no difference in the features they need. Our business partnership with Pentaho partner, Linalis, who provided first-rate consultancy and knowledge transfer, has allowed Swissport to be self sustaining for future developments.”
Airline passengers use Swissport services such as Passport Check-in, Lost and Found daily, while 600 airlines at over 170 airports worldwide use its services for aircraft pushback, cargo handling and de-icing. As the first part of a global roll-out programme, Swissport’s top 100 senior executives will use Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition to review operational and strategic data spanning 40 countries.
Using Pentaho Data Integration, the Swissport data warehouse will pull in operational data from several different data sources to combine and integrate financial, flight and cargo data, the companies said. Pentaho Reporting will then help management and operational teams uncover answers to questions such as “How much traffic should I expect over the holiday period?” and “Do I need to plan for more de-icing staff at this airport?” Such information is vital in a low-margin business focused on quality and tied to strict Service Level Agreements, the firms explained.
