Customers

Geneva Airport

Geneva Airport"Business Objects and Geneva International Airport have a long partnership. 10 years of collaboration based on trust, support and efficiency."

Gilles Hurni
Director of the Frenchspeaking region of Switzerland at Business Objects

Challenge

Air transport

With air traffic per year of about 10 million passengers, over 160,000 aircraft movements and nearly 60,000 tonnes of cargo handled, Geneva International Airport is ranked as a mediumsized airport. It’s a dynamic company with 650 employees working in 140 specialist professions in fields as varied as guiding manoeuvring planes on the ground, managing aircraft parking, the use of boarding lounges, passenger safety, car parking arrangements, fire prevention and safety, construction and maintenance of the infrastructure, to name just a few examples.

Air transport is constantly evolving, necessitating countless changes relating to safety, flight scheduling, budgets, specific licenses, for example. Above all, it is essential to be able to schedule flights and organize everything that ensues from that process such as the availability of take-off and landing runways.

It is of primary importance for an international institution of this size to have the capability to easily access and track data and the ability to manage the whole organization as effectively as possible.

Approach

Introduction of BusinessObjects applications

The partnership between Business Objects and GIA dates back to 1997. At the start, various BusinessObjects applications were introduced in the Finance department to compensate for the lack of reporting capabilities. Mr Guichoud says: "We very soon realized that a similar problem also existed in the Human Resources department and the same system was introduced there in 1998."

In 2003, GIA decided to standardize its reporting platform. A market study was carried out to evaluate and select a business intelligence (BI) software vendor whose products which would meet the company’s requirements and constraints. A two day proof of concept exercise was carried out to meet the shortlisted vendors and test their software packages.

Business Objects was selected for several reasons. Apart from the fact that the software’s technical characteristics were a perfect match with the requirements, GIA and Business Objects had a solid partnership dating back several years. GIA’s in-depth knowledge of BusinessObjects software combined with the excellent level of support were the factors that clinched the deal.

"The BusinessObjects applications convinced us; they are powerful, easy to manage and well structured. The reporting layer which uses InfoView and Crystal Reports covers everything we need from mass reporting functions to analysis."

Since these software tools were introduced, the GIA team has received frequent positive feedback comments from internal and external users alike, praising the quality of the environment. Users work on a self-sufficient basis, accessing the denormalized source data themselves, which guarantees the consistency of the information results returned.

Deployment of Rapid Marts on the Oracle E-business suite, which is quite a complex model, has resulted in considerable time savings. The ETL processes, the data models, the universes and some sample reports were all delivered with the solution.

As regards using the BusinessObjects reporting tools, the Finance and Human Resources departments found it quite easy to migrate to BusinessObjects XI Release 2, as they already had some knowledge of the existing tools.

Results

Benefts for all departments

For the Finance and Human Resources departments, the environment implemented on the BusinessObjects platform has brought improvements to a number of processes. Crucial information such as budgets, accounts, salaries, passenger numbers and cargo movements are now easily accessible to a large number of users.

The data warehouse has been evolving on an iterative basis and now serves most of the departments at GIA.

Quality data

GIA has given control to its employees by providing them with access to the data so that they can view, create and modify reports themselves. Users have become aware of the importance of data quality as they realize that if the underlying data is coherent, information contained in reports will be reliable.

GIA views its investment in BusinessObjects applications as a benefit to the company which has enabled it to standardize its reporting platform and provide the business with a simple, consistent system.

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