Air travellers benefit from open source BI rollout

Swissport rejects Oracle in favour of Pentaho's open source business intelligence suite

Open source rollout to help with lost luggage

Infrastructure company Swissport is to use Pentaho’s open source business intelligence (BI) suite as its standard corporate management reporting environment, claiming the rollout will cut the cost of flying.

Although not a household name, Swissport provides customer airline services such as passport check-in and lost-and-found online luggage tracing.

Swissport also has a presence at more than 170 airports worldwide, providing services for 600 airlines, including aircraft pushback, cargo handling and de-icing.

Swissport IT manager Uwe Geercken explained that Swissport went with Pentaho rather than alternatives such as Oracle, saying: "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."

Geercken continued: "After looking at various solutions, we noted Pentaho's complete tool set, and after further testing, found that our users were happy with the features on offer."

As the first step of a global rollout, Swissport's top 100 executives will use Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition to review operational and strategic data spanning 40 countries. Swissport said it would also use Pentaho's BI Suite for data integration and interactive analysis.

With Pentaho Data Integration, Swissport's data warehouse will use operational data from different sources to combine and integrate financial, flight and cargo data.

Pentaho Reporting can then be used by management and operational teams to answer 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?”

"In a low-margin business focused on quality and tied to strict service level agreements, such information is vital," added Geercken.