Saturn The Automation service process in the travel industry with the help of PowerDesigner

Source: Internet
Author: User
Tags functions interface connect object model reserved sybase web services powerdesigner
Process
"We save a lot of work on development and maintenance, and reduce the type of technology that will undoubtedly reduce the cost of hardware and software." "Bill Green, vice president of-power.



Saturn r/t®reservation Systems

Introduction: Saturn R/t®reservation Systems Inc. is a major supplier of computerized land transport service reservation systems. It works with system integrator power® to develop a real-time reservation travel service interface between commercial agencies for the travel industry. This interface runs the Sybase powerbuilder® and JAVATM code that is deployed on Sybase easerver. When designing this interface, Saturn and power® chose Sybase powerdesigner® instead of Rational Rose.



Business requirements: A low-cost, adaptable real-time interface is required to connect the back-end systems of travel and transportation companies to major travel service booking companies, such as Sabre and Apollo,saturn. With such a real-time interface, reliable travel booking confirmation numbers can be obtained and the possibility of manual transcription errors can be avoided, thus allowing the traveller's itinerary to properly display their land transportation service bookings. In addition, Saturn requires the solution to meet the needs of its Web services and future EbXML requirements.



Areas of application: tourism



Business Solution: Through a centralized Sybase EAServer computer installed in the Saturn data center, you can handle the business from travel agents, corporate customers, and future WEB travel portals. Saturn r/t® is built using Sybase PowerBuilder and Java code. Communicates with the travel transportation Company's site through a real-time interface. This interface runs the inter-server communication module developed with Sybase PowerBuilder, which provides communication between the real-time interface and the back-end business system of the travel service company. The entire system is designed with Sybase PowerBuilder.



Schema: Saturn r/t® uses Windows NT® and Windows Server computers to run Sybase EAServer.



Products used: Sybase PowerDesigner 8.0 and 9.0 Beta, Sybase EAServer 3.6.1c2, Sybase

PowerBuilder 8.0, Java, and Sybase adaptive Server 12.0.



Advantages: Sybase PowerBuilder is accelerated by its open, highly integrated, full-featured development environment

The development cycle of the Saturn r/t® interface. Sybase EAServer offers a run in low

A stable, reliable, and highly efficient server on the cost of Windows server computers

Solution. With Sybase as the only supplier of tools, Saturn avoided the implementation

Different tasks bring tools to change overhead.



Saturn reduced their processing costs, and the cost of each order fell from the original 2 dollars to

0.40 dollars and attracted a lot of new customers in less than 9 months. Overall,

Their total cost of ownership (TCO) fell by 75%, while returns on assets (ROA) increased

Added 500%.



Through this IT investment, Saturn has extended the core functions of its travel reservation service system to

The online booking field also creates new challenges for its competitors in price.



As Saturn customers, the advantage of land-based transport services is that they can

Accurate and timely information services will reach the global reservation service companies, but also reduce the

The time and cost of booking the service.



Saturn Easerver and PowerDesigner Drive automated service processes in the travel industry

Overland transportation is an important part of the tourism industry with a value of $ billions of. At the time of booking, the travel agency needs to confirm the availability of overland transportation services and their prices. Saturn Reservation Systems became Sybase's client in 1993, and it developed Saturn r/t® products to achieve real-time docking between commercial organizations. The product is currently being used to connect the business between travel agencies such as Sabre, Appollo and Worldspan, and transport service companies.



Saturn r/t® is an interface for secure publishing of WEB services, bridging the bridge between service providers and service requirements. Saturn r/t® uses Java programs and Sybase PowerBuilder programs that are deployed on the EAServer machine.



"Because our application server is basically self-developed, we are able to place the other half of the real-time interface in any customer location," said Paul Murray, vice president of Saturn. Saturn installs Sybase EAServer 3.61 on Windows NT® and Windows Server machines, and then delivers them to the major transport services companies. These easerver computers are responsible for exchanging information with the back-end business systems of the service companies mentioned above. At the Saturn site there is a central easerver that connects all the machines together. The Saturn server is responsible for exchanging booking information with the major computerized booking service companies. The business system can return subscription information in less than 4 seconds when processing a reservation request.



The origins of Saturn r/t®

In order to verify the latest travel price and availability of transport services, Saturn needs a real-time interface connecting travel agencies and travel carriers. The real-time interface is also the only way to provide a reliable number of booking confirmation numbers (which in the past is a thorny issue for Saturn). Referring to the past solution, Saturn's vice-president, Paul Murray, said, "Previously, we would have provided the transport service company with a scheduled confirmation number, and the travel agency would have accepted the scheduled trips." This can lead to many problems. When people call to inquire about the scheduled trips, the travel agent will say, ' This is not our reservation confirmation number '. Of course, they can query the scheduled train in the backstage Office system, but the front-line personnel rarely accept such training. "Now it solves this problem with a real-time interface to the Office system connected to the traffic services company."



To establish a real-time interface, Saturn noticed the system Integrator power®. "We use Power's technical services to create PowerBuilder and Java parts for polling our databases while maintaining our Secure Sockets Layer communication with our travel and transportation service companies," said Paul Murray of Saturn. ”



In the evaluation phase, the vice president of power Purchasing, William Green, said: "For the client, an object-oriented modeling tool will be the most cost-effective, it can provide us with the object-oriented and data model modeling capabilities and generate model reports, This is another very useful feature outside of the modeling tool. Such reports could be used to plan a comprehensive technical blueprint for the future.



Give up rational Rose, choose Sybase powerdesigner

When choosing a powerful modeling tool, the scope is quickly narrowed down to Sybase PowerDesigner and Rational Rose. The modeling and advanced reporting capabilities provided by Sybase PowerDesigner with a fully integrated environment are quickly becoming a natural choice.



Sybase PowerDesigner provides developers with object-oriented design and rich data model capabilities in a suite of programs. Developers can drill down into a complete set of critical UML diagrams provided by PowerDesigner when writing Sybase powerdesigner programs.



"Rose's data modeling capabilities are not comparable to powerdesigner, so we need to add additional tools." ”

-bill Green



Power developers have used Rational Rose in previous projects. For this time Saturn real-time project, Rational rose cannot meet the technical requirements.



"I was used to the ability of rational Rose to report, and as far as I wanted to see it, I found that it was always inefficient." ”

-bill Green



The ability of Sybase Powerdesinger to generate reports made a deep impression on Bill. "PowerDesigner's model reporting is so powerful that I can customize the reports I want in a very short time," he said. ”



The Sybase PowerDesigner provides an integrated development environment. Because the PowerDesigner modeling feature is built around the same version library (repository), developers always work in the same tool environment. They do not need to be busy converting modeling tools and importing export information. "Customers are also happy to use PowerDesigner as a one-step design tool for data modeling and object modeling," the Bill commented. Of course, PowerDesigner's ability to generate and reverse engineer PowerBuilder code and Java code is another advantage. To achieve the same function, Rational Rose needs a third party extension.



Deploy Easerver

Saturn has successfully used Sybase EAServer for its other products. Installing EAServer computers at the service provider's site to support the Saturn R/t® interface is a very easy task. Currently, Saturn uses Sybase EAServer to exchange information with the server, which ranges from small back-end office systems to a billions of-dollar subscription service system like Sabre.



Simplify the integration of service providers

To enable transport service providers to use Business-to-business services, Saturn needs an easy way to integrate the provider's back-end office system. "Most of the service providers we have contacted do not have the technical power to develop a communications infrastructure to support secure Sockets Layer and two-way communication in the short term," said Paul Murray of Saturn. ”



With Sybase PowerBuilder and Java,power, the communication module between servers has been developed to simplify integration work. If a major travel reservation service company, such as Sabre, sends a booking request to a central Saturn server, the next process may be this: if the destination's service provider's profile is marked as a live system, the inter-server communication module will first pass through TCP/IP, SSL, or The IIOP protocol connects to the easerver at the transport service provider's site and then writes the booking request to the local server's SQL Anywhere database and notifies the provider of the backend Office system. The backend Office system simply reads the information from the database and then inserts the information back into the same database.



"The project we're taking is going to take a few months, it could be longer for some companies, and their products are simply using ODBC or JDBC to read from the database," Murray said.



Saturn recently attended a nationwide transportation exhibition, and all the back-end office system vendors came to sell their products. Saturn took the opportunity to distribute its real-time interface products to these backend Office system developers and hope they could integrate the product into their back-end office systems. "We don't want to compete with those developers," Murray declared. We just provide them with an add-on module to sell. For them, a real-time interface is available, and their back-end office systems are easier to sell. They can tell discerning customers that the Sabre travel agency and other subscribers to the automatic booking engine will quickly become an order-entry officer in a transport service company. ”



PowerDesigner Sync function

Saturn relies on Sybase powerdesigner to maintain data models for all its applications. All changes to the database are made through the PowerDesigner model.



Sybase PowerDesigner is credited with Saturn R/t® 's development effort to keep the application fully synchronized with the model and the database. "The two-way engineering of PowerBuilder and Java components has become one of the goals of our development effort, not just another empty talk in the industry," said Power's green commentary. Recently, we have also added Visual Basic to it, and the work will still be done using Powerdesinger. ”



Create a technical Blueprint

To guide Saturn's future development work, Bill Green's development team used Sybase PowerDesigner to create an enterprise technology blueprint. "We don't have much energy to train our clients to use and understand the object model, so we need something to explain the infrastructure." ”



After delivering Saturn r/t®, Power uses the Sybase PowerDesigner 9.0 business Process Modeling feature to create a business processing model for the product. "We go back and build the business process model for the entire application," Green said. The completion of the work allows Saturn to truly understand their entire business process for the first time. Customers see these pictures will find some process, the original way of handling is very bad. ”



The brilliant prospect of system integrators

In the system integration industry, the best yardstick to measure customer satisfaction is the ability to win subsequent tasks. Power's working groups have been given new tasks to integrate with another transport service and then expand the system.



"The customer is very satisfied with the result. As an integrator, we are excited that we do not have to support a variety of technologies to achieve the same level of modeling that we can achieve with multiple products from other vendors. ”

-bill Green



Power has chosen to improve development efficiency with Sybase EAServer, Sybase PowerBuilder code, and Sybase PowerDesigner's integrated Sybase solution. "We save a lot of work on development and maintenance, and reduce the type of technology that will undoubtedly reduce the cost of hardware and software." ”



"I wonder why some companies don't seriously consider powerdesigner as their modeling environment," he said. ”

-bill Green



The future development of Saturn r/t®

Saturn has added application extensions that will include XML messages and server communication networks. As the market coverage of the product expands further, users who use any Web-based subscription service engine will be able to book and change overland transportation services. XML also supports consumer shopping features.



Overland Travel is the first and last part of any trip. If you think that travel is not an easy thing to do, Saturn reservation Systems, with the help of Sybase integrated products, will work to eliminate the problems you may encounter at the start and end of your trip. Turning to Saturn r/t® how to support the travel agency, Paul Murray commented, "We are currently providing End-to-end, complete solutions for this branch of tourism." It can be achieved quickly, accurately, and easily, resulting in better service and reduced workload for all. ”



IT managers always want to develop their own or purchase problems. For Saturn, the choice is simple, they invest in their customers ' systems to gain a competitive advantage. Saturn r/t® extends the core functions of its travel reservation service system to the online booking field, while creating new challenges for its competitors in price.



It is a difficult task to evaluate the success of technical decisions. But for Saturn, the results are obvious: reduced transaction costs, increased number of customers, and the ability to quickly add new functionality. By choosing the right tool, Saturn reduced TCO by 75% and increased returns on assets by as much as 500%. These figures illustrate everything.





All rights reserved ©2002 Sybase Inc. All rights reserved. In accordance with the provisions of the United States copyright law, no unauthorized publication. Sybase, Sybase logos, Poweerbuilder and PowerDesigner are the trademarks of Sybase INC. All other trademarks are owned by their respective owners. Registered in the United States. Technical specifications may be changed without notice. The publication number is USA lo2o46 9/02.


















Related Article

Contact Us

The content source of this page is from Internet, which doesn't represent Alibaba Cloud's opinion; products and services mentioned on that page don't have any relationship with Alibaba Cloud. If the content of the page makes you feel confusing, please write us an email, we will handle the problem within 5 days after receiving your email.

If you find any instances of plagiarism from the community, please send an email to: info-contact@alibabacloud.com and provide relevant evidence. A staff member will contact you within 5 working days.

A Free Trial That Lets You Build Big!

Start building with 50+ products and up to 12 months usage for Elastic Compute Service

  • Sales Support

    1 on 1 presale consultation

  • After-Sales Support

    24/7 Technical Support 6 Free Tickets per Quarter Faster Response

  • Alibaba Cloud offers highly flexible support services tailored to meet your exact needs.