Transforming the data platform for a leading travel services company
The Situation
These days, almost all large, global businesses outsource their travel arrangements to a travel management company. Our client — let’s dub them TravelCo — is a world leader in this space. In an industry that continues to face many challenges, including overcoming a pandemic, and with demanding business travel customers to serve, TravelCo sees digital and data transformation as a key pillar to creating competitive advantage.
The company needed to modernise its outdated, rigid data systems that were hampering customer experience and employee efficiency. They selected Onepoint to deliver an innovative, cloud-based enterprise platform that enabled real-time data analytics, improved data quality, simplified processes, and increased business agility. The new solution delivered transformational outcomes across customer service, employee productivity, data accuracy, and time-to-insights.
The Task
The client’s legacy data platforms and hardcoded systems lacked flexibility, making it difficult and slow to adapt to changing business needs. This resulted in poor customer experiences when agents couldn’t quickly update reservations or access accurate data. It also reduced employee productivity through manual workflows. The company realised they needed to fully transform their data infrastructure to meet the demands of corporate customers who expected excellent service and real-time visibility into travel spend and patterns.
The upshot? Rather than another evolution, it was time for revolution. It was an opportunity to build a competitive differentiator, a valuable asset from the ground up — a custom-designed data management solution with the customer and colleague (i.e. total) experience at its heart, and key business outcomes as its guiding force.
The Action / Approach
Onepoint conducted workshops to deeply understand the customer pain points and employee frustrations. The team then designed a next-generation cloud solution on Microsoft Azure leveraging tools like Drools for business rules management and Kubernetes for scalability.
The new platform enabled:
- Real-time data analytics with simplified reporting
- Enriched data quality with configurable validation rules
- Streamlined processes through workflows and automation
- Easy rule changes empowering non-technical users
- Flexible scaling to handle usage spikes
Onepoint’s human-centric approach and technical expertise allowed us to deliver an enterprise-ready solution focused directly on achieving the client’s business goals.
The Result
The new data platform had an immediate impact on the TravelCo business — a fact that was recognised at board level. The platform transformation delivered measurable improvements across the client’s key objectives:
- 10x faster customer onboarding
- Enhanced data accuracy and depth
- 10x faster implementation of business rule changes
- 3x faster time to data insights
- Increased operational efficiency
- Reduced dependency on technical resources
- Modernised technology landscape
According to the Transformation Initiative Leader of the client, “Onepoint has made it very easy… They have always genuinely wanted to understand the business and not just blindly build to requirements. This, combined with seeing ourselves as one team, has really been the key to our success.”
Focus In On: Responsible for Data / CDO
New Areas of Value:
Trusted, data-driven decision making supported by evidence
Cost savings and optimisation
Improved staff productivity due to better access to the right data at the right time
Ability to benefit from real-time analytics
Improvements around:
Can’t get timely access to data to support the needs of business stakeholders
Difficulty combining multiple sources for one version of the truth
Poor master data management