Saudi Airlines has implemented a business intelligence (BI) solution with Microsoft to analyse, visualise and share data in a unified way.

It includes Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Power BI for Office 365, Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013, which allows the company to have better business visibility, more engaged employees, and projected savings of millions of dollars per year in the process, said a statement.

The deployment is helping the company gain insight to better manage different aspects of the global aviation operations, and once totally completed, it also provides management with the necessary consolidated insights into subsidiaries such as Saudi Cargo, Saudi Catering and Saudi Ground Services, and is uniting business information spanning across multiple systems at the airline, it said.

Muhammad Albakri, executive vice president of finance, Saudi Airlines, said: “Before we worked with Microsoft, we had scattered information everywhere. We had many different business intelligence and incentive solutions, separate training and no standard platform to run all the environments.

"The new BI solution from Microsoft maximises the value of information coming from multiple systems. We've started to run analyses and provide results to executives to help them track trends and react quickly and proactively."

The solution has been able to pull disparate data together for multiple sources for analysis, and provides dynamic dashboards, enterprise reports and customer reports that allow executives to view any subset of information and any level of detail they require. In addition, the airline is using a Windows 8.1 app to give a consolidated view of the data for its highly mobile workforce.

Since the implementation, the airline is seeing improved operational functions, such as passengers sales, revenue accounting, customer service, marketing and fraud prevention, which has increased Saudi Airline's overall efficiencies globally and saved millions of dollars annually. - TradeArabia News Service