Flight Centre Case Study
The Client
Flight Centre Travel Group is an award-winning global travel management company with a global turnover of AU$9 billion. As one of the world’s largest and most successful travel companies Flight Centre is publicly-listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and has a presence in over 95 countries and with 8,000+ experienced travel professionals.
The Challenge
As an industry-leading company Flight Centre has quickly recognised that the times are rapidly changing, and with that so is the industry and the needs of their customers. In many cases, the traditional way of doing things will soon no longer be sufficient to meet their customers’ demands.
In anticipation, Flight Centre decided to design from scratch a new cutting edge reporting system that would deliver next-generation capabilities for delivering high-quality information to their customers tailored to their needs. A multi-million dollar investment that is already bearing fruit.
The following is a flavour of some of the high-level requirements that the project was set out to fulfil:
- Consolidate all reference data from either local or remote sources for more efficient governance and stewardship.
- Consolidate all business rules for more efficient governance and stewardship and to empower the business to quickly adapt to changing business requirements/rules.
- Highly enriched data with the capability to easily manage, expand and extend the sources for enrichment.
- The flexibility to more quickly adapt to changing regulatory and security compliance requirements (e.g. GDPR).
- Near real-time delivery of the data wherever possible.
- Empower their customers to tailor the information delivery to their needs.
The Solution - IDP (Intelligent Data Platform)
Flight Centre had found in Onepoint a partner that they knew would be up to the challenge of designing and delivering a system that would meet the above requirements.
Given Onepoint’s history and experience in enterprise systems architecture, it was clear from the beginning that certain architectural principles needed to be baked into the design to ensure the delivery of a high-quality system that fulfils all the requirements. Here are some of those architectural principles applied when designing the new system:
- Interoperability
- Data security
- Component reusability and simplicity
- Adaptability and flexibility
The Talend Product suite was chosen to accelerate delivery and to facilitate in management of various phases of the data lifecycle; not in the least to facilitate in the Master Data Management of the reference data used for data enrichment.
With an “everything in the cloud” vision, IDP has been built entirely on top of Microsoft’s Azure, utilising their different regional data centres to meet the data sovereignty requirements imposed by GDPR.
A message-oriented architecture was introduced using Azure Service Bus with the Kubernetes infrastructure to support asynchronous interoperability and at the same time ensure reliability as well as scalability.
But the biggest challenge proved to be the consolidation of the hundreds of business rules. The Drools rules engine was selected and a custom-designed Domain Specific Language (DSL) was implemented to facilitate in the process, giving the business full ownership of the governance and stewardship of IDP’s business logic.
The Outcome
The system has already proved invaluable, despite being in its early days. With a new user interface in place, the system gives the users instant valuable feedback on any data submitted to the system guaranteeing high-quality data input and resulting in high-quality data output.
Having the foundation set for a new reference data ecosystem, the system is enabling the business to manage all reference data from a single place resulting in increased consistency and enrichment of the data delivered to their customers.
The rules engine is also demonstrating its value. With the rules separated into their own component and implemented using the DSL, the business has now full visibility of all business logic implemented. In addition, the business is now capable of tweaking the business rules to the needs of each of their markets or customers, in a matter of days, if not hours.
The impact
- Improved customer experience.
- Enhanced efficiency in the delivery of information to customers.
- Empowered business users who are now able to take control of the business logic and more quickly adapt to changing requirements.
- A highly flexible system that can be tailored to meet the needs of the customers either on a global or local (country) level.
- Overall improved agility in change management, system management and support for the delivery of high quality enriched information to the customers.
Category
Industry
Travel
Solution
Data Integration (ESB, Microservices), BRM, MDM, ETL
Technology
Talend, Azure, Drools, Kubernetes, Azure Service Bus, CosmosDB
Service
PoC, Analysis, Architecture, Design, Development and Managed services
