Holiday resort slashes time for data queries

Holiday resort chain Center Parcs is using business intelligence tools to better understand its customers' behaviour.

Center Parcs, which has a collection of 20 holiday villages throughout Europe, has 38 years of historical data at its disposal but until recently the company's business managers weren't able to reap the benefits of this information.

Richard Verhoeff, director of ICT services and ecommerce at Center Parcs, said the company's data systems used to be slow and weren't able to handle complex requests.

The resort used an AS/400 minicomputer, which downloaded reporting data from a DB2 operational data store. This data would be flattened into a comma-separated file and then uploaded into an Olap (Online analytical processing) tool, Gentia, for analysis. The transformation of the data and the subsequent analysis would take a long time, and in some cases the administrator would report that the query was too complex and would "blow up the box", said Verhoeff.

The company knew it needed to develop a new reporting system and it went with data appliance maker Netezza for a dimensional-based modelling approach. Now, the data is pulled into a Netezza appliance, where software from Sunopsis handles the extraction, transformation and loading process. Business intelligence software from Business Objects is used to generate reports.

Because of these changes, the company has slashed the amount of time it takes to make sense of its data. It can generate its weekly reports and deliver results on a Friday, rather than waiting until the following Tuesday as it had to before.

It is also conducting complex data-mining queries on the system in hours instead of weeks. For example, the Netezza system might be called upon to track customer opinions of a particular outlet, along with its revenue. Verhoeff said: "To crunch that data [in the past] might take three weeks. Now we have it in an hour."

Netezza may also help with future projects such as an RFID rollout in France. The project, linked to a customer's visitor card, could be used for workforce management. For instance, the system could measure when a customer walks into a store and then track how quickly they were served and whether a sale was made.

Verhoeff said: "We were afraid that with so much data, there would be no scalability [for the RFID project]." However with the capacity for up to a thousand blades in the Linux-based Netezza environment (the company is currently using 28 blades), he is no longer worried.