American Airlines

Along with its regional carriers American Eagle and American Connection, American Airlines serves more than 250 cities in 41 countries with airplanes and about daily flights. The airline processes about 125 million transportation documents on an annual basis.

With the amount of data created by all these ticket documents, American Airlines needed a more efficient system that would help ensure proper amounts of earned revenue on ticket sales. But because of the complexity of the airline industry and the amount of data involved in ticket transactions, accomplishing this would be no small task.

Our business analysts have the expertise to spot fraud and other incidents of incorrect revenue flow, but they also need a system that makes it easy for them to quickly query and sort through large amounts of data, said John Hagen, senior systems analyst and project manager for American Airlines.

Hagen was also concerned with the amount of storage such a system would require. “Some data warehouse technologies expand the amount of required storage by five to ten times after indexing, Hagen said. “This would force us to purchase as much as two additional terabytes of storage and expensive proposition.