Airlines Reporting Corporation: Leveraging IoT for Improved Data Accessibility and Product Development

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Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a key intermediary in the travel industry, had accumulated a massive amount of data over its 50 years of operation. This data was stored in on-premises servers and was largely siloed by the company’s seven business domains. The company wanted to bring new products to market faster by making data more accessible across the business. However, ARC's existing product development processes relied heavily on the tribal knowledge of domain experts, which created bottlenecks and risked loss of expertise when employees left the company. In 2018, ARC decided to embark on a digital transformation initiative, which included modernizing business processes and migrating all their data to an AWS S3 Data Lake and Snowflake Data Cloud. The goal was to make data more accessible across domains and reduce reliance on individual expertise during product development. To ensure that employees could find the data they needed, ARC sought to implement a data catalog solution for their migrated cloud data.

Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) is a small but significant player in the travel industry, acting as an intermediary between airlines and travel companies such as Expedia. They handle transactions including refunds, exchanges, and cancellations. In recent years, they have strategically positioned themselves as a data and analytics company, selling business intelligence and other data products to airlines, travel management companies, and other third-parties. ARC develops their data products using aggregated data from their settlement transactions and from the International Air Transport Association (IATA). In 2019, ARC managed more than $97.4 billion in transactions between airlines and travel agencies, representing more than 302 million passenger trips. Their membership includes more than 200 airlines and 9,400 travel agencies, and they have 13,000 points of sale.

After evaluating several data catalog options, ARC chose the Alation Data Catalog. Alation's intuitive, refined, and mature user interface, along with features like Trust Flags, Compose, and data profiling, made it the ideal choice for ARC. The company is curating and cataloging their data in Alation as they migrate it to the cloud. Alation makes the data curation, cataloging, and governance process simple, even for a small company like ARC. A small group of data stewards – experts in their domain data – holds responsibility for data curation and cataloging in Alation. To help users from the wider company better understand where the data is and how to use it, ARC is encouraging the adoption of Alation as the one-stop shop for data access and analytics. ARC also implemented the manual lineage function in Alation to trace the connections more easily from the S3 data to Snowflake, and ultimately to Tableau for reporting and analysis.

• The implementation of Alation has transformed the way ARC accesses and uses data. The days of multiple meetings with multiple people to get the right data for product development are gone. As data is moved to the Snowflake Data Cloud, users are encouraged to use Alation to access it. This shift towards self-service through Alation is expected to speed up the time-to-market of new products. Project teams can use Alation to conduct their own research into the data in the S3 data lake and Snowflake, instead of learning to use multiple tools or contacting multiple people and information architects to find the data they need. As users become more familiar with what data is available and how to find it, data literacy at ARC is expected to improve. Furthermore, ARC can capture individuals’ domain expertise in the catalog, eliminating the loss of knowledge to the whole company that results when people retire or leave the company.

• Improved time-to-market for new products
• Improved data literacy across the organization
• Speedier resolution of data quality issues