Lufthansa Systems cracks the code on embedded BI

Impressive speed, secure multi-tenant integrations, problem-solving

Challenge

"We are a software supplier to airlines, so their goals are our goals. Smoothing the passenger experience is one of the main goals that all our customers are seeking," says Arpad Csordas, senior architect. "Since we have so many customers and more than 100 products in different lifecycles, we had all kinds of reporting. If we are not keeping up with trends and competitors, we will be out of the business."

Solution

"We evaluated more than 10 BI tools," says Tamas Farkas, technical lead for data services. "The most important requirements were multi-tenancy and to be able to create reports very quickly, in an agile way. We also wanted a tool that could connect to many of our products, and it was really important to be able to extend the tool easily because we knew that none of them would serve every kind of request. We knew we had to add our knowledge and special functions."

"We ended up with Jaspersoft® after doing three or four pilot projects with it. We were really lucky, because there is an innovation initiative in our company where to get ideas funded, we have to convince our colleagues to vote with tokens. We collected enough tokens to start our reporting project."

"Our vision was modern, agile analytics, and Jaspersoft was the missing puzzle piece," says Mr. Csordas. "There is no one-size-fits-all analytics for every situation. That was why we looked for a solution for special use cases, and Jaspersoft was just right."

Benefits

Speed that impresses customers

“We typically run six-month projects in three-week sprints, then do a demo," continues Csordas. "We showed the customer the first three week demo with Jaspersoft reports, and that was really different from the previous methods. The customer, actually it was Lufthansa Airline, was surprised. They expected us to show something after four months, and we showed something in three weeks."

Easy and secure integrations with customer systems

"We also did a really huge Lufthansa Airline project based on their ticketing archive, which is a really huge database," says Mr. Farkas. "We needed to connect to an external authentication system, which was one of the technical difficulties."

"External authentication and authorization is a very important feature we needed because all the airlines have their own systems that we need to connect to," says Mr. Csordas. "Jaspersoft is a pretty open system, and it is quite easy to do these integrations."

Easy solutions to difficult problems

"For the Lufthansa Airline project, we also needed to instantly email the generated reports," says Farkas. "We struggled a bit with connecting to some backend systems that provided only SOAP web services for connection, so we extended JasperReports® Server to use SOAP as a data source. Using JasperReports® Server, we solved the problem easily."

Future

"Our next steps are big data and cloud projects," says Mr. Csordas. "We are really excited to get into data-driven decisions and open up the possibilities lying in different data. We want to connect to all the data and get new insights."