Clients

Overview

Vacation.com (VCOM) serves over 8,000 travel agency members across the country, and provides industry experience, one-on-one service, and considerable value in travel packages to those members. Due to the rapidly changing business of travel, VCOM decided that it would need significant upgrades to one of its internal systems to continue to provide its excellent service. The legacy system was not flexible enough to accommodate VCOM's changing needs, and was lacking in features becoming more critical to servicing the travel industry. VMD Systems Integrators worked closely with VCOM Information Systems staff to develop a brand new system which would support VCOM's current needs, but also allow expansion for the future.

Objectives

The core of Vacation.com's business involves its member agencies. Agencies join the consortium to take advantage of the many benefit programs VCOM offers - benefits they would not find anywhere else. These benefit programs, however, change repeatedly throughout the year. Making things even more complex, the different programs each have their own set of options a member agency can choose from. The sheer number of programs and options had become unmanageable in the old system.

Requirements

• The new system needed to be flexible enough to accommodate new benefit programs in the future, but general enough to facilitate easy data transfer once the new programs were in place. The programs also needed to be standardized to fit into this new structure.
• Additionally, a robust reporting engine was required in an effort to monitor the demand and usage of company services of more than 2000 clients. Reporting tools would assist management with identifying those services which yield higher returns on investment.
• The new system needed to be centralized, but accessible to sales team users who are constantly on-the-move, without tying them down to a VPN network solution. In addition, the system needed to be secure enough to allow direct access over the internet.
• Coordinating the project in a highly compressed timeline requiring rapid turnaround by Vacation.com and VMD staff.

Solution Description

Ultimately, VMD worked with Vacation.com over a very short timeline to define requirements, user interface, and configuration layout. The system was developed in Microsoft .NET, with a Microsoft SQL Server database back-end, so that it could be delivered over the web. Sales team users and Vacation.com staff who were traveling could easily access the site from any location.

To provide a thorough reporting engine, VMD completely redesigned the company's data repository using SQL Server 2000. An efficient, normalized database schema was created to allow for flexible access to client and vendor information. Using Crystal Reporting web components, the .Net application provides a multi-use reporting capability. Executives have access to predefined "dashboard" reports which graphically display high-level metrics, while an ad-hoc reporting section gives power users the advanced flexibility needed for detailed analytics of customers and vendors. All reporting sections have the ability to export to Excel and PDF.

Process

VMD worked with Vacation.com staff for weeks to develop a flexible system which would not only provide all the diverse functionality needed to manage each of the benefit programs, but would also help manage the complex relationships between member agencies and each other, and member agencies and Vacation.com.

Results

The new system was developed and delivered in time for Vacation.com's launch date, on budget. VMD continues to work with Vacation.com on other projects, including a Phase 2 of this system redevelopment, which will include additional modules and features not already provided in the first phase.