Patni helps Best Western International improve its processing speed by 50% by reengineering its Reservation Support & Commercial System to a client-server environment, with enhanced functionality.
The Client
Best Western International Inc. (Best Western) is a worldwide consortium of 4,000 independently owned hotels. It has a global reservation system serving more than 50 million guests a year.
The Challenge
Reservation, a significant activity for Best Western, required a system ensuring speedy access to information and providing data to support systems such as financial billing, commission payment processing and many others. Best Western's reservation support system was executed on mainframe technology without proper security access, with a number of redundant processes and duplicate data storage on two servers. The business objective, therefore, was to migrate the existing legacy system to a new Oracle-based client-server environment. Patni, competing amongst a group of bidders, won this project on the strength of its well-defined reengineering methodology.
The assignment also required providing full functional and technical support, besides maintenance to boty IBM and Oracle 2000 environments until the migration was complete.
The Solution
Patni replaced Best Western's old mainframe technology with a new Oracle-based client-server environment to run the Reservation Support & Commercial System comprising 10 major modules. Patni adopted an Onsite (Requirement Study) Offshore (Development) Onsite (Implementation) model to execute the project.
Patni also developed Routeways, a multi-platform scheduling and routing software for data replication needs.
Patni added new functionality and brought the system up and running, keeping well within budget limits and aggressive schedules.
The Benefits
Best Western's newly configured system delivers 50% improvement in the processing speed and automates multiple functions that were previously handled manually. Patni turned the project around in six months as against the 12-month schedule proposed by competitors.
The Designer 2000 Repository that Patni created for the client, as a part of the project, enabled easy maintenance of:
The template form to store common code provided the customer added advantages such as:
Easier-to-maintain code
Reduced source points of errors
Consistency of look and feel
Consistency of operation.
The Technology
- Designer 2000, Developer 2000, SQR, VC++
- Source Platform: MVS, Cobol, Supra DB, Mantis on IBM 3090
- Target platform: Oracle 2000.