Overview
Ticketing is one of the core Sabre capabilities under Retailing, Distribution & Fulfillment that supports both Airline & GDS Agencies in travel document issuance, updates & revenue recognition.
Whenever airline ticket booking information is created in the Sabre Passenger Service System (PSS), several indices are generated, which assists various booking-related applications within Sabre and at partners’ sites in subsequent travel document retrieval and processing. After the American Airlines-US airways merger, some of these electronic ticket indices became redundant. However, these redundant electronic ticket indices continued to be generated across all Sabre hosted airlines, adding to the PSS storage infrastructure costs incurred by Sabre.
Challenge
Under the existing arrangement, the redundant airline ticket indices added to Sabre’s storage costs. Hence, the challenge was to eliminate the creation of these indices, without impacting any aspect of the system’s performance or business function.
What Sabre did
The members of Team Free Falcon drew from their creativity and talent to make changes in the PSS side, updating the code to terminate the creation of redundant indices. The team implemented these changes successfully on August 25, 2020.
SuperBlitzcode 2020 to the rescue. Team Free Falcon breaks new ground!
Team Free Falcon was a participating team in
SuperBlitzcode 2020 (The latest edition of the yearly 3-day hackathon at Sabre’s Global Capability Center, that aims to solve key business challenges facing the travel industry). The ‘team’ created a viable solution for cost savings incurred, by curbing the creation of redundant indices and thus reducing technical debt by preventing the need for storing unnecessary flight indices for airline tickets.
Working in close collaboration with system architects,
Team Free Falcon tested and productionized the new solution in a very short span of time, leading to immense cost savings for Sabre.
Some of the key approaches to the solution included:
- Re-evaluating the code for potential upgrades
- Updating the code thereby preventing the system from creating redundant flight indices for airline electronic tickets.
- Enabling optimized storage footprint and seamless transition to cloud storage
Results
- Reduction in mainframe memory pool file addresses consumed daily, to the tune of millions
- Millions of pool files made scalable for other TPF applications annually
- Immense savings in the infrastructure cost associated with mainframe storage – a step towards overall reduction in mainframe costs, as envisaged by Sabre
- A step forward in the technology transformation journey for Sabre through optimized mainframe footprint leading to eventual t towards cloud based solutions
