Based on comprehensive analysis and on-site research of various business systems, iSoftStone established a unified data platform for China Southern Airlines.

Situation
Founded in October 2002, China Southern Airlines Co. Ltd. is primarily an air transportation company.  In addition to operating as a passenger and cargo flight agent, it also is involved in the import/export trade business within industries such as finance, construction, and advertising.

When China Southern Airlines built a new type of financial management system for its holding company (China Southern Airlines Corporation) it also established a financial query system that allows CFOs to access data on the holding company’s overall financial operations. With an increasing demand for new and custom reports among the financial leaders, the original system, which used a static reporting technology, could not handle the heavy workload. In addition, the system didn’t support online analysis functions, such as the OLAP rotation and drill-down, which help to create quick reports and queries. In particular, the query system designed for these leaders lacked the corresponding access control, posing serious financial data security challenges.

Solution
iSoftStone needed to establish a data platform based on all of China Southern Airlines’ business systems, through which all subsystems could exchange information and ultimately provide a unified view of the business.

Using business intelligence analysis tools, iSoftStone created a management query and analysis platform system that performs the following functions:

• System management including user management, role management, and online user monitoring
• Access management to control functions and data
• Application development to allow data dictionary management, document management, and fixed reports

Benefits
iSoftStone met China Southern Airlines’s short-term requirements for the leader query and analysis platform. This new platform supplies financial leaders with better information to improve decision-making and enhance the value of data. The improved data collection tools allows users to easily access data from different sources and better manage data quality. The complete iSoftStone solution provided China Southern Airlines with comprehensive access management, flexible document management, and easily-scalable reporting and analysis. Additionally, with new access control capabilities, iSoftStone was able to increase the security of China Southern Airlines’s business systems.

In addition to the initial project scope of building a data analysis solution, iSoftStone also laid a solid foundation for China Southern Airlines to build a long-term data warehouse. iSoftStone designed and created modules of the data warehouse with important business functions such as reporting and inquiries. As a direct benefit of this project, China Southern Airlines can now easily enter new data into the existing data warehouse as the business grows and avoid the complex and timely processes previously used.

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