Customer Interface (API) & Process Automation

Initial Situation

Our customer and his client were exchanging passenger data via email. Many emails went back and forth and both parties had to copy and paste data from different systems and compose emails so they could be sent to the other party who would then copy that information and enter it in his respective system.

Goal

The goal was to automate the data exchange so both ends would have more efficient processes.

Implementation

Technologies

We've added this integration to the existing web application's backend. The server was running NodeJS at the time. The customer's platform was salesforce.

Project Management

This was a rather quick project but it required a lot of coordination between many different stakeholders: our client, his client and his client's IT service provider. The 9 hours time difference was a factor that had to be taken into account.

How it worked

The client in San Francisco would send ticket requests to the client in Frankfurt. That request was accepted and parsed by the server side interface that we have developed. An excel file with the relevant data was generated automatically and sent to the team in Frankfurt via email.

The staff would take that data, find the best flight solutions and book them in Sabre (Global Distribution System). The Sabre interface we had built in another project would make sure the data was available in the main system in no time. Once it was transmitted, it triggered our interface again.

Our interface would then create a notification and push the new records to the customer's API (application programming interface) endpoints. The customer's software would parse the data and store it in a database.

Result

We mentioned in the top that this project lead to a win-win-win situation. Actually we could add some more "-win"s to it. Both customers saved so much time and avoided many mistakes that would have happend if the work was done manually. Also, our client could strengthen the ties to his customer. Even if competitors would offer cheaper flight tickets, the customer in San Francisco would think at least twice, now that he has this seamless interface with our customer in Frankfurt. It was a real game changer.

This project was so quick because our client had gone through the process of Digital Transformation with us in the past. And because he used a tailor-made software from us, it was possible to implement this very specific interface between the systems.