The eight day cycle of report collation and distribution was cut to one day. All this despite increasing data volumes commensurate with Smarte Carte's business growth on the order of 25 percent for the last several years. This meant that local managers had fresh data and were equipped to make decisions or take corrective actions when it counted. The application deployment also enabled the MIS group to set up folders so that, for example, the various cart management reports used by the location manager at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport were not only more robust than managers needed to support operations at smaller airports, but routed to corporate managers as well as the JFK airport manager for collaboration. Managers can work with familiar applications and collaborate via GroupWise e-mail.
Managers supporting several locations can access reports no matter where they are.
Information is downloaded as needed for offline viewing and analysis. Jim Meyer, Smarte Carte vice president and corporate controller, said the key, as it will be for many similar cash business enterprises, is to put information into the hands of remote business managers quickly and efficiently. Prior to using byRequest, we spent two to three days just printing, copying and sorting before faxing and distributing the reports. This saves us considerable time and money and gets the information into the hands of our business managers quicker. Although administration aspects of Smarte Carte's reinforcing of the information system aren't so obvious to travelers as a silvery cart in the right place at the right time, ease of administration clearly helps.