Farewell, SABRE!

[wench1]

Too bad 1/2 and US and 1/2 OF HP entries were not included, INSTEAD of Going the WEST way..

Where's the merger here?

Any complaints please continue to forward to the IT Moron's and hopefully after mega complaints they will gradually Add the US parts to the POS system.

:down:

 

[JetwayJock]

What a sad time for us all. I am a cs agent with 24 years - formerly piedmont - been through and seen a lot. It is unfortunate, but clearly the focus is no longer on efficiency and customer service. It's all about generating profits by lowering costs. Which is fine, as long as you can accomplish this efficiently.
The shares system is extremely labor intensive because it consists of pop up windows that are filled in with the required information, as opposed to single DOS type entries with sabre. No huge deal for regular ontime operations, but when the system has major delays, ie weather systemwide, with lots of misconnects, shares is like running a footrace in mud up to your knees. It is just very inefficient.
So why the change? Because it is cheaper and easier to train new people to fill in popup masks as opposed to having long term career agents who have the motivation and time to learn a more complex system, such as sabre. The company objective is to have a constant turnover of entry level new agents starting at close to minimum wage, knowing they will not remain for a lifetime career.
This cheaper operating system combined with cheaper labor equals greater profitability potential, but at the cost of lessened efficiency and customer service.
Welcome to corporate America!

 

[wench1]

Think DOT complaint advice for your customers who are upset.

It's very easy for them to do. Go right to the DOT website, Takes 5 minutes. I have it saved as a favorite LOL

Thank you PB!

Hope it serves the passengers well-and here's egg on the face of Tiempe. :down:

 

[singh4us]

What a sad time for us all. I am a cs agent with 24 years - formerly piedmont - been through and seen a lot. It is unfortunate, but clearly the focus is no longer on efficiency and customer service. It's all about generating profits by lowering costs. Which is fine, as long as you can accomplish this efficiently.
The shares system is extremely labor intensive because it consists of pop up windows that are filled in with the required information, as opposed to single DOS type entries with sabre. No huge deal for regular ontime operations, but when the system has major delays, ie weather systemwide, with lots of misconnects, shares is like running a footrace in mud up to your knees. It is just very inefficient.
So why the change? Because it is cheaper and easier to train new people to fill in popup masks as opposed to having long term career agents who have the motivation and time to learn a more complex system, such as sabre. The company objective is to have a constant turnover of entry level new agents starting at close to minimum wage, knowing they will not remain for a lifetime career.
This cheaper operating system combined with cheaper labor equals greater profitability potential, but at the cost of lessened efficiency and customer service.
Welcome to corporate America!

Jetway Jock is absolutely "spot on" in his analogy. Northern efficiency gives way to Western profitability, at any means and cost. Gone is good customer service while we muddle through the new system. :down: This career agent has had enough....time to move on! Just twentyfive more days, and hello retirement!!!

 

[BoeingBoy]

If I may, Bob, here's all that in a nutshell.....

You can pick up an old Yugo and have the neighborhood kids tape some plywood on the sides, put a cardboard tube on the front, and paint Abrahams on the side and call it a tank. Then you can congratulate yourself on how much money you saved and how almost any semi-illiterate kid could work on it or operate it.

Or you go to the expense of getting the people that know how to build real tanks to build it for you and pay enough to entice the people smart enough to maintain and operate it.

Either way you can claim to have a tank, but which would you rather have when the feces hits the fan.....

Jim

 

[john john]

Hope this helps the frustrated G/A's out there. It wasn't just a price decision.

NO
Carrot dangling spoke to your one need

 

[wench1]

singh,
congrats on your impending ability to GET OUT!

 

[john john]

If I may, Bob, here's all that in a nutshell.....

You can pick up an old Yugo and have the neighborhood kids tape some plywood on the sides, put a cardboard tube on the front, and paint Abrahams on the side and call it a tank. Then you can congratulate yourself on how much money you saved and how almost any semi-illiterate kid could work on it or operate it.

Or you go to the expense of getting the people that know how to build real tanks to build it for you and pay enough to entice the people smart enough to maintain and operate it.

Either way you can claim to have a tank, but which would you rather have when the feces hits the fan.....

Jim

Thanks BoeingBoy I think agents take pride in knowing the ins and outs of a system that allows you without interruption to take care of the customer.

 

[DrBeth]

Thanks BoeingBoy I think agents take pride in knowing the ins and outs of a system that allows you without interruption take care of the customer.

I just wish management cared like the real employees do.

 

[drifterreno]

😛h34r:

It's hard to comprehend Sabre being superior for the folks who have only used QIK over Shares. There is no argument, Sabre was (is) a superior operating system for the travel industry. QIK is from the mindset of a young airline and it hasn't been fine tuned to the degree of Sabre. Perhaps with all of the new east users, we can pass along our experiences anda get QIK up to "speed".

You didn't read my post very well, or just what you wanted to---I did work on sabre and at USAirways too--I love quik and sabre also but we had to choose one.

 

[wench1]

Call the trng dept in CLT ,get the trainers in get their asses over to the a/p to help.
I would.

 

[john john]

You didn't read my post very well, or just what you wanted to---I did work on sabre and at USAirways too--I love quik and sabre also but we had to choose one.

The company elected not to change the operations side WHY?

 

[ClueByFour]

The overlooked piece is the ability of IT to easily and quickly customize a system that generates pop up windows as opposed ot a command line type of OS. Frankly with the current potential pool of available labor at any wage most IMO are so entrenched in the Windows/Mac style interface that most would struggle indefinately with command line legacy programs line SABRE.

Any IT situation today equal trade offs. SABRE is essentially bullet proof, ask anyone who uses it. QIK/Shares will most likely not be as reliable.

I'm taking a chance here and am going to quote a small piece of an e-mail I recieved from a US executive who knows about this stuff. I won't post the entire e-mail as I do not have permission. I thought his short paragraph provided a ton of insight.

"Sabre is the Ginsu Knife of Reservations systems. It does it all…but wait, there’s more…. While highly functional, it’s also highly difficult to make changes to. That’s why the former US could never seem to fix things like that upgrade disconnect between pre-departure and the airports that you hate so much. The code is all tied together and you have to change and test the whole thing just to make small modifications."

Hope this helps the frustrated G/A's out there. It wasn't just a price decision.

Let's take that at face value, and assume that it's as hard to customize sabre as they say it is. As an FYI, one of my roommates from college who went on to get an MBA and who now consults on sabre for a living disagrees with that assessment, but nevertheless:

The problem with shares is that Tempe seems to think they are smart enough to upgrade/change it in-house. Does anyone who has seen the IT acumen at play since the merger really believe that?

As we all know, for instance, the upgrade code since the merger has been equally broken to the upgrade code before the merger--just in a different way (although I love being able to beat a CP to the punch these days--Thanks, Tempe!).

The training thing is a misnomer--without understanding the underlying process and nomenclature, running shares on a Mac or Sabre on a VT100 will make no difference. I can teach the monkey the interface, I can't teach them what it means underneath. And I've seen HP agents work with clicky-clicky shares and east agents with sabre--the latter are always faster at a given task. Always.

This decision, like many that Tempe made, was short-sighted. The only quarter I'll give them is that they had the sabre-lite version and the contract with EDS, both of which were no winners. Working around them (or out from under them) in the long term would probably be a better strategic decision that going with shares. Moreover, it may turn out that having EDS in the loop is a necessary evil, since it sure don't look as if Tempe's inhouse IT has the stones to play "big airline."

 

[ClueByFour]

The problem in IT today is that what you spend 50 million on today and makes you the model of effiency in 18 months can make you the dinosaur. So we see the move toward more "open" systems. SABRE is NOT an open architecture system. So you live or die with SABRE, not that it's a bad thing it just limits your options in an ever changing world.

With a turnkey solution like SABRE you pay a premium for that solution. A lot of what you buy is piece of mind and top notch support. What you give up is flexibility.

Conversely with a more open system like Shares you can add a lot of parts from different sources. Now the trade off there is you better have people on staff to support it that don't have their collective heads up their arse.

Bottom line is NO Software out there in any industry is the be all, end all solution it often comes down to the IT Managers preference along with $$$$.

There is more to IT than simply spend and flexibility--risk management and mitigation is a very large factor, as is uptime.

In an industry that is often measured by it's "on time" statistics and the underlying need to have an "always on" system distributed world-wide, the issue of risk-management looms even larger.

In this case, I'd suggest to you that the widely distributed nature of the system (the datacomm requirements), combined with the uptime requirements, combined with a fair evaluation of the inhouse skillset at Tempe would lead one to a very different path than the one taken.

 

[JAXPax]

Let's take that at face value, and assume that it's as hard to customize sabre as they say it is. As an FYI, one of my roommates from college who went on to get an MBA and who now consults on sabre for a living disagrees with that assessment, but nevertheless:

From my experience working at a certAAin airline.... the problem isn't that Sabre is hard to customize... it's just that it's typically expensive to do so. At least that was the outlook there.