Farewell, SABRE!

[ClueByFour]

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.

Sure. That adage about "getting what one pays for" comes to mind. Would you rather pay big for sabre and have very little downtime or pay little for shares and make it up in lost revenue because of things like, well, today?

Tempe is going to do what many organizations do--assume that since it fit their model at HP that it (shares run inhouse) will scale up to a 500 plane airline. And they'll roll the dice that they don't get burned. Getting a bit crispy out there, and it's only day 2.

That's just one failure. Not having the kiosks working, when your entire staffing model is predicated upon driving people to them in %80 of airport check-ins, is laughable. Laughable. It should have jumped off the page when they were game planning this. Leaped. Done a dance on the conference room table.

Think that happened? Which brings me full circle--since that did not happen, it's indicative of the talent level involved. And due to that talent level, spending the bucks on sabre does not look like such a bad idea anymore.

This kind of corner cutting and thinking that the inhouse talent is smart enough to handle it is exactly what bit Jetblue squarely in the ### with regard to crew scheduling and communications. "Cheaping it" inhouse may work in the minor leagues, but certainly not when the going gets rough in the bigs.....

 

[john john]

John-John,

It allows you to put a lot of independent pieces together and have them play well in the sandbox with each other.

So why kept expensive hard to adapted SABER on the operation side if what you say is right then the hold shooting match should be SHARES.

 

[john john]

They offer several different lines. The marketing "spin" is the "Best of Breed" tailored to the customers specific need. The reality is the Sales Reps sell what they get "spiffed" on first then if they see themselves losing the deal they sell what the customer wants.

Bait and switch

 

[john john]

One thing I have found out is that the ops side of SABRE is superior to SHARES so they chose to "marry" that to the overall system.

PineyBob I finely got you to say what I wanted to here
SABER is superior product management did not want to take a chance with the operation side when it comes to one operating certificate. Customer Service Agents NOT SO MUCH. The will figure it out They always do…

 

[ClueByFour]

I've noticed this very same thing Clue now that you mention it and I thought it was just me. QIK looked like many more keystrokes to get to the same palce.

Somebody should have done a detailed time study of transaction times prior to a decision on SHARES or SABRE. This is were I continually fault Tempe, They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

This is not rocket science, truthfully. The manufacturing industry has been moving "green screen to GUI" for years. The rub is in the details--the big picture stuff is simple (and not always obvious).

Take a routine task of checking a pax in and tagging bags (all on US metal). It's probably a bit harder (initially) to train someone to do it in the sabre environment. The clicky-click GUI (for this task) is probably marginally easier to learn. Once this simple (and repeatable) task is learned, an agent can probably do it rote on either system with equal acumen.

The problem becomes:

1. Which is faster once it's learned. I'm betting sabre.
2. Does the agent really understand what's going on underneath?

#2 is much more important than #1 and the choice of CLI versus GUI. The repeatable tasks will all be cake in either system after a fashion. The nonstandard tasks, if the answer to #2 is "no" are going to suck regardless of which system is being used. This is a knowledge and competency thing and has nothing at all to do with the software. Nothing.

That said, I've seen sabre and (briefly) shares. I'd prefer sabre because I'm a CLI kind of guy and sabre seems to be intuitive ONCE YOU KNOW AND UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO DO.

I stood at DCA a few weeks ago and watched an agent who appeared to be quite senior almost kill himself to get me checked in via QIK. That tells me that the clickity-click of shares ain't quite what it should be, and this coming from someone (who, but the conversation with the supervisor that came over) knew exactly what he wanted to do but could not make the system do it. There is an argument to be made that a green agent won't have this kind of problem since they would not be predisposed to sabre, but then they would probably have no idea what the underlying problem was in the first place.

That's why I don't think it's a training issue. I think that the east agents (if you accept the line that the QIK GUI is _supposed to be_ easy) are usually pretty smart about how the transactions work on the back end, and if they can't get it then it's probably the software.

I've no idea, but I'm at minimum smart enough to ask the questions. Did anyone in the Sandcastle?

My guess would be a resounding "No."

 

[ggiby]

As I closed out my ATAC report for the last time this evening (March 3rd), I realized just how much I'm going to miss SABRE.... 🙁

How could you miss SAbRE???

you should miss PACER...

talk about more user friendly...

 

[REACC1]

This is not rocket science, truthfully. The manufacturing industry has been moving "green screen to GUI" for years. The rub is in the details--the big picture stuff is simple (and not always obvious).

Take a routine task of checking a pax in and tagging bags (all on US metal). It's probably a bit harder (initially) to train someone to do it in the sabre environment. The clicky-click GUI (for this task) is probably marginally easier to learn. Once this simple (and repeatable) task is learned, an agent can probably do it rote on either system with equal acumen.

The problem becomes:

1. Which is faster once it's learned. I'm betting sabre.
2. Does the agent really understand what's going on underneath?
#2 is much more important than #1 and the choice of CLI versus GUI. The repeatable tasks will all be cake in either system after a fashion. The nonstandard tasks, if the answer to #2 is "no" are going to suck regardless of which system is being used. This is a knowledge and competency thing and has nothing at all to do with the software. Nothing.

That said, I've seen sabre and (briefly) shares. I'd prefer sabre because I'm a CLI kind of guy and sabre seems to be intuitive ONCE YOU KNOW AND UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO DO.

I stood at DCA a few weeks ago and watched an agent who appeared to be quite senior almost kill himself to get me checked in via QIK. That tells me that the clickity-click of shares ain't quite what it should be, and this coming from someone (who, but the conversation with the supervisor that came over) knew exactly what he wanted to do but could not make the system do it. There is an argument to be made that a green agent won't have this kind of problem since they would not be predisposed to sabre, but then they would probably have no idea what the underlying problem was in the first place.

That's why I don't think it's a training issue. I think that the east agents (if you accept the line that the QIK GUI is _supposed to be_ easy) are usually pretty smart about how the transactions work on the back end, and if they can't get it then it's probably the software.
My guess would be a resounding "No."

Clue, you are pitching an ACE, dude! From my perspective, spot on.
Quick gets in the way. (in front of sabre)
Now that that's moot, I usually (for the last two days) spend my time reentering the same things over and over again, in order to get the desired result. Tis, time consuming and not fair to the paying passengers and the line they must endure. In other words, not efficient, nor adequate.
This is not a system for an airline the size of LCC.
I have reservations about the ability of the in house IT people to expand Shares to meet the requirements of an airline of the size of LCC.
Fix it Quickly, for Gods sake.

 

[Dog Wonder]

Fix it Quickly, for Gods sake.

Just fix it. The time for quickly has passed.

 

[CV580ETOPS]

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!

Noooo ....welcome to the "new" UsAirways...owned and operated by the "old" America West. Spot-on observation from what I here from friends who work there

 

[USPHLElite]

When i went up to the GA I asked how was FC looking and seem to struggle to find out, a few minutes later and some help she was able to find out but took a lot of keystrokes. They also were trying to get a printout but they came on saying it is not the right one and kept on trying. Maybe it is training but there are some things that will never be the same.


I also don't believe that the website "enhancements" have anything to do with the shares upgrade IMO, Being a website it only needs to pull & push data to the database, it is up to IT what it would be allowed to change or add. That is the great thing about using a website, once the DB is setup properly you can do almost anything with a nice GUI.