The Sunset Group consolidates financial information

Leading Mexican hospitality group leverages Talend's data integration and data quality technologies to aggregate data from diverse sources for better analysis.

A leading vacation ownership developer in Cancun

A hospitality group based in Cancun, Mexico, the Sunset Group launched operations in 1990 with the opening of their Private Resort VIP operation. Today, the Sunset Group is one of the leading vacation ownership developers in Mexico and Latin America with 1000 employees and six hotels in the Mexican Caribbean. A number of services were established to meet member needs, including a Services Center, a Reservation Center, a Collection Center, and Interclub. The Sunset Group also offers a full-service marina for yacht owners, a car rental agency, a spa and wellness center, and a full-feature tour and travel agency.

Seeking an ETL solution to optimize Business Intelligence

With a number of subsidiaries under the corporate umbrella, the Sunset Group needed a way for executives to get insight into their spending and how it related to the overall budget. The Sunset Group was already using QlikView to consolidate information from heterogeneous sources, but realized that they needed an ETL tool to properly manage the extraction and processing of all the information. The data sources included SAP Business One (using SQLServer on a Windows Server), distributed Oracle 9i (running on Linux CentOS), Excel spreadsheet exports from a legacy application, and statistics from the Accounting Department and the Hotel Property Management System.

“At first we had considered a home-grown solution, but the hand-coding requirements were too complex,” explains Edgar Osorio, CIO of the Sunset Group. “Further research indicated that there were several solutions that might meet our needs—iBolt, Jitterbit, and Talend. After in-depth evaluation, we decided that because most of the systems that the Sunset Group developed were Java-based, Talend Open Studio was the best fit for the project.”

Talend Open Studio gathers data from diverse sources, transforms the information, and stores it in a MySQL database. After this, QlikView is used to generate dynamic reports that can be accessed via a Web browser.

“The Sunset Group depends on Talend to bridge its current applications, saving the time and money involved in building our own interfaces,” says Edgar Osorio. “We are also planning to build a custom connector to access the SAP Business One database for merging data. The ability to develop components ourselves and to work with the community in the process is a great advantage.”

Branching out

“Some of our smaller divisions or subsidiaries cannot afford SAP licenses,” says Edgar Osorio. “With one of our travel agencies, we use Talend to pull information from their system and port it to our CRM. Now we have two systems integrated into one and the travel agency is feeding information online to our corporate servers. Previously, with hand-coding, it took a month to develop a process for pulling data; now we can do it in four days. It's a huge time-saver.”

“We also like the built-in data quality features,” adds Edgar Osorio. “Take something as simple as a date format. Sometimes these are entered month-first and sometimes it's the other way around. Before we deployed Talend we integrated data and didn't see errors until users told us that the information was rejected. That was bad enough when we only had 5,000 records a month, but now we're handling 25,000 to 30,000 records in the same time frame. Talend ensures that the information is scrubbed and our customers can make better decisions.”

The Sunset Group is planning to upgrade to Talend Integration Suite to take advantage of the training, certification, and support, and also to deploy Talend's fullfeatured data profiling and cleansing solution, Talend Data Quality. “The enterprise solution will also allow us to access data in real-time. Before Talend, we could only update the database every week. With Talend Integration Suite we'll have access to the information on-line.”

“It is true that the majority of Mexican companies are new to the data integration arena,” concludes Edgar Osorio. “Many of them are composites of different systems and different vendors, so integrating into a single solution on a single database can be very painful. Talend offers the perfect solution at the right price. The Sunset Group is very pleased to be able to use cutting edge technology that gives us a commercial advantage here in Mexico.”