Founded in 1952, Attar Travel is one of the oldest agencies in Saudi Arabia. Today, Attar is one of the largest TMCs in the Middle East with 35 KSA branches and more than 500 employees.
Attar’s IT did not keep pace with the travel industry digital transformation resulting in an ever-increasing dependency on financial staff manual labor to support management information and subagent business information demands.
Lack of timely management information and control began to increase the cost of operations and, more importantly, began to impact acceptable levels of subagent services and customer satisfaction.
As Attar expanded the number of branch offices the subagent inter-branch connectivity with central IT at headquarters began to deteriorate. Unexpected disconnects interfered with daily transactions within the agency and during customer engagement. Disconnects interrupted workflows causing significant rework, and disrupted, or lost, a customer transaction. GDS data was inaccurate or lost due to improper or incomplete data capture. Eventually, Attar had to perform 100% manual verification on all re-issues, refunds, and EMD transactions. Four financial team members were assigned to verification duty every day. Attar’s continued to use a legacy database that was no longer supported by the vendor and some of the most common features were never provided by its IT vendor such as credit card control alerts during a customer transaction or the inability to have multiple functional modules active at the same time. Attar’s IT system was not processing transactions in real time. Financial statements were not available on demand but had to have an end-of-day financial close before the actual status of providers, customers, or daily financial activity became available. More importantly, subagent access to the same information was also not available. These system shortfalls restricted the ability to manage the business in real time. Attar’s IT was not keeping pace with travel industry demands.
The Nucore Agency Management Platform is a highly scalable, customizable, and robust real time financial system and integration platform. The Nucore comprehensive financial solution cannot become outdated or drop into a legacy status since it is updated on a quarterly basis at no charge. TRAACS, the financial system that drives the Nucore platform processes financial transactions in real time. Real time processing provides accurate and timely 1) subagent GSD BSP and independent airline data capture, aggregation, and reconciliation, 2) on-demand multi-level consolidation reporting, 3) automatic invoicing, 4) on-demand financial statement generation, and 5) simultaneous credit card control with transaction entry which, collectively, removed Attar’s legacy business barriers. Going forward, Attar was able to reassign staff to support growth instead of increasing the staff to support its current customer base. Subagents were able to manage their own businesses without support from the main office staff. Management information is now available on demand at any time it is needed, and the entire system is updated with new features and functions every quarter. Nucore is 100% dedicated to providing its clients management with the IT solutions required to meet the rapidly changing travel industry’s market and information demands.
After upgrading to Nucore’s Agency Management Platform, Attar headquarters and subagent connectivity was stabilized. All locations had instant access to accurate, real time financial data needed to manage their own businesses. Customers immediately benefited from Attar’s higher level of service without system delays or interruptions increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction. The main office had the data and financial information they needed to manage the entire TMC activity on a consolidated basis knowing the data was accurate and the financials were up to date. The new system enabled the main office financial team to be reduced from 62 to 32 members, saving significant labor costs that translated directly into increased profits.
Attar needed an IT system that would remove the legacy barriers that were beginning to impact its subagents, customers, and financial performance. A new system with real time financial processing and extensive automated functions of new service capabilities was required as well as a system that could migrate data residing in Attar’s unsupported database into its own native database with little or no business interruption and little if any staff training. Nucore had everything to update Attar’s TMC operations and upgrade its level of customer service The major Agency Management Platform usages and Attar benefits are summarized int the following table. 
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