About the authors: Aditya Kothari, more popularly known as DAS, graduated in the summer of 2011 and has been working at Sabre Holdings for seven months. He is best remembered for being the founding editor of T5E and for being a hobbit. Amod Mittal is an alumnus from the 2009 BTech batch of Naval Architecture. Better known as Size, he is remembered by present day seniors as a prominent lit-godfather of Saraswathi hostel.
DAS to editor: “You don’t know Size? You must be a loser then.”
DAS :
Sabre Airline Solutions provide software in aid of airline companies world over, and try to increase their operating efficiency in a number of ways. Since people get placed across various products I’ll settle for describing my own role.
Delivery and Consulting is primarily a managerial role with a technical element to it. It mostly involves understanding the business of new clients and assessing how well our solutions can match their requirements. This can be a part of a new product installation, an upgrade, a major change from a previous version or a consulting assignment.
Once we find possible issues, we discuss within our internal teams and figure out how to tackle them. After the completion of this exercise we get down with the dirty work which is the actual implementation of the product at the client. It might take several months, and during this time we need to keep an eye out for other issues which we missed out on as well as keep track of deadlines. We also need to familiarise the clients with the product for a smooth transition and guide them for the first few weeks. Once the client is confident about using the product, we hand over the responsibility of helping them out to the Advanced Support team, with whom we stay in regular touch to chip in wherever required. In a dry nutshell that’s about it.
To be a little more direct, you should apply if you:
1. Like managerial work and client exposure
2. Have good people skills and are a good intuitive listener
3. Are interested in the airline industry
4. Enjoy travelling
5. Aren’t a stickler for a 9-5 job and don’t mind occasionally working late
More insights into DAS as well as his travel experiences as part of his work may be found in his personal blog.
Size :
I currently work at Sabre in the Operations Research team. The work in this profile is mostly centered around optimization models, data analysis and predictive modeling. Since DAS already gave some idea about Delivery and Consulting, I’ll write more about the area in which I work:- Airline Network Planning and Scheduling. As a very crude description, it can be broken into the following set of activities:
Long / Mid term Network Planning and Forecasting: In this we try and predict how many people want to travel, where they want to travel, and how will they want to travel. Given this, we then figure out what is the best schedule for an airline.
Fleet Planning: Given where and when the airline wants to fly, what is the least number of aircraft that you need, or other related optimizations.
Scheduling: Putting everything together and maintaining and modifying the basic schedule that is used in at least a 100 different departments across the airline.
Our work involves improving the above models and algorithms, helping the customer understand them, and in some cases, actually working with the airlines to do some or all of the above activities.
Compared to the Delivery and Consulting role, in the OR profile you need to have a better technical understanding of the models, but tend to have lesser direct interactions with the customers.
The OR profile also sees a more consistent distribution of work, although with lesser travel involved. Again, as with Revenue Management / Pricing, the Network Planning and Scheduling team also has a corresponding Delivery and Consulting role, with a job description very similar to DAS’s.
