Sabre – how the cooperation with Sii has been growing
Sabre is a global technology company that provides advanced IT solutions for the tourism sector. It is the market leader in IT solutions for travel agencies, airlines, travel agencies, hotels and other institutions in the industry.
From the point of view of Sii Sabre is our first client in Krakow, which formed the basis for the establishment of the Malopolska branch of the company. The client was acquired by Key Account Manager from Warsaw, Mateusz Mick, in September 2010. In connection with the growing cooperation and other prospects which opened in the south of Poland, a new branch was established formally in March 2011.
Until December 2011, Ryszard Pytko, Director of Sii Krakow, had been responsible for increasing cooperation with Sabre. Then the task was taken over by a newcomer Rafał Dybus, Account Executive, today responsible for cooperation with Sabre. At present, the team dedicated to cooperation with the client has 4 members. Apart from Rafal Dybus, who is responsible for the Business Unit, they are: Magdalena Jaworska – Account Resource Manager, Beata Piasecka – Sales Specialist, and Szymon Domirski – Sales Specialist.
The cooperation began with a basic model offered by Sii – staffing, or posting of specialists (programmers, testers, project managers, etc.) to work at the client. But after less than a year, we had to deal with quite a task.
Sabre faced a challenge – it was looking for Quality Assurance Automation engineers: those who know not only the issues related to the generally understood subject of the quality of software development, but also – and perhaps primarily – are able to automate tests in Java. We offered Sabre another solution – a long-term investment – says Rafał Dybus. – We recruited a team of talented 4- and 5-year students, who had the task to learn and gain experience in test automation. And it worked. On this basis, which was a good investment for both the client and Sii, we managed to build a team now implementing a project that is important both to Sii Krakow and Sabre. The said project consists in regression and test automation for one of the key systems of this customer.
It is a global platform dedicated to the Travel sector – travel agencies and tourist agencies, allowing to plan entire trip for the client in a very fast, intuitive and above all, flexible way – taking into account their expectations and individual needs in real time. The capabilities and versatility of this solution is confirmed by the fact that currently it is used by hundreds of thousands of people in more than 140 countries around the world.
The project is based on the Managed Services model. The team, which used to be managed by the client, is currently managed directly by a Sii team managed by our Team Leader. The level of our responsibility has increased significantly – we are assessed on the basis of effects and SLA with clearly defined KPIs. Sii is responsible for the construction of the whole team, recruiting as well as updating and improving the competence of team members.
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- www.sabre.pl
Our company is focused on Agile actions and dynamic growth, so we have been successfully implementing projects together with Sii for 5 years now. It is a partner that provides flexible cooperation, adapting operating models to the changing market situation and responding quickly to the needs of business partners – says Marzena Arszyńska, HR Director, Sabre Polska. And she adds: Our cooperation is a win-win one. Sii supports Sabre in recruiting top experts in various technologies with rich experience in the industry. And Sabre provides employees with the opportunity to work on very interesting business and technological projects for major airlines and hotel chains in the world (e.g. American Airlines, EtiHad) as well as the ability to co-create innovative software used by millions of people in 144 countries around the world.
These experiences, rated very highly by both parties, allowed to establish cooperation with two key departments of Sabre: Airline Solutions and Travel Network.
A year after the creation of the Quality Assurance Automation team, cooperation with the client has gained strong momentum. In 2012-2015, we formed a total of 8 teams in the Team Leasing model (Java, web development, mobile, QA, Ruby on Rails) managed by Sabre.
The development of cooperation with the client is based on consistent development of good relations – said Rafał Dybus. – For nearly five years, we have built a solid foundation for our partnership. We know that we share a common goal. We still care about the development of our cooperation and are working on it every day. Currently, our main goal is to develop an effective way to move our cooperation to a higher level, where we will be responsible not only for delegating appropriately qualified specialists to individual projects, but also – and perhaps above all – for the results of their work.
Taking into account the development of cooperation and models used to provide our services to Sabre on a daily basis as well as prospects, the team responsible for Sabre at Sii received this year’s award for the Best Client at Sii.
