Summary
The purpose of the paper is to present the structured concept of management in-formation system (MIS), dedicated to domestic (polish) tourism organizers. The system vision has been described in the form of domain ontology, structural and process con-ceptual models of the system, reflecting the key aspects of assisting the business of a tour operator. From the scientific point of view, the field examined by the authors is located at the border of economic and computer sciences, more particularly at the border of management and information fields. While developing the vision, the authors adopted the style of minute detailing of the main elements of the vision due to the lack of similar publications which could be used as support, especially for beginning de-signers of similar MISs.
Keywords: Management Information System, Tourism Organizer, Tour Operator, Domain Ontol-ogy, Business Process, Concept Modeling, Domain Model.
Introduction
The idea to publish the vision of the information technology project of an MIS for a tour oper-ator originated while running pilot implementation projects at the Koszalin University of Technol-ogy, concerning the implementation of particular concepts of business organization management system functionalities within the lsi2020.politechnika.koszalin.pl project. The scope of this project comprised monitoring of trial operation of the developed information system, statistical verification of project assumptions, and acceptance or rejection of conceptual assumptions. The authors have analyzed the results of prototype lsi2020 enterprise management system test carried out by the De-partment of European Social Fund at the Ministry of Development, by the Agriculture Restructuring and Modernization Agency, and the Ministry of Justice of Poland.
The research task carried out by the co-authors for the management system dedicated to tourism industry businesses, which is popular in Pomerania, consisted of the development of context con-ceptual models and carrying out the analysis of the specific functionalities of the system intended for assisting a tourism organizer (tour operator). The following research methods and techniques were applied, while performing the tasks:
• Conceptual modeling and analysis, using the concept mapping technique and modeling languages: Unified Modeling Language (UML 2.0) and Business Process Modeling Lan-guage (BPML);
• The Iconix software development methodology;
• Statistical data analysis methods (descriptive statistics, analysis of phenomena cross-com-pliance, variance analysis, time series analysis and forecasting, a survey).
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The topic of computer assisting of tourism organizers has been clearly represented in Polish source literature since the 90’s of the previous century. Currently, the purposefulness of implement-ing teleinformation systems in tourism is taught to students by lecturers of economic universities [1]. Scientific interest in the subject can be found, among others, in publications by P. Rusiecki, published by University of Economics in Katowice on “Organization Assistance Systems” Internet service maintained by the Faculty of Informatics of the Economic University in Katowice [2–3]. Similar themes are present in publications by R. Rajs from the Polytechnic Institute of the State Higher Vocational School in Krosno [4]. Unlike the researchers quoted above, the authors of this paper do not refer to existing software used in tourism, but they offer a generalized concept model of a management information system for tourism. Such approach is usually associated with an at-tempt to develop the so called typical solution – a typical MIS design that might by customized (adjusted to the customer’s needs). The authors of this article assume that following the vision pre-sented in this article, concrete implementations of a tour operator’s MIS will be built. The suggested concept to assist a tour operator can be also used by the developers of the existing systems for reen-gineering their own products.
1. Tour operator’s domain ontology as the basis of the MIS vision
Ontology in information systems [5] means a formal definition of types, properties and mutual relationships of entities that exist in the specific discourse domain (problem domain). In fact, it is a formal representation of the domain knowledge made of a set of specific concepts in a domain and the relationships between them.
The central concept in the tourism organizers’ domain is a commonly used in the tourism in-dustry term “tour operator”. The term means a business organizations providing services in tourism, most often relating to travels abroad. A tour operator creates and promotes its travel product in the form of a complete service package. It can be an organized tourist stay, an excursion, a pilgrimage, training or conference trip, etc. The tour operator also offers services from external providers in order to sell them to retail customers.
In Poland, in accordance with the Act of 29 August 1997 on tourism services, the tour operator is formally referred to as the tourism organizer [6]. The Act specifies the conditions for the provision of tourism services by entrepreneurs within the territory of the Republic of Poland, as well as abroad if the contracts with the customers on provision of such services are concluded within the territory of the Republic of Poland.
The Act defines the key term constituting the terminological base for the researched topic. The first category of terms can comprise of the terms describing the entrepreneurs and employees in tourism industry, namely:
1. ‘Tourism organizer’ – an entrepreneur1 organizing a tourism event;
2. ‘Travel agent’ – an entrepreneur whose business consists of performing actual and legal actions in connection with concluding agreements on provision of tourism services, on cus-tomer’s order;
3. ‘Tourism agent’ – an entrepreneur whose business consists of constant intermediation in
1 The entrepreneur is a natural person, a legal person and an organizational unit without legal personality with legal ca-pacity conferred by a separate law - running business on their own behalf. See: Act of 2 July 2004 on the freedom of economic activity, O. J. of 2010 No. 220, item 1447, as later amended.
concluding agreements on providing tourism services on behalf of tourism organizers au-thorized in the country or to other service providers established in the country;
4. ‘Tour guide’ – a person professionally guiding tourists or visitors around selected areas, localities and facilities, providing expert information about them, and attending the tourists or the visitors within the scope resulting from the contract;
5. ‘Tour leader’ – a person accompanying the participants of a tourism event on behalf of the tourism organizer, attending the tourists and ensuring the performance of service for them, and providing basic information concerning the visited country or place.
The second category consist of the terms describing the recipients of the tourism industry: 1. “Tourist” – a person traveling to another town outside their usual place of residence for
a period not exceeding 12 months, for whom the purpose of travel is not to take a permanent work in the visited town and who uses accommodation for at least one night.
2. “Visitor” – a person traveling to another town outside their usual place of residence, for whom the purpose of travel is not to take a permanent work in the visited the town and who does not use accommodation.
3. “Tour operator’s customer” – a person who intends to conclude or has concluded a contract for the provision of tourism services on their behalf or on behalf of another person, and the conclusion of the contract does not constitute the object of their business activity, as well as the person on behalf of whom the contract has been concluded, as well as the person who the right to use the tourism services covered by the previously concluded agreement has been transferred to.
The third category consists of the terms describing the services provided in the tourism industry: 1. ‘Tourism services' – guide services, hotel services and all other services provided to tourists
or visitors;
2. ‘Package' – at least two tourism services forming a single consistent program and covered by the common price, if these services include accommodation or are longer than 24 hours or if the program provides for a change of the place of stay;
3. ‘Excursion' – a type of tourism event whose program includes a change of the participants’ place of stay;
4. ‘Organization of tourism events' – preparation or offering as well as carrying out of tourism events;
5. ‘Tourism accommodation service' – short-term, generally available rental of homes, apart-ments, rooms, beds as well as placing tents or trailers and provision, within the facility, of related services.
The Consumer Federation [7] also defines the key terms relating to the tourism industry. Ex-plaining the meaning of terms describing tourism industry entrepreneurs and employees, the Con-sumer Federation points out that:
• ‘Tourism organizer’ (tour operator) – is an entrepreneur organizing a tourism event. This person is liable to the customer for failure to perform or improperly perform a contract for the provision of tourism services. A tour operator must have an entry in the register of the organizers of tourism and tourism intermediaries.
• ‘Travel agent’ – is an entrepreneur who on customer’s order and on the latter’s behalf con-cludes an agreement with the tourism organizer or another service provider, e.g. the hotelier or the carrier. The intermediary accepts no liability for the quality of services performed by these entrepreneurs, his liability is limited, i.e. this person may be responsible for the lack
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of due diligence when selecting the contractor and the service for the customer. A travel agent must have an entry in the register of the organizers of tourism and tourism interme-diaries.
• ‘Tourism agent’ – is an entrepreneur who constantly acts as an agent in concluding agree-ments for the provision of tourism services to organizers of tourism or to other service providers. He always represents another entrepreneur and does not act on his own behalf. The tourism agent is not liable to the customers for both failure to perform the services, and for defectively concluded agreement. The activity of agents requires an entry to the register.
It is worth noting that the PWN Dictionary of the Polish Language [8] defines the terms of ‘tour operator’ as a “tourism agency specializing in sales of organized events”. At the same time, the hotel glossary [9], suggesting the use acronym ‘TO’ (tour operator), defines the term as the “organizer of tourism, a company completing a tourism service and most often distributing ready-made packages via a network of agents, TO bears the financial risk related to the organization of the tourism event”. Having carefully learned the terminology adopted in the tourism industry, from the point of view of a MIS designer, the occurrence of fuzzy (“suspicious”) definition can be found, for example in case of the “tour operator’s customer” and partly duplicated terms, like in the case of ‘tourism agent’ and ‘travel agent’. It is also easy to notice too rigorous, imposed structural relations between entities in the tour operator domain, for example, a package must be the aggregate of at least two tourism services, and an excursion must be a kind of event. It is a standard situation for the natural language; however, it impedes the designer in building a coherent, logically not contradicting struc-ture of MIS. The author’s proposal for a constructive (engineering) solutions to the indicated inac-curacies was presented in the object model of tour operator’s domain (see Fig. 3).
Prior to the formulation of the vision for the tour operator’s MIS, it is particularly important to understand that the object of the exchange on the tourism market are tourism products (travel prod-ucts, travel & tourism products). As discussed herein, these are packages of tourism services most of which are composed of various tourism goods and services satisfying the diverse needs of tourists. A package comprises of mutually complementary services from one or several manufacturers. Such a package is selected by tourists when it is seen as a collection of benefits (including experience) available for a specific price. A clear understanding of the term 'tourism product' is important insofar as it is a crucial term in expressing business objectives of the tour operator.
In the context of designing the management information system for a tour operator, it is im-portant that a specific tourism product is often identified in the market with fuzzy terminology. Tourism products are presented to the customer not only through the term 'service', but also using such categories as: ‘route’ ‘site' (to visit), ‘event’ ‘package’ ‘area’ (unifying the components of a tourism product in terms of origin), or even ‘object’ (e.g. tourist guide or a souvenir).
As to the types of tourism services provided, according to the Management Encyclopedia [10], the term 'tourism service' includes:
• hotel service – accommodation at a hotel, motel (or hotel-like service, e.g. camping or hos-tel);
• transport service (hence terms: bus tourism, train tourism, or air tourism); • catering service – at a restaurant, bar, or a canteen;
Figure 1. Visualization of the hierarchy of basic concepts in the tour operator domain Source: own study.
The object of the intermediary services, also provided by the tour operator and its agents, can be the following elements purchased as partial services or in packages [11–12]:
• tourist package reservation and sales;
• travel service, comprising selling and booking tickets for different means of transport; • booking and selling of accommodation;
• booking and selling of catering services; • providing insurance services;
• booking and selling of accompanying services – health, cultural, recreational, sports and entertainment;
• providing leading and guide services; • providing resident services;
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• completing passport and visa formalities on behalf of the customer.
The description of terminology (terms) in tour operator industry presented above has been used by the authors of this paper to develop the domain ontology illustrated in Fig. 1. The diagram was generated by the ontology editor Protégé2. It is worth noting that in order to improve the clarity of the diagram, the term tree has not been presented in all details in Fig. 1. Furthermore, on the diagram, one can see a term tree borrowed from project Travel3. Such extension of the domain ontology of a domestic tour operator in the English language is to demonstrate the possibility to relate the created model to the international tourism terminology.
2. Process analysis of tour operator domain and conceptual variants of MIS implementation Separating specific document flows and logically closed activity types of employees in a tour operator’s activity, the authors differentiate four main business processes:
1) Designing a new tourism product, including the creation of its idea and verification of the eco-nomic viability of the product.
2) Preparing the tourism product for implementation, including searching for business partners. 3) Advertising a tourism product in order to reach the widest possible range of potential buyers
with the information about the product.
4) Providing as broad distribution network for active (current) tourism products as possible. The conceptual map of a tour operator’s major business processes in BPMN notation has been presented in Fig. 2.
Figure 2. Major business processes of a tour operator Source: own study.
Taking into account the structure of the identified processes, the tour operator’s management information system can be constructed using the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) concept. This is the class of integrated management systems for information resources in an enterprise or institution that is a result of functional and technological integration of such solutions as application integration and data exchange systems (including ERP systems), process management and workflow
2 http://protege.stanford.edu/
systems, electronic data and website content management systems. The term ECM comprises strat-egies, methods and tools used in the entire life cycle of managed information. The international AIIM (The Association for Information and Image Management) association – global association involved in ECM – defined the term in the following way [13]: ECM is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organi-zational processes. ECM includes information management throughout the enterprise, irrespective whether the information is in the form of a paper document, an electronic file, a data string or even an e-mail. This definition includes areas which were traditionally covered by the data management and document management systems. ECM includes document management, WWW content man-agement, searching, cooperation, management of legally sensitive data, digital asset management (DAM), workflow management, capture and scanning. ECM is primarily aimed at information life-cycle management [14] from the creation or first publication, through processing or archiving until its possible deletion. It also comprises data conversion between various digital and traditional forms. It is worth stressing that building an IT system for a tour operator, including the ECM concept, is only one of possible, logically justified methods. In the situation, when the tour operator imposes requirements concerning the integration of some domain systems already implemented and operated in their business, it may be reasonable to choose an alternative SOA concept [15–16]. Domain sys-tems are well suited for that concept where the main focus is on defining the services that will meet the user’s requirements. The term SOA comprises a set of organizational and technical methods aimed at a better link between the business part of the organization with its IT resources. SOA ser-vice means any software element that can operate autonomously and has its own defined interface through which it provides the implemented functions. The method of service provision is defined by the interface hiding the implementation details – this allows to hide the service architecture (struc-ture) inside the services, and the architecture remains irrelevant from the point of view of the service user. It is important that there is a common, available to all services communication medium that enables free flow of data between the components of the entire system.
The SOA architecture is conceptually similar to the concept of distributed objects [17], how-ever, it describes the solution at a higher level of abstraction. SOA service interfaces are usually defined in a way independent from the development platform, and the services themselves are often implemented on the basis of different technologies and made available by means of an independent communications protocol. Implementation of the SOA is usually preceded by modeling business processes in BPMN notation. In business processes models, the communication with the services is represented by events (e.g. sending or receiving messages) which provide data necessary to deliver the service.
It has to be taken into consideration that the tourism industry is characterized with very untyp-ical client-company relationships. These relationships do not only have a business (financial, time) dimension, but concern very important humanistic, social, and even political aspects. Due to the significance of tourism in the modern world, the quality of servicing tourists by tour operators is in the center of public attention, and all issues occurring in tour operators’ relationships with their customers are immediately exposed by television and radio. The significant complexity of the tour operator business model at relatively low margin in the tourism industry does not allow the tourism organizers operate solely in the “manual” management mode, therefore customer relationship man-agement systems constitute an increasingly important support for travel offices, travel agents, hotel-iers, and other organizations providing services for tourists.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the term referring to strategies, practices and technologies that businesses use to manage interaction with their own customers [18]. First of all, CRM is a group of business strategies that are aimed to increase the market value of the company by making optimal use of the relationship with its customers. In other words, CRM is a client-fo-cused business philosophy, that permeates the culture throughout the organization. In its essence, its comprises of profitable management of recognizing, procuring, retaining and developing customers, providing the company with a consistent image of the relationship with the customer, and the cus-tomer with a consistent image of the company, while consolidating all available media and infor-mation channels.
Customer relationship management is based on the analysis of the knowledge about the tomer. It requires the company to keep data collections describing relationships with its own cus-tomer and describing the entire life cycle of each cuscus-tomer. Maintaining such collections is currently supported by modern information technologies, utilizing, among others, the concept of data ware-house [19]. Systematic analysis of collected data referring to the customers is aimed at improving business relationships with the customers and it helps to retain customers and grow sales.
IT developers, creating specialized software for the tourism sector, need conceptual knowledge [20] on the specificity of this business, need process and functional patterns to design useful, ergo-nomic and multifunction software that will match the requirements of all stake holders in the tourism industry to the maximum. That software should also match, directly or indirectly, a wide range of tourists’ requirements, as well as the dynamically changing economic and legal conditions concern-ing provision of tourism services. The only methodological way out in this complex economic situ-ation is the development of detailed conceptual models, based on which it will be possible to design and manufacture dedicated systems for individual tourism companies, performing their localization and customization in real time.
3. Conceptual design of an integrated IT system for a tour operator
For the needs of presentation of the conceptual MIS design, the authors have developed a model of an example tour operator, and here is its description.
3.1. Example tour operator description
The example firm, tour operator doing business in Poland has its own branches in countries popular among Polish tourists, for example in the Mediterranean countries. The main business of the company is running a travel agency. The firm provides the following typical services: organiza-tion and sales of tours, pilgrimages, sightseeing and leisure as well as holidays. The tour operator is also active in the organization of mass travel, e.g. to church celebrations. The firm’s activity in the market of tourism services is founded on the partnership based on long-term cooperation agree-ments. A wide range of services offered by the company is the result of the concluded agreements which make it possible to sell various tourism products.
The development strategy of the tour operator’s company is based on strengthening the com-petitive position by marketing tourism services tailored to the specific needs of the customers through the use of IT tools supporting the key business processes. The list of main tour operator’s processes carried out in cooperation with business partners, includes:
• Administrative processes (archiving documents, accounting, document circulation, invoic-ing process);
• Special processes (sales, marketing, customer relationship management).
In practice, the IT systems operating in a tourism organizer's enterprise consist of several dedi-cated business applications and the technical infrastructure. A typical example of a business appli-cation popular with tour operators can be software intended for company accounting or customer relationship management software. The applications referred to above usually constitute a relatively simple business software based on collection, storage and transfer of structured data using the uni-versal markup language XML. The first example of popular software – accounting software, enables the tour operator to plan and conduct the sales. It comprises such functions as issuing sales docu-ments such as: a VAT invoice, a bill on sales excluded from VAT, and a corrective document. It enables controlling payments made in accordance with the issued sales documents. The software used by the tour operator’s firm for payment and settlement processing is adapted to exchange data with other programs.
The second example of popular software – customer relationship management software – ena-bles the tour operator to define separate sales conditions both for each type of contractor, and for each contractor separately, which enables a very flexible sales policy. By using the two described applications, the tour operator can control the state of cash flows between contractors and payment terms for company liabilities.
Apart from the software listed above, a tour operator firm usually uses common office software like: MS Office, Libre Office, and Adobe Reader.
3.2. Conception of an integrated IT system for a tour operator
The idea to develop an integrated IT system for a tour operator assumes designing and imple-menting of a new system adapted to the individual needs of the tour operator and companies coop-erating with the operator. The target system should be based on the tools for integrating systems [21–22] and automation of business process management and should include an Internet portal, con-stituting the access channel to services for partners who do not have their own IT systems. The integrated system should be of a B2B (Business-to-Business) type with interfaces corresponding to individual areas of the tour operator’s cooperation.
B2B comprises preparation of offers, preparation of orders, confirming orders, payments, trans-action performance, finding new offers, issuing documents relating to the execution of transtrans-action, and marketing, i.e. all the most important business activity categories characteristic for a tour oper-ator. Therefore, the presented model of the future IT system is the result of the necessity of automa-tion of business processes carried out by the tour operator, both in cooperaautoma-tion with partners who have their own systems (these will mostly be the cooperating tour operators), and with partners not having their own IT systems (these will mostly be the cooperating agents).
The integrity of the system will be protected by its own database server, enabling automatic data exchange, data distribution, and coordination of activities between the partners. With this ap-proach, an independent backup server will also be necessary, ensuring the security of all data being the object of cooperation.
A B2B category system should act as a relationship coordinator between the cooperating tour-ism organizers. Its structure should be based on business process models that are recognized as key ones by the tour operator. The implementation of such IT system should take place concurrently
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with the commissioning of the Internet portal, which will facilitate the tour operator’s cooperation with the agents.
In the early period of tourism industry computerization process, the software systems were cre-ated and implemented mainly at the initiative of individual companies. The purpose of these systems was to improve the management of the core business activities of tourism organizers. The develop-ment of information technology application in the managedevelop-ment in recent decades has caused the emergence of specialized software packages supporting more and more areas of management. Con-currently, further information systems (e.g. HR, payroll, non-material management, document cir-culation) supported wider and wider areas of a tourism company. Each domain system is a standalone and independent information system that has been created to provide services only for clearly defined area of the enterprise concerned. Its range comprises all or almost all useful functions within its domain. However, it does not constitute a part of another domain system, but, at the same time, it can be the supplier or recipient of information for other domain systems used in a tourism enterprise [23].
The advantages of domain systems (minimum acquisition cost; large independence from other systems in the enterprise, the scope of change in case of extension is negligible) make them still very popular in the tourism industry. Unfortunately, these solutions have their defects because a multitude of small systems makes it difficult to manage their maintenance and development. They may cause duplication of the same data, thus their desynchronization, which makes it difficult to implement some changes in the company. It is a significant issue for a tour operator since his activity is char-acterized by the need to respond quickly to sudden changes taking place on the unstable tourism services market.
Analyzing possible variants of developing new information technology systems for tour opera-tors, it can be stated that due to the management level, the tour operator needs an operational man-agement system, and due to the area of application – his system should enable manman-agement of in-tangible resources and finances. Due to the level of complexity, the tour operator’s system should belong to the category of multifunctional systems, and due to the level of integration – to integrated, or at least semi-integrated systems. Due to its universality, the tour operator’s system cannot gener-ally be based on computer tool packages and should not be developed as a typical (standard) system, but it rather should be referred to the category of individual systems.
The necessity to integrate domain systems [23] for a tour operator in a new product – with the simultaneous requirement for operability, multi-functionality and individuality – poses a challenge for software developers. The basis for taking the major architectural decisions in such software pro-ject should be the results of functional and process analysis of the tour operator’s enterprise. 3.3. Access to management system by tour operator’s business participants
It has to be assumed that a tourism organizer’s firm owns several offices in separate locations, wherein each office can perform independent business tasks. Additionally, those offices can carry out intensive data exchange with each other. A necessity arises to treat such system as a distributed system, which can be implemented in two ways:
• The tour operator’s system will be completely distributed, with distributed database – all system points will be equal. In such situation, synchronization of data between sub-systems belonging to individual offices will be necessary.
• The system will be designed with a central database. Sub-system available in the offices will use the same database, data will be always up-to-date, thus data synchronization will not be necessary.
Because many employees can participate in carrying out the tour operator’s business processes (wherein their reliable interaction is required), the second system architecture should be decided upon. That is, there should be one separate location where the dedicated database server will be installed, powering the whole information system. With such solution, the tour operator’s server will be the central element in the system, connecting partners’ offices, so the server should be designed in such a way as to minimize the risk of failure of the entire network.
The system server should consist of an application server, a database server and a WWW server. The task of the application server will be communication with partners’ systems and performing the actual operations on the data. Critical resources for this server will be, first of all, the processor time and the Internet connection bandwidth. The task of the data base server will be fast provision of data on the application server's request, ensuring durable recording of entered and processed data, and preparation of Business Intelligence type reports. The critical resource for this server will be primar-ily the capacity of the disk storage and RAM memory. The task of the WWW server will be sup-porting users – tourism organizer’s employees and their partners – by providing interfaces allowing issuing commands to the application server.
3.4. System environment – partner systems
The tour operator’s system will have to cooperate with information systems used by the tour operator’s partners. Within the analysis, a classification of the existing partner systems has been performed, and their general operation principles were examined. Based on this analysis, categories of necessary business actors have been identified, together with their potential business actions.
The first important type of partner is the transportation company. The tour operator needs co-operation with partners providing various types of transport (passenger) services. These are both passenger bus operators, airlines, as well as other firms providing transport services using smaller vehicles for a few passengers. The business actor being a transportation company must respond to the following queries:
• Checking the number of available vehicles that can take a given number of people, on a date, at a given place.
• Making the initial reservation for the vehicle at a given time and place. • Checking the current status of the reservation.
• Confirming or canceling the reservation of the vehicle.
• Checking the availability of the driver at a given time and place, including checking whether the given driver can drive the given vehicle.
• Making the initial reservation for the driver at the given time. • Checking the current status of the driver reservation.
• Confirming or canceling the reservation of the driver.
The second important type of partner is the accommodation company. Such companies usually have many offers for hotels and motels in a specific area. Booking accommodation is not made directly at the given hotel/motel, but with the help of an intermediary aggregator. These companies
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have knowledge about the standard, location, and the number of places at the hotel. The business actor being a hotelier company must respond to the following queries:
• A query about a list of available nights during the given period, in the given standard, and in the given area for the specified number of people. Wherein the possibility to exclude certain areas (hotels) provided in the form of list being the search parameter.
• Making an initial reservation by providing the list of rooms at a given locations, and on a given date.
• Checking the current status of the accommodation reservation. • Confirming or canceling the reservation of accommodation.
Table 1. Description of tour operator’s system roles. Source: own study.
User role Rights assigned to the users within the given role 1. Tour operator’s IT system
Administra-tor
1.1. Assigns and revokes other users’ rights 1.2. Edits vocabulary data
1.3. Adds and removes users 1.4. Manages backup copies
1.5. Checks the status of the electronic exchange of documents and connects new subsystems
1.6. Manages message templates
2. Tour operator’s Board Member 2.1. Accepts offers
2.2. Creates offers 2.3. Manages transport 2.4. Manages contractors list 2.5. Manages payments 3. Agent Service Department Employee 3.1. Creates offers
3.2. Estimates costs of offer 3.3. Manages accepted offers 4. Transport Service Department
Em-ployee
4.1. Makes transport reservations 4.2. Manages transport partners 5. Accommodation Service Department
Employee
5.1. Adds and removes accommodation providing partners 5.2. Makes accommodation bookings
5.3. Reviews accommodation offers
6. Tour Leaders Department Employee 6.1. Reviews the list of available tour leaders 6.2. Assigns tour leaders to the trips
7. Sightseeing Reservation Department Employee
7.1. Enters information on making sightseeing reservation 7.2. Marks the reservation as paid
8. Sales Partner (Agent) 8.1. Displays a list of offer according to the specified criteria 8.2. Selects offers for printing for a given customer
8.3. Makes offer reservation 8.4. Selects additional services 8.5. Enters the customer’s financial data
8.6. Displays the list of offers bought by his customers 8.7. Reviews a trip calendar of his customers
The third significant type of partner is a tourism agent, a travel agency. A travel office is a busi-ness actor who simultaneously interacts with the tour operator and the customers. Customer type actor should be described separately if the tour operator anticipates making such relationship avail-able online. Travel agency type actor is an agent without specific network services. It is usually the active party that calls tour operator’s services. An exception may be the action of issuing the invoice by the tour operator.
A distinction should be made between public and private services of the tourism organizer’s system. Within the public services, the tour operator’s system should allow displaying (advertising) the list of available tours and trips with details; it should also allow making initial reservations. Private tour operator’s services will be provided by the internal methods of the system and will not be visible to the public, but only available for the employees of partner companies. Private action of the tour operator’s system results directly from the business processes that the system performs. The format of the internal queries should be established by the tour operator within the strategic phase of the project.
Data exchange between the tour operator’s system and their partners’ systems is not a trivial task for the designers. Within the current analysis, a review of the following formats used in the process of electronic data exchange was performed. Taking into consideration, among other things, EDIFACT and ASC X12 standards, it has been found that none of these common standards is fully adapted to exchange documents in the tourism industry. In such situation, following the agreement with the tour operator, using a dedicated framework communication format can be suggested, which will be intensively developed with integration with new systems. It is suggested to use the basic data format like XML or JSON, sent by means of HTTPS protocol. In some situations, external commu-nication will have to keep the standard used by the tour operator’s partners. In order to eliminate possible inaccuracies, it will be necessary to create rules mapping internal messages (generated by the tour operator’s system) into external messages (accepted by the tour operator partners’ IT sys-tems) and vice versa.
Because the data will be sent many times between the customers and the tour operator’s servers, it is necessary to protect the privacy of the transmitted data. Data encryption using SSL certificates is suggested. The communicating systems should identify each other by applying a mechanism sim-ilar to authenticate users. At the same time, it will be required to apply mechanisms preventing or significantly blocking various forms of known hacker attacks.
The system users will be authorized based on roles. The roles have been defined on the basis of the tour operator’s business processes. The rights corresponding to those roles will be assigned by a privileged user (Administrator role). Table 1 provides a short description of the proposed roles. 3.5. Object model of tour operator’s domain
At present, IT teams prefer object paradigm over the procedural one, particularly in case of realization for large IT systems. It facilitates the teams, among other things, in organizing the work over the project and in managing the quality of the created software. Therefore, the authors of this article developed a conceptual object model of tour operator’s domain that has been presented in Fig. 3. UML 2.0 notation was used in creating the model. Abstract business objects from outside the tourism industry, like ‘enterprise’ or ‘natural person’ have been highlighted with a different color. The other objects constitute class hierarchy that, in the author’s opinion, is critical in the industry.
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Furthermore, the fields of class attributes and methods belonging to this hierarchy contain the prop-erties of business objects that constitute their peculiarity or confirm existing restrictions.
The created hierarchy of tour operator’s domain objects should be used in constructing the ar-chitecture of the management information system, at least in the business logic layer.
Figure 3. Tour operator’s domain conceptual object model in UML notation Source: own study.
4. Summary
The description of the author concept of a management system presented in this article is a set of technical recommendations for the design team that will build the dedicated MIS supporting the business of a domestic tourism organizer. The business specificity of the tourism industry has a sig-nificant impact upon the suggested mechanisms and suggested technical solutions. Due to the prac-tical necessity to integrate already existing domain systems of the tour operator into one manage-ment system, there is no possibility to develop a full technical description of such project. Many details concerning the system architecture must be developed during analytical and development works of the IT team. Designing many detailed solutions will require direct cooperation of IT pro-fessionals with the employees of a specific tour operator.
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KONCEPCJA INFORMATYCZNEGO SYSTEMU ZARZĄDZANIA DLA KRAJOWEGO TOUROPERATORA
Streszczenie
Celem niniejszego artykułu jest prezentacja usystematyzowanej koncepcji infor-matycznego systemu zarządzania (ISZ), dedykowanego krajowym organizatorom tu-rystyki (touroperatorom). Wizja została opisana w postaci ontologii dziedzinowej oraz strukturalnych i procesowych modeli konceptualnych systemu, odzwierciedlających kluczowe aspekty wspomagania specyficznej działalnoĞci gospodarczej touropera-tora. Z punktu widzenia naukowego, badana przez autorów artykułu tematyka znaj-duje siĊ na pograniczu nauk ekonomicznych i technicznych, dokładniej na pograniczu nauk o zarządzaniu i informatyki. W trakcie opracowania wizji autorzy przyjĊli styl szczegółowej detalizacji głównych elementów wizji ze wzglĊdu na brak podobnych pu-blikacji, które mogłyby posłuĪyü wsparciem szczególnie dla początkujących projektan-tów podobnych ISZ.
Słowa kluczowe: informatyczny system zarządzania, organizator turystyki, touroperator, ontologia dziedzinowa, proces biznesowy, modelowanie konceptualne, model domeny Tomasz Królikowski
Department of Mechatronics and Applied Mechanics The Faculty of Technology and Education
Koszalin University of Technology e-mail: tomasz.krolikowski@tu.koszalin.pl Walery Susłow
Department of Computer Engineering The Faculty of Electronic and Informatics Koszalin University of Technology e-mail: walery.suslow@tu.koszalin.pl