So who is in charge?

[katiemack Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close katiemack]

Ever wondered about how RCI determines the trade value?

You can read the whole article here

RCI forecasts vacation demand with SAS® RCI Global Vacation Network’s 3 million members own time-shares they want to swap or luxury properties they want to lease. SAS Enterprise Miner gives RCI the ability to estimate the value of swaps and rentals and the means to forecast demand. As a result, the company has increased transactions and is saving $1 million a year.

RCI Global Vacation Network is a more than $1 billion-a-year business that helps people swap time-share units and rent private luxury residences all over the world. The company completes more than 3 million transactions a year.

Before switching to SAS, the company’s forecasting system, essential to its daily operations, was unstable and at risk of breaking down anytime. With SAS, the company has not only stabilized the environment but has also benefited from more accurate forecasts.

“SAS is the bread-and-butter product for our company," says Sri Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Product Development for RCI. The switch to SAS also has saved the company $1 million compared with the costs of maintaining its previous tool.

[tonyg Goomba & Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close tonyg]

Well it doesn't seem to be working too good. I have a gold crown, highly rated resort which pulls worse trades than a standard resort that is currently suspended from exchanges. RCI called today while I was unavailable and probably wanted this year's gold crown resort's deposit- sorry for once that I missed the call.

[T. R. Oglodyte Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close T. R. Oglodyte]

Ever wondered about how RCI determines the trade value?

You can read the whole article here

RCI forecasts vacation demand with SAS® RCI Global Vacation Network’s 3 million members own time-shares they want to swap or luxury properties they want to lease. SAS Enterprise Miner gives RCI the ability to estimate the value of swaps and rentals and the means to forecast demand. As a result, the company has increased transactions and is saving $1 million a year.

RCI Global Vacation Network is a more than $1 billion-a-year business that helps people swap time-share units and rent private luxury residences all over the world. The company completes more than 3 million transactions a year.

Before switching to SAS, the company’s forecasting system, essential to its daily operations, was unstable and at risk of breaking down anytime. With SAS, the company has not only stabilized the environment but has also benefited from more accurate forecasts.

“SAS is the bread-and-butter product for our company," says Sri Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Product Development for RCI. The switch to SAS also has saved the company $1 million compared with the costs of maintaining its previous tool.

I'm not quite sure what your see as an issue is here. SAS only provides an enterprise software platform - the underlying algorithms are still RCI's. Are you saying that RCI should have stayed on their old system? Or are you saying that RCI made a mistake going with SAS and should have used Oracle software instead? Or do you think that they should never have dumped the shoe boxes that Christal deHahn started with?

I'm a bit confused about what you see is the significance you see associated with RCI using an SAS system.

[katiemack Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close katiemack]

Steve, I can understand your post, as it would seem I am implying there is an issue. Not so. I was under the misapprehension that RCI was the full independent entity, but the article seems to say that SAS does the analysis and RCI follows its prescribed data recommendations....at least that is what I got out of it.

SAS is a data miner, which I interpret as the one who digs into the RCI platform and creates and recreates the "formula" based on the data mined.

But I confess, I am illiterate when it comes to such complexities.

I did find it interesting that it is an outside party, not RCI....which was to me, news.

[T. R. Oglodyte Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close T. R. Oglodyte]

Steve, I can understand your post, as it would seem I am implying there is an issue. Not so. I was under the misapprehension that RCI was the full independent entity, but the article seems to say that SAS does the analysis and RCI follows its prescribed data recommendations....at least that is what I got out of it.

SAS is a data miner, which I interpret as the one who digs into the RCI platform and creates and recreates the "formula" based on the data mined.

But I confess, I am illiterate when it comes to such complexities.

I did find it interesting that it is an outside party, not RCI....which was to me, news.

SAS provides enterprise software. Every company that has large data management needs uses some form of enterprise software, and the larger the data management requirement, the more essential enterprise software becomes.

RCI is like most companies that implement enterprise software solutions. RCI went from Chrystal's shoeboxes into a variety of computer systems. Almost every company does this ad hoc and winds up with a lot of incompatible systems or with bugs as they migrate systems from one platform to another as they outgrow the old platform. Programs are written in old languages that are no longer supported. Databases grow bigger than the original software can handle.

In RCI's case, they had a huge mess about five years ago, right about the time that they rolled out the website. That collapsed them, and I suspect that was about the time they needed to bite the bullet and pay huge bucks to SAS to give them a coherent company-wide system.

That is the primary job of the enterprise software companies. They do also sell some services to try to optimize existing programs, but they are not really in the data mining business. The real data miners are much smaller boutique shops. The data miners basically provide updated algorithms that the client installs on their existing systems.

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Remember that the article you linked to was written by a SAS marketing person. Those things are always written to make the companies role in the project appear more momentous and signficant than it is.

In my business I might get hired by a client to prepare a rather routine application to connect to a public sewer system. In a marketing brochure that becomes a project in which I helped a client cost-effectively solve a long-standing wastewater management problem. I ensured the application contained all needed information and received a timely review by the agency.

Ya always gotta read through the puffery and discard it. The SAS project for RCI looks like pretty much a plain vanilla enterprise solution.

[EvelynK72 Member Find all posts View Profile Close EvelynK72]

That is the primary job of the enterprise software companies. They do also sell some services to try to optimize existing programs, but they are not really in the data mining business. The real data miners are much smaller boutique shops. The data miners basically provide updated algorithms that the client installs on their existing systems.

It was my understanding that SAS is, in fact, a data mining business. This is a program that is routinely used by epidemiologists as they look at the patterns of diseases and predict what might happen in future. SAS may also have an enterprise component, although I didn't notice that in my brief scan of the link posted above. I found it interesting that RCI uses this software in predicting demand for exchanges. I think one point of the article (advertisement??) is that the commercially-available system can be more cost-effective than creating and maintaining a home-grown system.

[T. R. Oglodyte Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close T. R. Oglodyte]

It was my understanding that SAS is, in fact, a data mining business. This is a program that is routinely used by epidemiologists as they look at the patterns of diseases and predict what might happen in future. SAS may also have an enterprise component, although I didn't notice that in my brief scan of the link posted above. I found it interesting that RCI uses this software in predicting demand for exchanges. I think one point of the article (advertisement??) is that the commercially-available system can be more cost-effective than creating and maintaining a home-grown system.

I don't think so. I've used SAS software to analyzing data, but I don't think there is a connection between that and SAS, the enterprise software company.

If there is a connection, that component is small compared with the enterprise portion of the business. Enterprise software contracts are huge - $10 million is a small contract in that business. The firms are huge - Oracle and SAS are Fortune 500 companies.

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With that being said, I would certainly expect that RCI would have retained some firm to do some algorithm optimization, which likely would include some data mining. That work would start with RCI's existing algorithms, and the firm would look for ways to improve the algorithms to improve the balancing of supply and demand.

For years RCI probably did all of that tweaking in-house. But at some point the needs become great enough that it makes sense to bring in a specialist to look at things.

*****

The title of this post is "So who is in charge", and at the end of the day the improved algorithms are still owned by RCI. RCI has long regarded those algorithms as the most important of their business trade secrets. They aren't going to hand that over to some third party to manage for them.

[Carolinian Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Carolinian]

The real potential for problems for members in not necessarily who does it, but whether they are cross factoring potential for rental profit, which would not surprise me at all. Why is it that some exchange deposits unconnected to points partners, cruises, etc. are immediately placed in the RCI rental pool?

If an exchange company rents any exchange deposits to non-members, there should be extensive and detailed disclosure requirements in state timeshare law of everything involving in moving exchange deposits to rentals.

[T. R. Oglodyte Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close T. R. Oglodyte]

The real potential for problems for members in not necessarily who does it, but whether they are cross factoring potential for rental profit, which would not surprise me at all. Why is it that some exchange deposits unconnected to points partners, cruises, etc. are immediately placed in the RCI rental pool?

If an exchange company rents any exchange deposits to non-members, there should be extensive and detailed disclosure requirements in state timeshare law of everything involving in moving exchange deposits to rentals.

The big surprise would be if they are not factoring in rental rates.

Even if an exchange company were doing zero rentals, rental rates for comparable units would still be relevant baseline information that the company would be foolish not to incorporate. I would be amazed if Chrystal deHahn herself didn't use rental rates to help with determining demand.

Extending that thought - perhaps the reason why RCI places more emphasis on relative demand and supply than does II (which places greater emphasis on like quality exchanges) is because RCI's algorithms are more commercially derived. If RCI uses comparable rental rates as a significant factor in gauging demand, RCI is more likely to give proper value to a lower quality resort in a high demand, scarce area (such as the European exchanges you often mention).

[JimJ Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close JimJ]

Post #1 of this thread supplies a link to essentially a piece of SAS advertising saying a customer (RCI) has found good use for its product. I find this no stranger than if Microsoft put out a piece saying that a customer (perhaps RCI) had found good ways to use the Excel spreadsheet.