Correspondence: Steve Pinchuk, SAS Institute, 5134 Blissful Valley Circle, Las Vegas, NV 89149, USA. Tel: +702 682 8648; Fax: +702 254 9320; E-mail: steve.pinchuk@sas.com

¹Steven Pinchuk is Vice President, and the Global Practice-Leader, for profit optimisation systems at SAS institute. In this newly created position, Steve leads a new team in the global application of profit optimisation and revenue management across all applicable industries. SAS is the world's largest private software company and the leader and most widely used statistical forecasting optimisation and analytics software in the world. Prior to this new role Steve was Vice President of Revenue Management for Harrah's Entertainment and Director of Planning and Analysis for Club Med, Princess Cruises and others. He was also Director of Business Development for SABRE decision technologies and Vice President of Business Development for PROS.

Received 5 December 2007; Revised 5 December 2007.

Abstract

Why are revenue management (RM), pricing, customer relationship management and distribution still a chain of separate islands, or departments, that have separate rulers, and in many cases separate goals, databases, analytical processes and skill levels? A new profit optimisation system™ (POS™) and department, using RM and pricing theories and tools, should integrate these areas and provide dedicated and standardised command, control, communication and intelligence (C³I). One system needs to combine all the data from these separate areas, under the leadership of RM and pricing experts, to create a new central profit command centre. All these islands and their data should be aggregated, integrated, planned, tracked, analysed and controlled from one POS™ interface by a new dedicated profit optimisation team.