Jet Airways propels growth with finance planning software from Miagen – Miagen

Jet Airways propels growth with finance planning software from Miagen

Airlines are complex organisations, but this complexity can often hinder optimal financial planning.

Jet Airways is India’s second largest airline, operating more than 300 flights every day to 68 destinations. During FY17 it carried more than 27 million passengers. Yet in 2015, the situation was very different.

Like so many carriers, Jet Airways had driven its business on Excel, but the multitude of spreadsheets throughout the business was holding the company back from seeing the full picture. With so much information dispersed throughout the business, the company faced a major challenge: to prepare the data in a short space of time and to assemble that data into one place.

Each department at the airline had been working as individual silos, relying on their own information. The biggest challenge was that every time a new provisional plan was introduced, it was hard to see the full picture because there were a lot of manual recounts needed to arrive at the desired numbers.

With incomplete information, management at Jet Airways were unable to get a complete sense of the airline. It was missing the opportunity to carry out true enterprise financial planning, and missing the chance to take action quickly and react to changes in the business.

Jet Airways engaged with the financial planning consultancy Miagen to establish a system that would extract data from the company’s existing tools and would transfer that information into a new environment without any human interaction. This delivered faster planning, improved data quality, greater efficiency and reduced time to prepare data that drives the planning process. There are no delays while one department completes its numbers.

Miagen recommended the Adaptive Insight toolset. This was a challenging, extensive, organisation-wide project that started in August 2015 and was completed in December of that year. Both sides took the decision to take a ‘big bang’ approach, moving to Adaptive in one go rather than in phases.

Adaptive Insights is now the central hub for all organisational information at Jet Airways, accessible to all departments, with correct data that connects all elements of the business. This solution is the beating heart of the airline.

According to Jet’s budgeting team, the Adaptive solution has simplified the entire corporate budgeting process, reducing the time required and the resource dependencies needed. The user-friendly look and feel of the budget templates makes inputting data much easier for end users. The turnaround time for solving problems is reduced dramatically and the process is now much more efficient.

Jet benefits by being able to carry out enterprise financial planning by point of sale or by individual city. Managers can access this information fast and make decisions quickly. The new toolset has also fostered a culture of greater transparency, because everyone in the company has confidence in the numbers because they are based on facts and on operational data.

Jet Airways’ HR department is a good illustration of how its new approach to planning has changed how the company operates. Headcount planning is critical for HR to ensure there are enough pilots and crew to operate all of its aircraft. By having all of the information about routes, destination and sales in one place, HR can make quick decisions to fulfil the demand that has been identified in the operational plan. These decisions can be a combination of recruitment and training.

Jet Airways benefited from Miagen’s knowledge of the aviation sector, as it had already delivered planning, integration, and consolidation projects for Etihad, Air Serbia and Air Seychelles. Miagen brought its experience of best practice in projects to bear on the project for Jet, delivering further value.

Jet Airways now has confidence in its numbers, and can make business decisions faster because the information needed to plan is available faster than ever before.