Fly Buys Jets into Its Financial Reports in Style

About the Customer

Loyalty New Zealand operates the hugely successful Fly Buys Loyalty scheme on behalf of its owners, the Bank of New Zealand, Foodstuffs, Shell, and IAG.

Launched in 1996, Fly Buys is the largest and most comprehensive coalition loyalty program in New Zealand. It comprises more than 1.3 million active households, which represents over 70 percent penetration of new New Zealand households.

Members collect points from more than 40 retail companies. Between them, these participants have more than 3,000 outlets and cover most day-to-day shopping categories. These companies are all leading players in their respective categories. Fly Buys card holders have redeemed nearly $500,000 worth of rewards this year.

Situtation

In 2007, Loyalty NZ had installed the Microsoft Dynamics NAV enterprise resource planning system, using Microsoft specialist Intergen. “The Dynamics reporting wasn’t great,” Bayley said. “In Australia, NAV comes with Jet Reports packaged in.”

“We’d reached the point where we needed something other than Excel,” Bayley said.

Results

Bayley is extravagant in his praise for Jet Reports, which he said is “fantastic.”

“It’s saved us three-quarters of a day. There was a wee bit of a set up, which Tim and I did.” Both are chartered accountants.

Excel has a number of tabs, each with a different functionality. Jet Reports is just another tab. “You press the tab and it runs,” Bayley said.

“It was cheap to buy, quick to install, and you get a real bang for your buck.” He used Jet Reports for monthly reporting and then again at the end of the financial year.

At the time of the interview, Bayley was looking forward to implementing the scheduler module in Jet Reports: “I want to set up the scheduler so that when I am away, it will run all reports automatically. That means no downtime for me.”

He is keen to understand where Jet Reports will go with future versions and take advantage of the local distributor’s expertise.

Loyalty NZ runs SQL and Oracle databases, the latter for its data warehouse. It currently runs its key performance indicators on spreadsheets, but Bayley said it will possibly automate those.

“We can streamline a few things, subject to consulting with Tim. For example, we might look at the monthly points issuance per retailer.”

The company is currently engaged in a project with SAS to reconfigure its data warehouse to increase the capacity. That should be completed within a few months. Loyalty New Zealand employs an information technology team of around 20 people.

Bayley concluded, “[Jet] saves me a hell of a lot of time. If anyone is running a general ledger, they should definitely get Jet Reports.”