How Flight Centre Corporate accelerated customer solutions with CloverDX

Use Case:

Integrating and consolidating data
Eliminating manual processes
Making processes more reliable and easier to manage and maintain

About:

Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) is one of the world's largest travel companies, with 15,000+ employees and operations in over 100 countries. Managing travel at this scale means handling vast amounts of data across diverse systems and teams. The company’s vision includes delivering amazing experiences to their people, customers, and partners. To deliver that they needed a data platform that could enable teams throughout the business to move faster, automate and streamline workflows, and reduce time-to-market for new solutions.

www.flightcentre.co.uk

Industry

Travel & Tourism

Size

15,000+

Region
Global

Challenges

Onboarding data from 1000s of customer systems
Traditional coding practices and Excel was time consuming
Managing 1000s of customer-specific jobs was becoming complex

Results

Customer data onboarding streamlined with a low-code approach that's more reliable and easier to manage
Resource freed up to enable business to scale more rapidly
Manual work has been eliminated and traditional code has sped up time to market

As Flight Centre’s Corporate business has grown, customer data processes, which were traditionally written in code, needed to scale quickly and more efficiently to match this growth. The company needed to be able to develop new solutions and features for customers faster.

Read on to discover how CloverDX helped Flight Centre streamline their processes...

The challenges

Ingesting and consolidating data from multiple sources

Onboarding data from 1000s of corporate customer systems posed a unique and complex problem – especially as the business has scaled, was time-consuming, and running on legacy code that was consuming valuable resources to update and maintain.

Time-consuming manual processes

Managing data processes with traditional coding practices and Microsoft Excel was slowing them down and prevented engineers working on higher-value business problems.

Increased need for richer visibility

Scale brings unique challenges, and managing the 1000s of customer specific data jobs was becoming a complex task.

Leveraging a wider pool of resources, not just software engineers

Enabling non-technical users to manage or provide valuable input into processes was difficult and required extra effort from the engineering team to build interfaces.

4 Main Solutions

CloverDX has enabled teams right across Flight Centre Corporate to transform their thinking and approach to data processes, automating and simplifying the process of receiving, processing and transforming disparate data.

1. Streamlining customer data onboarding and integration

Customer data onboarding has traditionally been a complex bespoke coded solution to manage CSV and Excel documents, requiring a high investment in people which was time-consuming and becoming harder to maintain.

The process of ingesting, consolidating, and transforming data from multiple customer systems is now being rebuilt in CloverDX, which has not only eliminated the need to build and manage complex code, but has also allowed the team to:

Rapidly automate jobs visually and execute with enterprise scheduling.
Integrate directly with customer systems by calling APIs to ingest and transform data and send information wherever it needs to be – without manual effort.
Eliminate legacy code, replacing complex processes with a low-code approach that was more reliable, easier to manage and provided increased visibility.
Allowed the corporate business to rapidly scale, freeing up valuable resources to focus on solving bigger customer problems.

2. Accessing and converting data for system migrations

CloverDX has also enabled and streamlined system migrations - starting with a project to migrate over a decade of data from a vendor-based travel platform to Flight Centre Corporate’s own in-house product.

The vendor’s closed system made the data difficult to access, but with CloverDX the team were able to connect to the underlying database, transform millions of lines of data to make it fit Flight Centre’s model and enrich it via API calls.

Grant Currey, CTO at Flight Centre

Grant Currey

Chief Technology Officer at Flight Centre ANZ

Executive Leadership

“CloverDX enabled us to convert millions of lines of data from what it was to what we needed it to be confidently at scale. It’s hard to imagine how we would have done that project without CloverDX. The migration was so successful, CloverDX is now our first option when doing a system migration."

3. Eliminating manual processes and code, speeding up time to market

Currey was looking to reduce the effort the engineering team spent on coding data jobs – something that was time-consuming and frustrating, especially when it came to repetitive, routine tasks.

He explains: “Using a highly skilled engineer to write low level code to process data from an SFTP server, is not a good use of time, it adds little value, and is hard to maintain”.

Replacing that complex coding with a low code/no code approach in CloverDX has saved huge amounts of time, enabled teams across the business to move faster, and freed up our highly skilled engineers to focus on higher-value business and customer problems.

Executive Leadership

Grant Currey, CTO at Flight Centre

Grant Currey

Chief Technology Officer at Flight Centre ANZ

It’s also increased reliability by allowing the company to decommission legacy code that was, in Currey’s words, “…written years ago, following different engineering principles and standards, and was becoming extremely hard to maintain, keep pace and scale.”

4. Freeing up technical resource by bringing business users into the process

Solutions based on code meant that they could only be managed by engineers, even though there were non-technical business users who were more familiar with the data and the customers.

With CloverDX, Flight Centre Corporate has been able to introduce a more collaborative approach to generating and sending customer statements. Technical users build core data pipelines and pull data into Excel templates.

Results

CloverDX has helped the Flight Centre Corporate business work faster and smarter to transform their data processes, and deliver real impact to not just systems, but also culture.

Key benefits have included:

Faster time to market: Solutions that once took weeks or months to develop in code can now be pulled together in a low code/no code way, driving a culture of working smarter.
Reduced manual work: Engineers are no longer burdened with repetitive complex coding tasks like SFTP connections or Excel formatting.
Cost and resource optimization: CloverDX has enabled Flight Centre to achieve more without needing significant additional resources – whether by leveraging different groups of people that don’t traditionally code, or by working with CloverDX’s Professional Services team to augment in-house teams and provide another pathway to deliver outcomes, without the overhead of hiring more people.
Improved data quality and reliability: CloverDX has become the backbone of customer data integration operations, enabling Flight Centre to confidently move, transform, and validate data across key processes – importantly, improving customer experience.

Executive Leadership

Grant Currey, CTO at Flight Centre

Grant Currey

Chief Technology Officer at Flight Centre ANZ

“Regardless of if you are travelling for leisure or business, travel is a very personal experience, full of friction points. For the business traveller, the focus shouldn’t be 'Why is my frequent flyer number missing', it must be ensuring that we remove as many of these technology friction points to allow the corporate traveller space to de-stress and prepare for that next meeting – CloverDX is helping us achieve this”

Want to discover CloverDX for yourself?

Book a demo and see how you can reduce time-consuming data tasks with automation

Book a demo

zywave-hero-img

How Zywave freed up engineer time by up to a third with data automation

InsurTech company Zywave provides agencies and insurance companies with tools to fuel their business growth, including cloud-based sales management, client delivery, content and analytics solutions.

Read full story

Read our HireRoad case study

Saving hours of manual work with a control center for all of PeopleInsight's data processes

HR SaaS software PeopleInsight, part of HireRoad’s cloud-based talent management and insights platform, has created a centralized, automated control center for all their data processes with CloverDX.

Read full story

vanmossel-hero-img

Enabling data integration across Van Mossel Automotive Group

The largest automotive company in the Benelux is rapidly expanding, and CloverDX is enabling centralized data integration across the business, with automated standardization, transformation and ingestion of data from multiple sources.

Read full story