Singapore :  AirAsia Expedia, a joint venture between AirAsia, the world’s best low-cost airline, and Expedia, the world’s largest online travel agency by gross bookings, has chosen Anaplan to improve its budget forecasting and planning for territorial alignment across the region. AirAsia Expedia selected Anaplan as a flexible solution to consolidate their data for analysis.

As a joint venture start up, a major initial challenge for AirAsia Expedia was the integration of data from the systems of both parent companies, resulting in incompatible solutions.

“The travel industry is highly dynamic, so we wanted something flexible, fast and user-friendly to collate our information in real time for business analysis,” said Henry Tjan, Head of Forecasting, Planning and Analysis, AirAsia Expedia, “Anaplan gave us the solution we were looking for, and we were impressed to find that implementation took only six weeks, compared to many months for previous attempts with other technologies.”

Anaplan now connects the two brands, 22 points of sales and 14 channels for AirAsia Expedia across Asia. This was a task that previously involved using linked spreadsheets to collate data generated from disparate systems, and had to be manually updated to account for new points of sale.

“With the old system, we had various spreadsheets that were up to 60 megabytes in size. It was almost impossible to navigate. We had 300 to 400 formulas in the spreadsheets, and each time we had a new point of sale, we had to change the formulas and relink related files,” Tjan commented, “We implemented Anaplan with zero scripting or coding. It was completely streamlined, and finance can make changes at any point in time.”

“By working with AirAsia Expedia, we were able to greatly improve the speed, accuracy and auditability of their forecasting,” said Samir Neji, Managing Director, “Every number can be traced back to its source, and calculations are achieved in split seconds. This increases AirAsia Expedia’s ability to perform timely, accurate budgeting and planning.”

AirAsia Expedia opened their Hong Kong site in July, and recently unveiled a strategy to offer more localized services in Asia.

Source : ACN Newswire