CityJet centralize and control spend at the height of the COVID pandemic with Planergy
- Company Overview
Established in 1993, CityJet is a regional airline operating a fleet of 20 Bombardier CRJ900 regional jets across Europe. Employing over 600 employees, CityJet is a provider of wet lease services – aircraft, crew, maintenance, and insurance.
- Why Planergy
Undergoing examinership (administration) during the COVID pandemic, CityJet needed to implement a user-friendly, fully auditable procurement and purchasing process; tightly control spend and accountability; and gain a level of predictability to plan for recovery and growth.
Key Challenges
- In danger of going out of business
- Needed assistance to navigate, and meet the requirements and legalities of the examinership
- Previous software not intuitive or user-friendly, leading to poor user adoption
- No efficient way to track trends and patterns to maximize purchases across key vendors
- Lacked control of spend and inventory visibility
- Customization was needed, but unavailable
Key Benefits
- A fully automated and streamlined purchasing process across the entire organization, leading to speed and efficiency
- A fully controlled and auditable spend management system
- User-friendly system, encouraged rapid user adoption
- Enabled staff to work remotely
- Improved visibility into spend data and accountability
- Satisfied the audit requirements of the examinership
The Story
Customer
Regional airline
Key client
Head of Security, Emergency Response & Data Protection
Industry
Hospitality & Leisure
Company Size
600 employees
Before Planergy
The 2020 COVID pandemic was detrimental to several industries, especially the airline industry. Several airlines perished; others survived by consolidating, restructuring, and optimizing financial and procurement systems – as did CityJet.
Unexpected travel restrictions, loss of revenue, and the possibility of going out of business resulted in CityJet going through a chapter 11.
Initially operating with ‘light touch’ control on spend, they now needed to approve every cent and meet chapter 11 requirements, CityJet was on the search for a more intuitive software – eventually choosing Planergy Spend Management Software.
“Prior to finding Planergy, we were using Exchequer and one of their add-ons as our finance and procurement system. And it was a dinosaur,” said Joan Sheridan, Head of Security, Emergency Response & Data Protection.
Joan explains that using Exchequer, “resulted in poor user adoption across the organization”. This led to manual execution of purchase orders, lack of true spend visibility, and no traceability or control over inventory.
The threat of closing, along with the chapter 11 process revealed a need for a centralized, fully auditable purchasing process, that offered customization, strict accountability and approval workflows, inventory control, and data-backed spend visibility.
Further, the shift to a remote workforce created a requirement for cloud accessibility, and ease-of-use across mobile devices.
After Planergy
The company needed to gain full visibility and control over spend and satisfy the fiscal requirements of chapter 11 as soon as possible. Rolled out across CityJet’s entire company within weeks, the Planergy onboarding team assisted with the execution of custom approval workflows, user access permissions, and helped populate item catalogs – to enhance inventory and vendor management, and visibility.
“We had help for the setup and uploading of data, but we were able to get around the system quite well ourselves, although there’s lots of support available,” shared Joan.
“We trained everyone on how to use the system with just a little support from the Planergy team needed,” she added.
The software not only granted the CityJet team access to an intuitive, fully auditable purchasing system, its cloud-based functionality allowed purchase orders to be created, tracked, and approved from any web browser or mobile device; this drove efficiency across their remote workforce.
Along with a new level of predictability, visibility, and control over spend and inventory, Planergy was a budget-friendly solution for CityJet.
Joan remembers, “I had to double-check the pricing quite a few times. It was such a simplistic pricing model, no tricky subscriptions to deal with. The simplicity and the quick turnaround made it easy for us to choose Planergy”.
She adds, “the biggest benefits of using Planergy were definitely the return on investment, the overall implementation process, from start to finish, and user adoption. Using Planergy was a no-brainer.”
Testimonial
The biggest benefits of using Planergy were definitely the return on investment, the overall implementation process, from start to finish, and user adoption. Using Planergy was a no-brainer.
Joan Sheridan
Head of Security, Emergency Response & Data Protection
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