• Enables the business to pivot quickly to lead in changing market circumstances

• Ensures efficient and accurate analysis of data

• Democratizes data to empower users across the business to create relevant reports for decision-making

Originally the loyalty program operator for Malaysian low-cost airline AirAsia, BIG Rewards has expanded the BIG Loyalty Program into a lifestyle rewards platform that operates across travel, financial services and ecommerce. Members ‘earn and burn’ points with 300+ earn partners that provide shopping, food & beverage and other products and services. About 100 employees support members from a range of locations including offices in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore.

BIG Rewards partnered with Searce, a partner that specializes in helping businesses use cloud, automation and analytics to innovate, to implement the solution. “Searce is an established partner within the business and is already helping us migrate our data cloud to Google Cloud, a move we expect to reduce our data costs by 50%,” says Sereen. “Searce’s role includes studying BIG Rewards’ business intelligence models, determining the best approach to integrate each model into the solution and recommending that approach to the business.” The partner worked with BIG Rewards to convert the models to Sheets, create data marts in BigQuery and create efficient Ui/UX for models and dashboards.

With a live connection between Sheets and BigQuery through Connected Sheets, BIG Rewards provides a familiar front-end for finance team members to use current data in the analytics data warehouse to budget and forecast. The team works on the data with standard Sheets tools like pivot tables, charts and formulas, with the results fed into Data Studio for visualization and reporting. The business uses automation through an Apps Script application to save these outcomes back to BigQuery. With Connected Sheets, team members work with thousands of rows of data, such as the number of transactions made, points issued per member and points redemption by partner each month, under multiple tabs. BIG Rewards also used Sites to create a single location for team members to view the reports.

“Finance roles are evolving and the Finance function needs to take the steering wheel in driving businesses - particularly during crises such as coronavirus pandemic. I am a strong believer in digital transformation and in empowering the business by moving from traditional spreadsheet and slide products to Connected Sheets and Data Studio dashboards. Working with these tools and the Google Cloud team, we have built a solution that enables us to seamlessly complete actual-to-budget-to-forecast and vice versa reporting,” says Sereen.

With the new system due for use in a 3+9 forecast exercise in the second half of March 2021, BIG Rewards has calculated the benefits it expected to achieve: “With the Google Cloud and Google Workspace solution, we expect to reduce the time to complete budgets from up to three months to just two to three weeks and lower the time to undertake quarterly forecasts from one month to one to two weeks,” says Sereen. “We also expect to cut the time to complete monthly forecasts from one week to one day.

The business set these targets by comparing the time needed to complete a forecast or budget manually - including the requirement to extract and add data to spreadsheet models - with the time required to perform these activities when a model links directly to a data warehouse, and the process of extracting the data and adding it to the model is automated.

Automating the linkage of data in Google Cloud to models also running in Google Cloud enables the finance team to eliminate the formula errors, incomplete and inconsistent data and subsequent checking and fixing that hampered the prompt development of budgets and forecasts in the traditional solution.

The time savings achieved with the new solution will enable the finance team to analyze data more efficiently and effectively, while colleagues from departments such as commercial will be able to look at revenue uplift drivers rather than simply deriving the revenue numbers themselves. Marketing, Legal, Operations, IT and People & Culture team members will also be able to review data such as expenses incurred and determine where costs can be trimmed or eliminated.

The enablement of self-service data access through the solution will also help BIG Rewards effectively navigate the change and diversification of its business. “As we want to grow using technology rather than adding headcount, deploying an agile solution with self-service capability through Google Cloud helps people at different levels and functions within the business create the data presentations they need to support different types of decision-making,” says Sereen.

“We generate a considerable volume of data and senior leaders need to process a lot of information and work with a number of priorities. Selecting the data to present to them is an art. If you want to stand out in a sea of bland presentations, you need to think about the visual aspects of the story you would like to tell. Data Studio dashboards make analysis and visualization to support confident decision-making easy, and enable people to drill down into data for further insights.”

The Chief Financial Officer is particularly impressed by the ‘smart cleanup’ functionality of Sheets that flags unusual data to relevant team members so they can address issues and make timely decisions. In addition, automated refresh functionality enables the finance team to send out revenue forecast calculations based on the previous 30 days on a daily basis, enabling management to view likely actual revenue if no changes are made.