Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations Success Story: Flight Centre Travel Group

Customer overview

Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) is one of the world's largest suppliers of travel services and products. The group operates 40 retail, corporate and wholesale brands internationally with more than 2,000 locations spanning 12 countries and a global staff of over 20,000 team members.

"D365FO is a fundamental building block for us, the cornerstone of our strategy underpinning our operational efficiencies and rearchitecting our business functions." 

Leonard Donaldson
CIO, FCTG Global

To better engage their customers, empower employees, and optimize operations, FCTG upgraded from AX 2012 R3 to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO) in the U.S. and Canada becoming one of the first customers to make the move to the cloud. Travel Operations, Flight Centre’s implementation partner, worked closely with the Dynamics FastTrack team on both the code and data upgrade processes to successfully move 800 GB of data at cut-over time with a total upgrade implementation project duration of six months.

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"Starting with Corporate Americas FCTG initiated a project to deliver one financial platform globally, in a more automated, integrated & transparent way than ever before. This is not just replacing one system with another, D365FO is transforming our business for the better & supporting us well in to the future."

Susie Gladman
Program Manager, FCTG

Journey from On-Premises to the Cloud

Flight Centre was compelled to move to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations to access the improved architecture, scalability, and modern UI combined with the new, and enhanced capabilities of embedded analytics that are included in the licensing. With no additional required products, integrations or implementation charges, the total cost of ownership was better in the cloud. Travel Operations, a Microsoft Partner, collaborated with the Dynamics FastTrack team to plan and implement the upgrade.

It was critical that the upgrade could be completed within a brief downtime window because most of FCTG's products and services are online and available 24/7. The project required 800 GB to be moved from the on-premise Microsoft SQL Server to Azure SQL. By executing very detailed production cutover planning, the Flight Centre implementation team ensured the upgrade was completed within the available downtime window. Flight Centre also heavily invested in the significant change management effort, which ultimately assisted in widespread adoption of the new features and functions of D365FO.

The following diagram shows the end-to-end upgrade process, and the activities in each phase. More detailed information on the overall upgrade process can be found here.

"Using data replication mechanisms to move data into Azure SQL prior to production cutover can significantly reduce cutover downtime"

Paul Wu
FastTrack Solution Architect

The cloud upgrade solution was rolled out in the U.S. and Canada with close to 400 users. It includes six newly created embedded analytical workspaces that enable travel consultants, team leaders, area leaders and brand leaders to have embedded analytics inside of D365FO with additional capabilities to drill down and access more granular data. The adoption is growing fast, and a worldwide rollout is in planning.

Embedded Analytics

Embedded Power BI in D365FO enabled Flight Centre to maximize usage of the key strategic business data with its rich infographics and visuals creating an appealing and graphically rich interactive working experience.

Flight Centre is also benefiting from Entity store, which comes pre-configured with D365FO, and provides an extensible Azure SQL database that periodically refreshes from the transactional D365FO database. The value with Entity store comes from leveraging and analyzing near real-time data without taxing the transactional database that is used to perform daily operations. The implementation team extended Entity store with aggregated measurements necessary for FCTG business operations into six analytical workspaces embedded in D365FO. This enables the Flight Centre team to explore and analyze travel data without leaving their workspaces.

Six new workspaces with embedded Power BI are used from entry-level employees to the leadership team, currently a population of 400+ business users across the Americas.

Next steps

FCTG has been live in the cloud since June 2018 in US and Canada. The plan is to aggressively roll out the solution to other parts of the world. Travel Operations has finished the code upgrade of the solution to other parts of the world. Travel Operations has finished the code upgrade of the solution to be overlayer free. The team is working on rolling out the latest Dynamics 365 F&O version in early 2019.