JUCY is a family-owned New Zealand success story, with brothers Tim and Dan Alpe firmly at the wheel of the company’s operations. JUCY stands for fun, adventure and the spirit of travelling. Having ridden a steep growth curve – and with the company’s growth trajectory set to continue – JUCY knew it was time for a very different kind of adventure. As Tristin King, JUCY’s Head of Technology explains, it was time for them to embark on a Business Intelligence Road Trip.
The opportunity
On a track of phenomenal growth, in an industry known for its pronounced seasonal and regional variations, with numerous sales channels, challenges around reporting and timely forecasting, and limitations imposed by legacy systems, while JUCY had a strong grasp on the overall picture, its understanding of the finer mechanics was often times “fuzzy”, Tristin says.
“There are three factors in our cost structure:acquisition costs, labour costs and fixed costs. We had all the transactional details but our ultimate goal is to understand costs per rental, and in doing this we can be much smarter with our data.”
With all these business complexities to take stock of, JUCY wanted a Business Intelligence solution that would help identify opportunities and inefficiencies quickly and proactively.
The first step on the road trip was to engage Intergen to develop and deliver a self-service BI environment and a series of executive dashboards that would allow JUCY to track business performance and important KPIs, be proactive in assigning valuable resources and achieve greater business efficiencies through data insights.
The technology and vision
“Every day we ask ourselves, how much better could it be?”
This is a question JUCY staff ask themselves in order to always be open to the next opportunity for improvement. And JUCY’s Business Intelligence journey holds true to this. With an agile implementation methodology allowing quick wins and incremental improvements, value was delivered quickly to the business; and a strong roadmap means that future functionality is a constant part of the data analytics picture.
Microsoft’s Power BI was a “no brainer” for JUCY. “As early adopters of Microsoft Exchange Online and Office 365, Power BI easily “clicked in” for us. And it’s proving to be a fantastic tool for the business. We can store our data and deliver our dashboards, and we have lots of power users trained across the business,” Tristin says.
“We’ve taken a mobile-first approach to BI, so that our people can access their dashboards, gauges and targets wherever they are. And if they need more information they can head to their desktops to delve deeper,” he explains.
The future
It’s been an epic first year, but the fun is only just beginning. One of the next focus areas will be vehicle maintenance. By increasing visibility of vehicles being serviced and better managing the time vehicles spend ‘out of action’, JUCY will increase revenue by up to 4% - “a very big win in a short period,” Tristin says. “And after that we’ll stretch our legs and try out the Internet of Things.”
The result
“We are a people company, so we want to be out there with the customer, rather than behind our desks,” Tristin says. Just one year into JUCY’s BI journey and already their data analytics platform is allowing them to do this.
And while the ROI is significant – a return of $15 for every $1 spent on BI-related enhancements – Tristin is careful to stress that JUCY’s commitment to BI is about much more than dollars and cents.“We achieved these results, in part, by focusing on our vision of having a positive impact on our customers’ lives rather than just going after the easy money. It’s about people – happy customers and a happy crew can only be a great thing for our brand,” he says.
(And not a whiteboard in sight.)
The business case
With strong international success over 15 years in business, having grown its fleet from 35 to more than 3,000 vehicles, JUCY Rentals saw the opportunity to use Microsoft’s Power BI and Office 365 to create an easy-to-use Business Intelligence platform to derive greater and faster insights through graphical dashboard reporting. And a journey to data-driven decision making began. One year in and return on investment has been quickly realised, although there’s still plenty more benefit in store as JUCY continues to mature and evolve the Data Analytics tools at its disposal.
The business value
- Company Performance self-service portal and dashboard provides up-to-date information to company executives, reducing risk and allowing timely, data-driven decision making
- Organisational insights are easily and readily accessible anywhere, from any device
- Fully automated Sales and Financial reporting has eliminated manual data interpretation, freeing up time to focus on customer-centric, value adding activities
- Greater control and understanding around costs, reporting and business forecasting
- Ability to look at collective organisational performance across all geographical regions or separately by country
- Through greater visibility and management of vehicle maintenance, future BI work will see maintenance time and costs reduced, resulting in a 4% increase in revenue
- Daily snapshots provide managers with an up-to-date view of performance at their site
- ROI of $15 to every $1 spent on BI enhancements