From technical manager to technology advocate
Headquartered in Ireland, LCI is a leading aviation company that is uniquely positioned across the commercial fixed-wing, helicopter, and advanced air mobility sectors. It provides leasing services to airlines, helicopter operators, Governments, and end-users and has undertaken more than $10B in aviation transactions since its inception in 2004. Such a consistent growth trajectory requires a team steadfast in its business goals.
Monica Butfoy, the team’s Technical Manager, spends her days managing the company’s aircraft and engineering operations. LCI's technical team ensures that all aspects of aircraft management like maintenance, inspection, delivery, and retrieval happen efficiently and effectively. These business-critical processes involve an extensive list of tasks and processes to complete.
To help manage their data, LCI teamed up with Jetstar partners in 2015. Warren Willis from Jetstar worked closely with the LCI team and built a custom system called Jetbase which sat on the Quickbase platform. The system met all of the LCI requirements and allowed the company to track aircraft management, lease management, utilisation, maintenance reserves and much more.
As LCI’s business grew, it became an increasing challenge to keep track of all company projects with their existing apps. So, Monica, who had no background in app building, began adding custom solution apps in Quickbase to assist the company to implement processes and procedures to allow better project management of growing numbers of aircraft deals. In the process, she found herself solving multiple challenges for the business.
Crafting a complete project management and business operations solution
Due to the specialist aircraft leasing and management sector in which LCI operates, a comprehensive, out-of-the-box solution does not readily exist. So LCI had already engaged with Jetstar partners to have a custom system built. This allowed LCI to design and build exactly what they required for their business.
With Jetstar and Quickbase, changes can be made as and when required. The system is fully customizable.
Monica took over the management of the platform after starting work with LCI. Once she began training with Jetstar, Monica realized that Quickbase could solve many of the challenges the business was contending with.
At LCI there are as many as 30 to 40 projects in-flight each week. Managing an aircraft fleet means tracking movement to delivery, repossession, refinancing, plus client onboarding. This constant influx of work requires every department to complete its tasks before the next phase can begin. Making operations simpler was a necessity, and this meant finding a single system that could handle all tasks and centralize them.
With this understanding, Monica and the wider LCI team built their company’s project management app, and a CRM (customer relationship management) & Prospect management app where the company can organize and manage each potential prospect from that initial stage through to the live project stage. The apps are now a one-stop shop for all LCI company projects and include detailed prospect & project lists, terms for contract management, cost tracking, budgeting, specific task lists, customer database, and more. Prior to the application’s creation and adoption, everything was monitored via Excel. The move has simplified operations and ensures that each project can be tracked with an assigned deal team.
Quickbase has not only enhanced LCI’s operations once a project has begun, but prospect and customer management are also operated out of a CRM built on the platform. As the marketing team identifies opportunities, the tracking of prospects has moved from Excel spreadsheets to the CRM & Prospect management app. This has not only made keeping tabs on prospects easier, but also simplified the hand-off process to the operations side of the business. Monica also built streamlining functionality into the CRM so as a prospect matures, the marketing team transitions the prospect from the CRM app to a project in the project management app with the click of a button.
While the applications have improved how LCI works, adopting new technology that changes the way you work usually doesn’t happen overnight. Monica and the wider LCI team approached this challenge in a practical way.
In addition to the project management and CRM apps, she created solutions for simple, previously disconnected business processes to get employees comfortable with using Quickbase. Processes like keeping track of employee leave application and approvals, which was previously tracked on excel, moved to a Quickbase application.
Capturing business-critical but simple solutions led to her colleagues becoming more comfortable using the application. This triggered an increase in usage for the organization, improving their productivity. Monica’s focus on engaging the team has taken Quickbase from an underutilized software to one in which “most people log in at least every 24 hours.”
Creating a single source of truth, one Quickbase app at a time
Adopting Quickbase has streamlined the way LCI tracks important business information. The growing number of applications built on Quickbase in the organization has:
- Automated project handoffs between teams with the click of a button
- Eliminated duplicate work and information
- Provided data in real-time to make better business decisions
- Made onboarding employees and clients easier
We've gone from just putting things in Excel to "let's build it, and let's create something."
For the past six years, Monica and her colleagues have made their Quickbase system more user-friendly by creating team-specific apps and making it easy (and necessary) to access them. Quickbase is now the home of day-to-day operations for LCI’s aircraft & lease data management, HR, CRM and prospect management, project management, and more. The ability to customize each dashboard, be it for the project management team or Marketing team, is what Monica loves most about the easy to evolve platform.
“If somebody comes to me and says, ‘I don’t like the look of it’ or ‘can we add new fields?’” Monica replies, “No problem let’s get it done!”
Thanks to the LCI teams’ vision and dedication to creating solutions, Quickbase has gone from a data repository to a business-critical platform that every member of the business logs into at least once every day. The team’s work has not only taken the company out of spreadsheets, but also facilitated further creativity and innovation from many teams within the company.
The way Quickbase has evolved LCI’s operations is clearly reflected in the work of Monica Butfoy and the wider LCI team.
“I love delving into what each team needs and figuring out how we can help them by adding apps and allowing people to reduce workload through better process and procedure,” Monica says. “Quickbase apps give us the ability to assist with this, and we are now also exploring its AI capabilities and how we can integrate them into our platform.”