The Client

COPA Airlines is a leading airline in Latin America offering passenger and cargo services. It began operations in 1947 with domestic flights to three (3) cities within the country. During the 1960s COPA Airlines began International flights to 3 countries in the region and by the 1970s domestic flights were eliminated making it a truly international airline. Today COPA Airlines offers daily flights to over 41 destinations throughout 22 countries in North, Central, and South America as well as the Caribbean regions. It owns a fleet of 39 airplanes with 20 being Boeing 737-700, six being 737-800, and 13 being Embraer E-190. Additionally, COPA Airlines offers its passengers access to more than 120 destinations through strategic alliances with Continental Airlines and others.

The Challenge

COPA Airlines needed to make improvements to the budget generation or planning processes which involves the entire organization and demands significant man hours and thousands of excel spreadsheets. It was important for them to optimize the entire process and to reduce the time and effort involved in it. Consequently, COPA Airlines decided to carry out a preliminary project that would be executed in phases until reaching the final outcome, which would be the implementation of a financial planning tool. This project would allow COPA Airlines to achieve a more agile and flexible budgetary model capable of creating and simulating complex “what if” scenarios for planning purposes.

The Solution

Solusoft’s answer to COPA Airlines was to carry out an extensive analysis of the entire budgetary planning process and the effort involved. After this study, Solusoft managed to create and design a multidimensional model that would allow COPA Airlines to incorporate all the industry complexities and variables. The Solusoft team executed this project in a period of 3 months, and it promises to extend into a soon to come second phase where a financial planning tool will be implemented to automate the entire process.

The Results

With the implementation of this new model and the future implementation of a financial planning tool, COPA Airlines will be able to simplify and reduce the time put into the financial and budgetary planning process as well as integrate all its financial processes with the use of a single tool.