Fly Buys data comes home after technology upgrade

By RICHARD WOOD

Loyalty NZ, the company behind Fly Buys, plans a major IT revamp that will include moving the Fly Buys database from Australia to New Zealand.

The project will involve automating operations as much as possible, and greater use of data mining.

From the third quarter of this year the outsourcing of the Fly Buys database will be transferred from Melbourne-based Loyalty Pacific to local systems integrator Gen-i.

Telecom, which has just announced it will be joining Fly Buys at the expense of its own Talking Points loyalty scheme, and a further 33 participants, will gain from the changes.

Loyalty Pacific has been running the NZ database alongside its own Australian Fly Buys database.

Loyalty Pacific is jointly owned by Coles Myer and National Australia Bank. Loyalty NZ is owned by BNZ, State Insurance, Foodstuffs NZ, and Shell NZ.

Gen-i was appointed services provider to Loyalty NZ on Christmas Eve. It will implement rewards management software from local company Cardlink Systems, which specialises in rewards programmes, fuel cards, and fleet management systems.

Bringing the data into New Zealand will give Loyalty NZ more control and allow it to speed-up the development of its services.

"Our demands on the Fly Buys programme are evolving to be more demanding than Australia," said Loyalty NZ general manager Alastair Hutchens.

He said the Fly Buys database had 930,000, or 75 per cent, of NZ households and over 1.8 million individual members. Telecom's Talking Points would add less than 200,000 members.

The database was now being implemented using Oracle software running on a Unix operating system but Mr Hutchens said the company might move to a Microsoft operating system.

The change would also see a focus on "mining" the data for useful information.

Telecom will be required to get its data flowing into the Fly Buys scheme. Its Talking Points scheme has involved the running of a program across Telecom's ICMS billing system to calculate the number of reward points earned by each customer.

The required changes have being worked out with Telecom's supplier, EDS.

Telecom's general manager of marketing, Kevin Kenrick, said reducing IT cost was not the goal of the project but switching to Fly Buys would allow Telecom to focus on its core business and reduce the workload of customer service representatives.