Success story DSCIM & Clay Lacy
Achieving 10x Faster P&L Reporting and Trusted Analytics for a 150-Aircraft Fleet
About Clay Lacy Aviation
For more than 50 years, Clay Lacy Aviation has been a pioneer in private aviation, setting the highest standards for safety, service, and innovation. Managing a fleet of 160 aircrafts while carrying forward the legacy of its legendary founder, the company reached a point where manual financial processes and fragmented legacy systems could no longer keep pace with its operational complexity.
To maintain its leadership and enable data-driven decision-making, Clay Lacy partnered with Data Science In Motion to transform its budgeting, reporting and analytics into a trusted, scalable foundation for future growth.
Profile
Founded 1968 in Van Nuys, California
Hubs Van Nuys Airport, Los Angeles
Services
- Aircraft management
- Air charter
- Aircraft maintenance
- Fixed-base operator
The company manages a nationwide fleet worth more than $3.5 billion
Challenges
As Clay Lacy Aviation scaled to manage a fleet of 160 aircrafts, its legacy financial system infrastructure started showing signs of not keeping pace with ever growing requirements to support enterprise-level decision-making.
In this regard, Clay Lacy Aviation faced three interconnected challenges:
Monthly P&L reporting was entirely Excel-based, requiring a group of 8 finance professionals to dedicate multiple business days to prepare the P&L reports for each aircraft owner — significantly limiting analytical capacity and strategic responsiveness.
Critical operational and financial data was spread across different systems (Great Plains, Corridor, FL3XX, Data Warehouse) without a unified data model, leading to data inconsistencies and affecting the overall data quality.
Due to insufficient data quality and manual aggregation methods, financial outputs lacked auditability and stakeholder confidence. Detailed profitability analysis by aircraft and data-driven forecasting were practically impossible.
As a result, the organization required not just accelerated reporting, but a fully integrated, scalable budgeting, forecasting and reporting system that could deliver accurate, reliable and timely results.
Solution (The DSCIM Approach)
Starting in 2018, Data Science In Motion worked side by side with Clay Lacy Aviation on the implementation of Vena FP&A platform, with the goal of rebuilding existing budgeting and reporting processes from the ground up – not all at once, but through a thoughtful, step-by-step approach that delivered value at every stage.
First, we created a Vena Data Mart – a central hub that transforms, standardises and cleanses data before it enters the Vena cube. The goal of this transformation was to make sure the data inside Vena is 100% clean and accurate, giving Clay Lacy Aviation a single, reliable source of truth they could rely on.
The originally designed data model within Clay Lacy legacy systems was based on temporary parameters that made historical comparisons unreliable. We rebuilt it with permanent, consistent logic so that trends, forecasts and year-on-year comparisons finally made sense.
What used to require 420 scattered Excel templates now runs on just 35 optimised, controlled templates. This is not just a reduction in files – it is a dramatic reduction in risk, complexity and manual effort. Fewer templates meant fewer errors, faster updates and easier maintenance.
We started small – with GL data – and then expanded to other types of corporate data. Once we had a solid foundation, we built a complete, unified financial model, which provided automated aircraft-level profit and loss reports – accurate, timely and ready for review by senior management, every single month.
Results
Clay Lacy has not only updated its tools, but changed the way the entire company views and uses financial data. What used to be a manual, error-prone task is now an automated, reliable process. Teams across the company now trust the numbers, analyze performance more accurately and make decisions faster – with confidence.
Monthly reporting, which used to take days, now runs automatically, allowing the finance team to focus on analysis rather than data entry.
The Vena Data Mart became the company’s official, trusted data warehouse – eliminating version chaos and synchronising disparate systems.
For the first time, management can analyze profitability per trip, uncovering hidden opportunities and inefficiencies across the entire fleet.
The number of user licences increased from 25 to 47 – proof that the solution was not only developed for the finance department, but has been embraced by the entire company.
Customer Success
We were highly impressed by the comprehensive nature of DSCIM’s services and the expertise demonstrated by their entire team when we started phase 1 of the Vena project back in 2018. This positive experience became a catalyst for future innovation. Over the next several years, Clay Lacy Aviation executed several additional projects with Data Science In Motion, each successfully expanding the Vena platform’s value and reinforcing its role as a strategic driver of growth.
The success with Clay Lacy Aviation stems from our strategic focus on laying a truly scalable foundation, which is paramount in complex environments with numerous source systems. We engineered a robust Vena Data Mart to overcome the challenge o and inconsistent source data, functioning as a powerful cleansing and consolidation layer. This approach, spanning a long-term partnership, restored data integrity and unlocked powerful, granular insights, ultimately achieving tenfold productivity and proving that a solid data foundation is the ultimate enabler of business efficiency and growth.
Are you ready for the future of FP&A Process?
Have a question or need more information? Contact DSCIM Today!
