Optimizing Data Visibility for Supply Chain Operations
The Situation
A $180 million distributor of laboratory products recently undertook a number of add-on acquisitions and had an active pipeline of additional targets. As the Company integrated the acquisitions, it was essential to improve supply chain operations as a platform for future acquisitions. The Company needed better visibility into critical points along their supply chain because the current systems only provided rudimentary insights. Accordion was engaged to develop a business intelligence solution to allow the Company to manage its supply chain more effectively.
Services
KPI Reporting
Big Data Analytics
Supply Chain
The Execution
- Initiated a discovery process across the organization to understand current situation, pain points, processes, and data landscape.
- Provided detailed data request lists to ensure that all data be complete, timely, and most relevant to the required deliverables.
- Worked hand-in-hand with the Company’s technology team to procure a dedicated SQL database for direct linking of the data.
- Used Power BI to standardize and link multiple source data sets including sales orders, purchase orders, and inventory to provide a complete view of critical metrics with drilldown capabilities by supplier, customer, warehouse, product, and sales velocity.
- Integrated the Company’s supply chain data into one dynamic model, which allowed them to attain visibility into their order-to-cash and procure-to-pay processes. This also helped the Company identify bottlenecks in working capital.
- Enabled the Company to track its customer service levels and manage their inventory in real-time. This allowed them to provide proactive insight for customer account management and adjust stocking levels.
- Trained the Company’s team on using, maintaining, and expanding upon the Power BI tool developed and provided post-handover support.
The Results
Accordion provided the Company with a flexible tool to analyze critical paths along their supply chain. Now, the Company has a real-time view into high-level operations metrics as well as the data and reporting necessary to drive those metrics. All audiences within the organization have one source of truth for information regarding sales backlog, purchasing, inventory fill rates and service levels, order-to-cash, and procure-to-pay cycle times. Drill-down capability allows management and non-management to use the same data in varying detail so that there is no need to manually compile and clean data from different sources on a regular basis. With an automated supply chain visibility tool in place, all stakeholders can focus on achieving operational efficiencies, reducing backlog, improving working capital, and, analyzing data instead of searching for answers.