The Challenges
From frozen, dry, and fresh food to items such as cleaning and paper products, our client offers everything that its customers need to run their business. It is not an easy feat for the company to understand its operational performance as well as customer behavior, while offering 4,500 products for its 30,000 plus customers from 16 central warehouses. Delivering food items to different customers means different routes, workforce and assets; and ensuring that each delivery is a success becomes increasingly challenging. Similarly, for the client to keep a watch on food stock damage, loss, waste, fraud, and risk is also a challenging task. Adding to it is the delivery drivers’ performance that the company must deal with in order to improve food-supply chain efficiency.
Today, Microsoft Dynamics AX powers the company’s entire operations - starting from procurement, route, and stock management to order processing and inventory management. It generates huge amount of data that gets stored in this ERP, but no means to consistently tap into this gold mine. The company had no single view of assets & operational data, driver behavioural data, food temperature threshold data, customer delivery data, inventory data and the other significant data that would reveal critical business insights. To overcome all these challenges, our client wanted a business intelligence solution that can enable them to take better decisions towards running the food delivery operations efficiently. It would empower the operations team with relevant & timely reporting to react quickly.
The Smart Microsoft Power BI Solution
Our expertise in Cold Chain Monitoring & Food Service logistics has helped build business intelligence solution that transforms data into intelligence. Power BI consultants leveraged Microsoft Power BI tool to provide interactive logistics dashboards with rich visuals and self-service capabilities required to empower client’s operations team. The tool connects to an on-premise ERP system that collects staggering amounts of data - assets & operations data, food items’ temperature data, customer order delivery data, and workforce data. The BI solution provides the transportation & logistics team with insights on food delivery operations; starting from route planning, warehouse to fulfilling customer order, in not more than two seconds. It also allows the operations team to take intelligent decisions for efficiently manage their supply chain operations; making their job simpler & easier. Although this solution was delivered as a proof-of-concept, our client could see the impressive potential benefits.