Cloud-based Power BI optimises operations at a supply chain specialist

Background

A supply chain leader who specialises in sales, merchandising, and a fully integrated, temperature-controlled distribution network in Southern Africa, chose Keyrus as an expert in business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions for this project. Keyrus has previously implemented a highly successful automated sales analytics for this customer.

Challenge

The organisation faced several business challenges including an outdated business analytics system. Multiple analytics platforms resulted in duplication of effort, resources and costs, while existing models were either no longer relevant or unable to offer self-service for business users. The supply chain organisation required a seamless, integrated & fit for purpose analytics platform to allow self-service analytics that would lead to efficient, effective management of resources and costs and drive a single source of truth. It also needed key models to be automated, using the cloud.

Approach

Keyrus developed a cloud-powered analytics solution involving a number of Microsoft Azure and Power BI technologies. The business intelligence specialists at Keyrus leveraged tabular models and Power BI to enable large-scale models to drive self-service capability. The self-service functionality is enabled by a Power BI mobile app readily available to the whole business community. The solution ensures that sales & route data, pulled from a number of disparate source systems including SAP Business Warehouse (BW), SQL Server, SFTP, and Azure blob storage, is initially staged and massaged before being made available for the tabular model. This model consolidates the data from the SQL staging layer and SAP, and presents it in the correct star schema format to the Power BI reporting layer. The architecture, therefore, consists of a source, staging, semantic, and presentation/reporting layers. Technologies used include Azure Analysis Services, Azure Storage Account, Virtual Machines, Azure Data Factory, Azure Function Apps, Azure SQL DB, and Power BI Pro.

Key results

Benefits

The major benefits can be summed up as improved visibility with consolidated views of internal & external sales and planned versus actual transport-related data, reduced manpower requirements, enabled self-service capabilities, and reduced costs. The administration load has also been tangibly reduced. The customer is now benefitting from a 20% improvement in terms of visibility and has reduced its manpower requirements by 3.5 hours each week. The frequency of updates and distribution of this customer's reports has increased from once a week to daily, and the information is now available immediately via the Power BI mobile app. As the solution is completely cloud-based, the client no longer needs to maintain on-site servers and automation has replaced tedious manual workaround Excel spreadsheets.

What our clients say

“We are now benefitting from a 20% improvement in terms of visibility and have increased the frequency of sales reports from once a week to daily.”

Ashleigh Jacobs, Supply Chain Intelligence , Vector Logistics

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