Unleashing transparency and fueling business transformation for a CPG giant

What the client got 

• Visibility of end-to-end supply chain data that provides a consistent, reliable bedrock for self-service analytics and incorporates more sophisticated demand signals. 
• Supply chain: OTIF (On Time in Full), Demand forecast, Fleet-optimization, Inventory movement 
• Sales & Marketing: Improving distribution, optimizing spends, trade promotions management, channel performance, sales rep management 
• Financial Planning: improving receivables, overhead cost management, drill down to P&L 

• Overall improvement agility, quality, speed, and productivity while reducing the cost. Slicker Dataflows and insights have boosted team productivity and cut the decision cycle from monthly to hourly. 
• A strong, diverse internal team of data experts to manage the EDW implementation project 

• Data architecture embedded with self-service analytics and predictive insights that empower business functions across Finance, Sales, Supply Chain to work together more efficiently and accurately 

The Challenge

Boost profitability by unlocking value of data cross 40 business units. 

With 30+ factories across 24 countries and 5 continents, more than hundreds of distribution partners, and thousands of SKUs, our client is one of the largest CPG manufacturers in the world, and its supply chain is one of the most complex. With vital data hidden across 40 business units that muffled demand signals, the client’s supply chain planning processes could not accurately match demand to supply.  

 The low accuracy of numbers across various business functions led to blocked working capital, rising inventory, and operational inefficiencies.  

Absence of Unified KPIs across 40 business units impacted their financial analytics – leading to lack of visibility and delayed access true Customer-SKU Profitability in turn causing a lag in decision making on every customer / SKU across the group 

 Legacy systems and multiple databases were a challenge. The sales, operations, and planning processes either could not access the right data or relied on inconsistent data and involved too many manual processes. 

 The client knew that it had to reboot its supply chain to take advantage of sales, fend off global competitors, and meet customers’ expectations. 

 They recognized that they needed to become a data driven organization with an accurate representation of numbers across their various departments and organizations. If they wanted this goal to become a reality, they needed a BI (Business Intelligence) Platform that could support the creation of a data warehouse, unified KPI’s, comprehensive analytics and insights, and data governance & quality management. 

We started by carrying out granular analysis of the end-to-end supply chain and operations planning processes to find critical gaps and issues. The sheer size of the data, frequent surges in demand and ad-hoc requests from executives added to forecast complexity. On the financial side, we found inaccurate and inconsistent representation KPIs (Key Performance indicators) across various business functions impacting their annual planning. 

 We implemented a high performing Enterprise Data Warehouse, full stack analytics and decision-making transformation built on the foundation of standard data accessibility to model complex relationships between the business unit and increase profitability, supply chain planning, inventory planning, allocation accuracy, Marketing spend optimization, Improved procurement cycle time and vehicle hiring optimization. 

The secret sauce: Tech meets business 

 Client testimonial: “We chose Systech to extract and map data for our company because they’ve been around for a while. They have the subject matter expertise and vast experience in fast adoption to SAP HANA modeling. They speak our language and engage well with businesses for designing and validation of optimal output. Systech continues to be our trusted partners for Data & Analytics space. “

 Planning & Strategy: We architected a roadmap that would take data from business functions across Finance, Sales, Supply Chain (Planning, Procurement, Manufacturing, Inventory), Marketing, Consumer Insights (EPOS), Transport & HR and put it into the Enterprise Data Warehouse.  

Creating a Team: To implement a high performing EDW solution, we leveraged data engineers with skillset in Data Curation, SAP HANA Modeling and dashboarding. The team brought to the table a deep understanding of SAP HANA, SAP BODS, SAP Design studio, Lumira & Tableau. Our business analysts in the team worked closely with business users to translate the technical definitions of the KPI (Key Performance indicators) library and refine and re-define the KPIs. This was critical to ensure long-term success of the implementation 

Discover, Design & Develop: We used an iterative and phased approach to deliver on Profitability analysis, Inventory Management, Marketing spend optimization, procurement cycle time optimization, vehicle hiring optimization as part of the data warehouse implementation, ensuring business value is being delivered at regular intervals.  

Standard KPI Definition Templates and accelerators: To standardize KPIs we leveraged data solutions accelerators to homogenize data from multiple ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) and other source systems to bring the data forth in a way that could be used. The data definition templates have been the cornerstone of this project and have completely re-hauled the way the client’s data is treated. 

Single source of truth 

The team also made data and analytics easier to access and use by deploying Tableau to create interactive dashboards for several business areas. To improve visibility of revenue and cost reduction around trade & consumer marketing, the team standardized and unified 140+ KPIs across functions and enabled users at all levels with direct access to data via dashboard and ad-hoc tools. 

Data governance and change management 

To create a data-driven culture, we leveraged data governance templates and frameworks along with change management to help employees adapt to new ways of working.  

A Solution delivery model approach was used to ensure technological transformation for end users. 

Modernized data infrastructure to support the scale and flexibility of business expansion.

• The creation of enterprise data warehouse (EDW) harmonized their data and laid the foundation for data governance, quality, and timely business engagement.
• The optimized technology landscape via a centralized BI system ensured smooth transition to Enterprise dashboard adoption.

• This also facilitates continuous enhancement of financial KPIs resulting in accurate, granular profitability and performance improvements.
• This turnkey implementation resulted as a foundation for advanced analytics within the enterprise, enabling the organization to look at ML solutions as the next step in their journey for innovation and automation.

Increased visibility and adoption of data-driven insights

The unified KPIs and Self-Service Analytics allowed access to near real-time insights on the entire operations.

Supply Chain Planning – Inventory Freshness & inventory movement management provided complete visibility to each of items across a wide range of SKU behaviors. This helped understand item’s time to expiry, minimize the obsolescence, improve on-hand quantity management, and eventually improve forecasting, customer satisfaction and overall supply chain cost.

Manufacturing Production: Access to scheduled adherence enabled them to understand the reason for change in schedules and plan production runs better. Usage variance and shop floor inventory visibility helped improve maintenance, boost yield, and increase productivity.

Financial Planning – Achieved true profitability of a SKU and a channel by enabling an integrated view of balance sheet, accounts receivable, cost of goods sold, overheads, depreciation, interest rates. Daily/Monthly updates of these KPIs enabled the business to achieve their target seamlessly. The KPI driven daily/monthly alerts helped manage product profitability on an ongoing basis

Sales Performance – Sales rep performance tracking showed insights into effective coverage, field capability score, bill productivity, LPPC, sales returns, run rate, shop score, trade expenses across various channels and markets and helped them improve overall team-performance and annual operating planning.

Marketing Spend – The solution enabled marketeers access brand profitability, ATL, BTL spends, Consumer marketing investments, Value & Volume share at any point in time and helped optimize the overall marketing spend.

Fleet Optimization – A holistic view into to the shipping-container placement, document clearance indexes for import by service providers and gaps in missing clearance, delivered seamless experiences, happier clients, a better shipment compliance, container rollovers and revenue growth. Visibility into overall truck placement adherence, maintenance costs, capacity utilization and return trip ratio helped plan the routes for returning vehicles efficiently.

Synchronization of data and dashboards for faster decision making

• Enabled Cycle Time Reduction: E.g.: monthly insights took 15-20 days (about 3 weeks), reduced to 1 day. Update of COGS (Cost of the Goods Sold) / NSR on hourly basis help offers insights into these figures to the CEOs on an hourly basis.
• Drove user adoption of the enterprise analytics platform and helped change culture to be an empowered self-service analytics organization – interactive report runs scaled up from 100 to 800 per month.