Enhancing business intelligence for a logistics company

About client

The client is a pioneer in providing end-to-end supply chain and third-party services with storage hubs in multiple locations.  Headquartered in South India, they work with brands all over the country from industries like hi-tech, pharma, eCommerce, transportation, etc. With 160+ warehouses spanning over 6 million square feet and 36000 customer locations, they provide modern infrastructure, plug-and-play services, and end-to-end supply chain management services.

Challenges

The client had robust ERP solutions to handle the warehousing and transportation data as well as human resources and finance. However, their operational data was scattered too in multiple locations like flat files, ERP applications, web API, and other data sources. Even though they were able to generate analytics, they faced the following challenges due to this scattered nature.

Tedious report generation: Their leadership team required frequent insights collected from their consolidated data to review their performance and make plans for the future. Their data team spent a lot of time collecting data from the source data and generating reports. This was a chaotic and complicated process as they had to fetch 10 to 20 tables of data out of millions of rows. They had to write suitable queries to get the required data, visualize, and share with stakeholders. 

Since they were frequently collecting data, they observed latency issues on their server end which also affected their database performance. 

Bottlenecks in Estimating Warehouse Performance: They wanted advanced metrics that directly impact their warehouse performance. These metrics can highlight problem areas and performance-affecting factors. To name a few, whether the agreed turnaround time is being met or how many units are picked or packed per hour, actual time vs agreed time for the inbound or outbound operations, etc.

Lack of centralized data: They lacked a centralized repository for business insights. Without this, their warehouse managers and business leaders couldn’t view daily reports in one place without switching from one database to another. 

This increased their time to insights as well as the time they took to act on the acquired insights.

Also, they couldn’t collaborate better internally with other departments or warehouses from other locations. 

Unavailability of data catalogs: They were handling humongous amounts of data. But they had no metadata that explained what this data is. Who does this belong to? Who has access to this data? And more like this. Hence, decision-makers and stakeholders couldn’t understand the business context or track data lineage. It also led to poor data discovery, utilization, and access practices.

Manual performance scoreboard: Performance scoreboards were crucial for them to share with clients as part of service-level agreements. The siloed departmental data and complicated reporting process didn’t let them have instant access to the performance score. And they were using spreadsheets to manually create and maintain these scoreboards. 

Solutions

Proconnect reached out to us to simplify their reporting process and automate their performance scoring. They wanted instant and up-to-date access to metrics that they could drag and visualize. This is where datakulture chimed in and helped them in the following areas.

One version of the truth through an open-source warehouse: Their custom warehouse and cloud had customer, vendor, and inbound and outbound operations data. We identified the metrics they needed to measure, consolidated the data from different sources, and created fact tables with this aggregated data. This aggregated data is stored in a Clickhouse warehouse which acts as their single source of information. 

Incremental load and employed to keep the data error-free and discrepancies-free on this destination end and mirror exactly what the source reflects.

This is how we converted their detailed, transactional data into highly ingrained metrics crucial for their decision-making.

Uncovering important supply chain metrics: They had issues with accurately evaluating SLAs for customer inbound and shipment operations from all their hubs.  Metrics like inward cut-off time, GRN agreed TAT, putaway agreed TAT, employee pick pack per hour performance, etc. With the modern data warehouse, they can now access these metrics, whenever required. 

Simplified reporting process: They were able to measure the crucial SLA metrics of inbound and outbound operations without having to write queries or tap into the production server. With the Clickhouse warehouse, they obtained the metrics they required and visualized them with a BI tool which they could share with every stakeholder. 

Automated performance scoreboard: We set up an automated scoring process for each of their hubs - human resources, safety and accidents, finance, operations, and stock count API. With this, they will automatically receive fresh scores for every single day from the consolidated fact tables. These scores help them find which hub is performing well and what issues to address. 

Instant availability of insights: With this near-real-time BI setup, they could avoid spending long hours on reporting. Their productivity peaked by 15% and they could act on any business insights faster than ever. Instant report generation for SLA metrics was their major requirement and with this new and modern data foundation, they were able to accomplish that.

Conclusion

Now the client gets instant and immediate reports, be it for critical insights or service level agreements on critical supply chain parameters like inventory levels and order status. Their productivity has improved tremendously by 15%. They have also identified cost savings of 70 to 85%, all while managing data sources with flexibility. They are able to make quick and informed decisions now with the availability of high-quality, real-time accurate data inferences. With our technical expertise and business understanding, we have optimized their supply chain operations, increased efficiency, and strengthened their decision-making process while bringing scalability and agility to their business which is very important for the supply chain and logistics industry.