Revolutionizing Manufacturing through the Lens of Data-Driven Insights

Transforming Manufacturing with Data-Driven Insights

A team of area sales managers at a leading Indian tobacco company are collating sales reports. Sales have been down in the past month and the leadership has asked for root-cause analysis, identification of low-performing outlets and products and a month-on-month comparison. However, their data resides in multiple sources and it is time and effort intensive to collate it. Further, data for the past week is not available yet. Even with the information available, drilling down to outlet- or product-level is simply not possible.

Once they have cleaned and collated the data, they have to manually prepare comparisons with last months’ data. Next, they will manually roll-up the data to track quarterly sales against their targets. It is going to be a long 48 hours for the team.

With a rich legacy that spans over nine decades, the tobacco company has a strong network of 835 wholesale dealers and an extensive retail presence of more than 1,150,000 outlets nationwide, selling up to 4 cigarette brands per outlet. The massive network produced volumes of data every day.

The Challange

With the influx of data from various sources, the biggest challenge was consolidating this data to derive actionable insights. The large volume of semi-structured data was a roadblock and reporting were siloed due to the inherent limitations of their analytical environment. Using a mix of SAP, Excel and Bizom for reporting, the enterprise continued to face challenges around the cost, performance and speed of analytics.

Collating data from multiple data sources and analytics solutions took days if not weeks and hampered immediate mitigations for underperforming outlets and products. The enterprise struggled to utilise historical data to drive strategic decision and planning. The time required to collate data resulted in delayed decisions, often on weeks old data. In addition, the leadership lacked a holistic view of the enterprise.

However, their data was rich, and they wanted to analyze 3 years’ of historical data across various dimensions such as outlet sales, inventory, and demand and supply. Business teams like sales and marketing needed an interactive, easy-to-use platform that could offer fast, modern and intuitive analytics, particularly as data volumes grew. The need for faster and more in-depth insights became a requisite as every essential operation relied on prompt decision-making.

The Ask

• A unified platform for high-performance, real-time analytics to drive strategic decisions.
• Holistic reporting across geographies, retailers, distributors and data sources.
• Real-time insights, with granular level details, for immediate actions.
• Flexibility to drill down primary, secondary and regional sales reports to outlet- and product-level for efficient planning.
• Boost employee performance and increase employee retention.

After evaluating many options in the market, the company was inclined to choose a partner that would enable them to deepen their analytics and get a bird’s eye view with speed-of-thought insights for faster decision-making. Using data-driven insights, they wanted to improve sales processes, brand equity, productivity and cost efficiency, while also fostering a high-performance culture.

The Intellicus Solution

The client chose Intellicus Technologies for their comprehensive solution that met all these challenges head-on. Intellicus was tasked to generate real-time reports and dashboards for business critical APIs.

After a rapid deployment, Team Intellicus got to work immediately and created a common portal for uploading three years of historical data, including individual data files. The company could now connect to internal and external data sources and consolidate all the datasets in a centralized location. Sales, marketing, SCM and operations teams could now see all their data in one repository and establish the same business logic despite different underlying data sources.

Intellicus enabled holistic reporting to improve product quality & cost-efficiency

With the help of Intellicus, the company was able to achieve a holistic view across geographies, retailers, and distributors. They are now able to create reports and dashboards that give them sales KPIs and period-on-period comparison on non-buying, high-buying and low-buying outlets, along with total productivity coverage, which the client uses to make data-driven decisions.

This allowed the enterprise to improve product quality, reduce losses and improve customer satisfaction. By comprehending the root causes of quality issues and bottlenecks, the team could create standards for future reference.

Intellicus empowered teams with reduced time to insights by improving reporting speed, accuracy and efficiency.

Intellicus designed a dedicated data mart to provide easy access to unified, consistent and accurate data. Using these intuitive and interactive dashboards, the on-field sales fleet and area managers can now know if any route or any outlet had fewer sales as compared to earlier weeks or if the average sale is less on any specific route.

Based on these insights, they can make operational decisions accurately and take action on route/outlet that requires attention. The territory manager can use these insights to focus more on that specific route in terms of sampling and visiting outliers. The teams can also track product-wise performance in real-time for multiple outlets and routes across geographies, enabling them to make strategic decisions and save revenue by shutting down unprofitable shops and routes. The company’s operations team now drives decisions not from intuition, but through data-backed insights.

With Intellicus, the leadership now has a holistic view of the organization and can drive cross-functional efficiencies

In addition, Intellicus refined marketing strategies to drive strategic decisions. The company is using Intellicus’ new brand launch dashboards to check the market penetration of new brands of cigarettes launched. They can now plan their targeted campaigns, launch new brands and assess brand penetration for respective areas accordingly.

All the departments of the company are now using Intellicus to drive performance and have complete visibility into all datasets across the enterprise with appropriate role-based access controls to constrain data leakages and improve productivity. They are now able to use the data and insights more effectively to work smarter.

Intellicus enhanced operational efficiency with in-depth, last mile analysis

Using Intellicus, the company can closely monitor product inventory, warehouses, store performances, retailer responses and customer needs to keep production flowing and ensure optimal inventory levels at all times.
They can drill down to reach deeper insights such as top-selling products, reorder levels and quantities, safety stocks and much more. The manufacturer has also improved their product mix by ensuring that the right product is available in the right place at the right time. Non-moving brands can be shipped to other CFAs to be sold in other regions.

By aligning demand and supply with predictive insights, the company can stay on top of consumer trends and demands and efficiently manage cost, quality, orders and inventory by keeping track of the stock in hand. In the future, the finance team will initiate payouts of the field force based on dashboards to be built in Intellicus. The insights will also help them analyze supplier performance for the best price, quality, and delivery.

Intellicus strengthens HR operations to improve employee performance

Intellicus helped the company align historical data with current trends and gain predictive insights to examine the performance of each employee. They can now create actual and target dashboards with employee data and compare them to know which employee consistently performs best. This information helps incentivize employees for compensation, rewards, and recognition to motivate them and drive performance.

With a unified 360 view of its enterprise, the retail and manufacturing giant has access to real-time analysis to drive growth. By having a single source of truth, the enterprise can now expand the use of their data to multiple business cases, powering innovation and as well as enhancing their production efficiency.

Connect with our experts at Contact Us – BI Platform & Consulting (intellicus.com) to learn how Intellicus can help resolve your data management and analytical challenges with an advanced BI platform.