Global Personal Care Company

THE CHALLENGE

When the company began to experience strong growth, their data grew exponentially across multiple sources and projects span across several different Operational teams, creating a relatively large scope to track and monitor.

The Supply Chain Enablement Team ran into challenges combining data from multiple sources in order to deliver a cohesive picture of demand and supply chain data to decision makers. They asked themselves, ‘how could we join these different sources into one piece?’

A ‘Product Control Platform’ was built to eliminate manual processes and better support decision makers with consistent and reliable data in Power BI dashboards.

“The challenge was a gap still existed: Users could not interact directly with the data.”

While data analytics are key to managing various projects, users needed to update, change or add commentary to the data in order to provide precise updates of project progress.

For example, when the Demand Planning team needed to manually input hundreds of line items as components of a new product, it involved a repetitive, manual process of exporting and uploading data.

Also, managing bar codes for retail trade became a time-consuming, back and forth exercise for hundreds of products for the Demand Planning and Account Manager teams.

The team could not do anything else apart from continuously checking the information, wasting days or weeks. The Enablement team wanted to make this process effortless and efficient and leverage the dashboards in Power BI.

THE SOLUTION

The Supply Chain Enablement Team optimized their new Power BI Platform by adding Power ON and further powering dashboards with the ability to input data and add commentary, real-time directly in Power BI.

“Power ON was the key component to optimize the Power BI platform for our business needs.”

Operational teams replaced the manual sharing of siloed Excel files with an interactive and collaborative Power BI dashboard with the ability to make real-time adjustments.  The information is then digested and analyzed in the relevant Power BI dashboard to monitor and understand product trends and where and how they could improve outcomes.

For example, the demand planning team uses Power ON within the Power BI dashboard for root cause analysis of the Sales Forecast.  They can view historical sales data over specific time periods and adjust any sales forecasting errors. If a variance on the forecast is too high, project managers can record their own input and comment directly in the Power BI dashboard as to why.

Leveraging their Power BI dashboard with Power ON, the team gathers valuable insights along the way such as how many days a project is delayed or ahead of schedule, product sales volumes, and other related information to help them determine what they could do better to push the next product to market.

THE RESULTS

Power ON cut the unnecessary and repetitive steps from users' workload so that they can now concentrate on the most important piece – making decisions to improve the business.

50% of the Operational teams’ time is saved by eliminating hours spent on data validation, input, consumption, and getting the data where it needs to be.

With Power BI + Power ON, the team now just sends a report to the users and says, ‘Check, update, and add comments yourself.’ No one needs to work for hours moving data back and forth – it’s now just a link.

For example, when a retailer orders with an old barcode that no longer exists, Power BI triggers an alert. Power ON then allows users to correct the barcode selection directly in the Power BI Dashboard – and make adjustments in real-time, versus learning about the issue days later and avoiding any negative impacts to retail customer orders, sales, and even production.

Adding Power ON to Power BI, the various Operational teams can now plan better, manage production better, launch products more effectively and communicate and deliver to the retailers and customers better.

Biggest Impact: Adding Power ON to Power BI brings Power to decision makers across the organization from Supply Chain, Operations, and Sales. If they see something they want to change, they don't have to go to another application or export a different file.

By introducing Power BI + Power ON, the Enablement team improved the productivity of their internal customers, and in turn, the company’s ability to fulfill their commitments to their end customers.

AFTER

• Users modify data directly in Power BI dashboards

• Real-time updates to Supply Chain dashboards

• Data driven decisions and improvement

• 50% less time spent on low-value tasks