Unlocking key business insights via automation and system integration

Client:

Our partner is a leading metal products manufacturer based in Melbourne, with a heritage that goes back over 50 years. They provide a wide-range of metal products, from bespoke hand-made items to large-scale automated roofing solutions for clients from a wide-range of sectors.

The Problem:

Having undergone significant operational changes in the last 12 months, our client was struggling to get the insights required to understand profitability at an item level, and therefore did not have the visibility of the key performance drivers of their business. They were wanting to get a granular view of profitability, split by customer and item, to make better pricing decisions. The process for obtaining this was not only difficult, but it was also time-consuming, with several people required to help provide their input into the monthly performance report.

The Solution:

We worked closely with our client to understand the impact of the operational changes before performing an analysis of their systems and then set in place a solution which would bring together data from multiple systems into a single-source-of-truth data platform to drive an automated gross profit dashboard that could be automatically refreshed each day without any user intervention. We joined multiple systems, by building a customer data map and the required data pipeline automations of each system to provide our gross profit data model which we then leveraged in Power BI to create a detailed yet engaging report for the managing director and senior management to consume each morning.

The Outcome:

Not only did our reporting solution provide a clear and consistent view of gross profit, a view that was previously unachievable, we also discovered several key insights that management were not aware of. As an example, our data discovery showed that for one particular product category, they were charging their clients a labour cost that was 28% less than the actual labour cost, a change that since implementation has seen gross profit for that category grow by over 16%, and overall business gross profit grow by over 5%. In addition to this, the sales team are now able to drill-down on their customers and determine specific pricing strategies to optimise business performance, and track their analytics more efficiently, delivering efficiency gains.