For a whole sale office supplies distributor, operating across a wider range
of products, Data Nectar helped customer to make efficient decisions across
sales strategy, marketing and finance.
An end to end BI and Data Analytics system was designed and built to identify
customer needs, optimize inventory, reduce receivable time to boost revenue by
over 20% in 8 months.
The objective was to have a clear overview of payment receivables, customer’s buying patterns, inventory and demand forecasting.
20%
Increase in revenue in 8 Months
12%
Reduction in payment receivables
15%
Increase in high-margin product sales
The client, a wholesale and distribution industry player, headquartered United Kingdom, is one of the fast-growing business supplies companies. Client deals with high-quality office consumable supplies to small and medium businesses. Offerings contain more than 3000 products to more 1000+ customers.
The client’s business does not undertake retail sales and operates primarily from the company’s warehouse, with the salespersons directly dealing with B2B (Offices, Factories, Showrooms, Schools) supplies customers. The business principle followed by the sales team is to focus on customer retention and create patrons with whom they can build a long-term business relationship that will facilitate upselling and cross-selling of their products.
INDUSTRY:
Wholesale and Distribution
LOCATION:
United Kingdom
BUSINESS:
Office Consumable Supplies
NO. OF CLIENTS: 1000
PRODUCTS:
4000; stationery, housekeeping, pantry, electronics, furniture.
Service deliveries
- Data Integration, MDM
- Data Warehouse
- Self-service Dashboards & Reports
- Data Security
- BI Support
Business requirement
The client had a growing concern about making the right decisions to improve their operational and sales efficiencies. It is worth mentioning that the client was using the Zoho book + Zoho inventory + Zoho CRM. Data analytics and visualization capabilities of Zoho’s book were limited to providing generic sales and inventory statuses.
The client was looking for more data-driven perspectives to make better decisions towards improving vendor negotiations, reducing payment receivable time and profit optimisations through cross/upselling of alternative products with better margins. A transformation from the traditional decision-making approach to ‘data-driven decision making’ was possible through implementing a robust business intelligence system to equip the client with dashboards and actionable insights to improve operational efficiencies.
REQUIREMENTS
Analyse data to know about:
- Payment Receiveables
- Customer Buying Pattern
- Inventory Replenishment
- Demand Forecasting
An end to end Business Intelligence solution was built with the intent to address the client’s current business problems and also enable them to expand data analytics capabilities through the business growth journey.
- A business intelligence system ingested data from Zoho systems including data sources like Excel & Order booking web portal.
- Required data processing and data transformation were applied to make all data consistent and qualified to load into the MS SQL-based Data Warehouse using Talend Open Studio as a data integration and ETL tool.
Considering various dimensions required to analyse the data by a specific business user; data cubes and data marts were designed and developed to enable faster access of specific data for analysis and visualization purposes. Following are key KPIs and Reports:
- Customer Segmentation (based on category and product demand)
- Supplier Analysis: Across pricing, margins, delivery time & credit time
- Account Receivable(AR) analytics: Time, invoice date, receipt date, customer type(Office, Showroom, Schools & ), top 20 best and worst customers by AR
- Customer Analytics – Customer segmentation by account receivable tracks, product volume, revenues, purchase patterns/order frequencies
VALUE ADDS
- Increased revenue
- Improved high-margin product sales
- Reduced Payment Receivable time
- Improved inventory replenishment leading to reduced cost of inventory / stocking
Solution benefits
17%
Reduced inventory cost / Better
negotiation and terms with suppliers
15%
Increase in high-margin product sales.
18%
Reduction in payment receivable time.