Fast business value in profitability analytics
A wholesale company asked August to improve its profitability analytics to gain visibility into its product, service, and customer profitability. Together we executed a data-intensive proof-of-concept to generate fast results. This pilot also served to act as a starting point for a larger IT implementation, for which August continues to support the customer.
Interested in hearing more? Contact Juha Martikainen
Challenge
A wholesale company had developed several value-add services for its customers on top of a wide product portfolio. The company lacked the needed analytics and reporting to understand profitability in terms of their products, services, and customers, which made data-based management impossible. To make the situation more complicated, the company had massive amount of data dispersed in several ERP systems but only a vague understanding of the dimensions where profitability understanding was needed.
Brave the future
To tackle the challenge, the client followed August’s suggestion to create a proof-of-concept . The proof-of-concept was seen as the most suitable way to gain results quickly before committing to a large-scale IT implementation project that would make the profitability reporting possible on an on-going basis.
However, unlike a typical proof-of-concept, this case was a massive data-heavy project. Hundreds of gigabytes of input data were collected from multiple systems, then thoroughly reviewed, cleansed, and wrangled to create the necessary profitability information.
Impact
After the data analysis phase, the customer had for the first time an understanding of which customers, services and products were profitable and where it should focus its efforts in the future.
The customer valued August support as they gained results fast thanks to the successful PoC approach. August supported them in all the phases of the project from initial vision to blueprint, and from data-heavy PoC execution to support in IT implementation. The project also created an excellent starting point for the on-going IT implementation. As the logic and needed results have been defined precisely, the IT implementation will be straightforward, generating cost savings for the customer in addition to profitability.