Data analytics solution for a family-owned beverage distributor in the Midwest
A family-owned beverage distributor in the Midwest teamed up with Baker Tilly's food and beverage team to implement sales and profitability interactive dashboards.
Business challenge
Our client, a beverage distributor, was struggling to gain insight into key drivers of distribution and profitability due to the limitations of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Beverage distributors typically face challenges with visibility into their profitability due to the complexity of individual sales transactions, the seasonality of the beverage demands and the continual evolution of consumer demand. With millions of transactions occurring each year at this company, Excel was not powerful enough to analyze trends and identify meaningful action.
The company needed to be able to understand not only the volume of product distributed but also the complexities that drive true profitability. The existing processes the client had in place to monitor these performance indicators required numerous hours of manual report preparation. And even then, these reports would only paint a static picture of the data which would require supplemental work to provide specific insight.
How Baker Tilly helped
Our professionals leveraged their understanding of data analytics in the food and beverage industry to develop a variety of interactive dashboards that provided the client visibility and insight into its business. We worked with the client to develop tailored dashboards specific to their needs and address shifts in profitability driven by consumer preferences. We then leveraged our library of industry-agnostic analytics to expedite deployment and drive value quickly.
We began by meeting with the client to establish their specific needs and validate the data we gathered from our connection to the client’s ERP. We also worked with the client to understand the specific nuances of their profitability and key performance indicators.
The process of gathering the data necessary to create the dashboards involved the automation of numerous business processes and internal calculations. Once completed and validated, the work of creating dozens of manual reports was simplified to hitting “refresh”.
The result
The business intelligence generated from the work on this project is now available every day for the client without any manual assembly required. The company increased profits in the first full year of using these tools by leveraging the new model to drive strategic decisions and manage the daily profitability of customer and supplier relationships.