Embedded analytics customer portal for a manufacturer of consumer products

Business challenge

Our client is a contract manufacturer that produces branded household products for some of the largest Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies in North America.

The company completed a voice of customer assessment and discovered that providing additional transparency to order activity was the top opportunity to differentiate its business in a competitive industry. To provide information regarding current inventory and upcoming deliveries, our client would need to establish a secure environment where authorized customers could access data in near real time regarding upcoming shipments.

How Baker Tilly helped

Baker Tilly had previously assisted this client in setting up monitoring analytics using Tableau, an interactive data visualization software, to provide insight into KPI’s. We quickly evaluated whether this framework could serve as a starting point for a client environment and found that it would be suitable for organizing data into interactive analytics.

Our team worked with the client to identify which indicators would be shared with the customers and began developing data pipelines to extract the data and prepare it into useful information to share via dashboards. Once visuals were created, their top concern was ensuring that customers would only see data relevant to their business. We established security measures that would tie customer activity to specific user accounts to filter down the data from one source to many unique views.

The client knew a branded platform with company information would shine above its competitors. To fulfill this requirement, Baker Tilly brought in the capabilities of its application developers to create a custom portal environment with branded content using an app development platform that added improved functionality and additional capabilities, while providing significant customization to each customer.

The result

The customer portal solution successfully led to more transparency and strengthened our client's relationship with their customers. The customers were given the power to find upcoming deliveries and on hand inventory themselves. This resulted in fewer calls and disruptions to the company’s account managers, which provided our client the opportunity to shift time toward strategy and selling.

The delivered solution included key information regarding customer owned products in inventory, upcoming planned production, open purchased orders and delivery performance. As on-hand values are communicated more clearly prior to packaging or product changes, the sharing of this critical information amongst long-term business partners will reduce future costs through higher on-time delivery performance, reduced inventory investment and lower obsolescence costs.