I was inspired to author is this story based on a solution we could provide to a client’s problem. Our client operating primarily from the Middle East, which houses more than 12 different business units. The group also has branches in India, Australia & UK. Steered by a young and dynamic CEO, who usually is very busy whole day, holding multiple business meetings & frequent travels between cities & countries. A person like him has very little time to conduct daily or even weekly stand-up calls to formally understand the day-to-day operations and get in-depth business insights. 

The question was how he could get all business insights instantly. How can different companies be integrated into one platform. As different entities were formed at different time periods, which had adopted available ERP solutions at that time. Some entities were acquired and the as-is process were continued. The thought of unifying their business system (ERP), didn’t find a good solutions, due to putting in efforts of business reengineering and scraping of existing infrastructure. Also investing in a robust and world-class single solution could cost heavily. The transition time could be even expensive in terms of man day efforts and consulting charges.

Keeping all these factors into consideration, Finlytyx AI Labs proposed a cost effective solution of unifying their business reports into a single platform. Using the existing ERP & data connection, some kind of mapping could be made to map like elements and convert others, to fit into a one solution.

Considering the busy schedule of the CEO, who is very much keen on looking into individual performance of this companies from different perspectives. Finlytyx proposed to meet the requirement on a single visual infographics model.

We at Finlytyx held meeting with their key stakeholders and business leaders and process owners. Did brainstorming on their business performance indicators. Having understood the business model in detail , moved on with their different IT partners who take care of their data bases or ERPs. The IT Admin team were very supportive in providing quick and timely access to their data sources. The whole part of the development were done on client IT infrastructure keeping in mind data security and confidentiality.

The solution we built was to integrate all the data after proper data filtering and consolidation into a data warehouse. Microsoft PowerBI was selected as the best solution for the data analytics, because the company has already purchased several MS365 licenses. Carefully considering the CEOs pattern of observing the key indicators, powerfull visuals were developed on the PowerBI, where the user can drill down till entity / branch level at the same time view and compare consildated performance of different entities.

One of the entity which deals with retail and FMCG has more than 30 branches. The requirement of comparison of day to day sales revenue , filtering by day , previous day , week on week  , Month on month, Year on Year was also another requirement.

Another entity which deals with freight movement , shipping and inland transportation. Sales performance, order to cash, ageing receivables were its key focus. Because the company is spending heavily on operations and maintaining the workforce, the branch level performance related to order booking & order fulfilment was their primary focus.

Another entity which deals with production, packaging and distribution of drinking water, required performance insights on the supply chain, other brand white labelling, production , distribution, CoGS vs Revenue, new customer addition & churn analysis.

There were few more other entities we haven’t covered in this article, which shall be detailed in the next chapter of this case study.

This client provided us an opportunity to dig deep into different business. We could uniform data visualisation for Production, distribution, retail, ecommerce, shipping, transport, banking, education, automotive, fuels, hospitality, real estate and many more to come based on the company’s new venture.

The client was quickly benefited by experiencing key info graphic visuals, on a portable device like an iPad over a morning coffee could plan his day today. As it provided him quick insights, on what was happening.Rather than comparing numbers, we understand that graphical
representation are more effective.

“The effectiveness of data visualization can be gauged by its simplicity, relevancy, and its ability to hold the user’s hand during their data discovery journey.”

Part 2 releasing soon