Leveraging a Data & Analytics Solution to Drive Profitability
The Situation
A distributor of scientific products recently acquired several add-on acquisitions and had an active pipeline of additional targets. The Company had never done a thorough analysis on their incumbent products, as well as the acquired product lists, which now totaled over 1million unique SKUs across the consolidated entity. Accordion was engaged to provide a solution for continual analysis of their product-level costs to ensure realization of synergies and overall cost savings, while also creating a structure to allow for future acquisitions to be incorporated seamlessly.
Services
SKU Rationalization
Margin Growth Initiatives
Big Data Analytics
The Execution
•Initiated a discovery process across the organization to understand current situation, pain points, processes, and data gathering across all entities.
•Provided detailed data request lists to ensure that all data be complete, timely, and most relevant to the required deliverables.
•Identified gaps and inconsistencies in data and worked with the teams to rectify issues and find a creative approach to modeling the available information.
•Used Power BI to standardize and model 40+ source data sets from numerous systems to provide a consolidated view of product SKUs across entities. This resulted in the ability to identify duplicate products purchased from the same supplier, substitute products purchased from multiple suppliers, and current and historical inflated costs, among other items.
•Extended the engagement to include further sales, margin, customer, and sales rep.
•Created a flexible and scalable model that led to standardization and an intermediate data model layer between source data and the BI platform. This also allows for future acquisitions to be integrated with ease.
The Results
Accordion provided the Company with a flexible tool to analyze SKU costs at a consolidated level, which provided visibility into cost savings at their fingertips. The sales team now has a tool that can be easily updated and shared across the function to do high-level analysis (as well as customer account and product-level sales analysis). Now, all audiences within the organization have one source of truth for information regarding supplier and product-level costs, inflation, and sales, customer-level sales, sales rep performance, and margin across all views. Drill-down capability allows management and non-management to use the same data in varying detail so that there is no need to manually compile and clean data from different sources on a regular basis. With an automated purchase and sales visibility tool in place, all stakeholders can now focus on achieving cost savings, selling products, and analyzing data instead of searching for answers.