24 Oct Supply chain & distribution BI solution for Intercars
Context
Intercars is the biggest auto parts importer and distributor in Romania. Handling daily large batches of products and a big number of SKUs, the supply chain management, individual asset tracking and logistic bottle necks anticipation and management are paramount.
Problem
Working with MS Dynamics, the client couldn’t track movements between locations for an individual product, thus not having a clear understanding of how products are transferred between various warehouses and towards the final customer. This problem was limiting their capacity of identifying and preventing bottle necks caused by possibly suboptimal internal procedures.
Solution
After careful analysis of internal logistics and accounting processes we identified several algorithms to recreate the exact path of each individual product, using the existing ERP database. This inferred information allowed us to generate an analytics platform, helping stakeholders easily identify problems within the supply chain and various other operational variables, previously undiscovered. The adopted Business Intelligence solution implied the generation and analysis of a graph with more that 100 million vertices, and the chosen implementation was an online analytical processing platform, built around the technologies of the Hadoop ecosystem.
Result
The solution provided clear understanding of the supply chain for each individual product, thus making it very easy to track and identify the original supplier, very important for cases like returns caused by product faults.
It also provided the client the necessary information to make optimization decisions, based on information previously unavailable — data such as warehouse transfer latency, stock life, supply chain length — all of these aggregated at the level of supplier information, product categories and so on, resulting in a complete business intelligence solution.