Case Studies Archive

Self-service enterprise portal gives vendors real-time insights into orders and inventories with automated analytics and intelligence reporting

About

US’s leading distributor of quality pet food and animal supplies to pet stores nationwide.

Challenges & Goals

The nation’s leading distributor of wholesale pet food and animal supplies was constantly receiving requests from its 200+ vendors across the US for reports with varying levels of data to understand the performance of their products in various markets. These reports would take the distributors’ employees days and weeks to create; taking time away from their principal job functions. The company was looking to automate reporting of product performance, inventory levels and give deeper insights into various other parameters to their vendor partners.

Solution

Effectus worked closely with the distributor’s vendor management team to understand the answers vendors were looking for through data and reports as well as assessed the current systems for the data being captured and available for reporting.
We implemented an automated solution to integrate data that was scattered across multiple disjointed systems into a single source of clean data with unified definitions. A business rules engine was put in place to process the data for extracting intelligence answering various questions from vendors.
Our team of reporting experts created a variety of standard reports for each vendor with insights into various performance metrics, inventory levels, top moving products and parameters helping them better plan their inventories and shipments. Report creation was automated, eliminating excruciating long hours the team had to put in to create reports.
Each vendor was given secure and self-service access to the portal for viewing real-time reports with the ability to drill-down for further details as well as historical performance. The portal automates the creation of the reports per vendor and automatically refreshes the information at standardized cadences.
The portal has also given insights into the performance of various products and vendors to the vendor management team.

Results

Vendors now get real-time answers to their questions about the performance of the products they supply through the distributor in various markets and regions in the US. The self-service portal created for vendors is one of the first ones in the industry to improve the supply chain. Additionally, vendors now have visibility to information not previously available such as nationwide inventory levels. With automated data collection, processing and report creation; the vendor management team saved significant hours and had the time available to focus on value-add activities.

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Sam Billings
VP Operations, Gatorade

Areas Effectus Worked In

Data Management

Reporting and Analytics

Digital Transformation

Enterprise Vendor Portal

Change Management and Training

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Tell us your challenges and find out how we can help.

About

An American manufacturer of sports-themed beverage and food products, built around its signature line of sports drinks. Effectus Partners worked on a business transformation project for client’s products/equipment division that sells products including squeeze bottles, towels, coolers, ice-chests, bottle carriers and various custom team bundles.

Challenges & Goals

The company’s current processes were not strategically conducive to long-term growth. Gaps in current processes impacted sales orders and lack of insights hampered the growth of company sales. With a focus on improving operational efficiency and increasing sales, the company was looking to transform its existing operational processes and supporting systems to make them scalable, efficient, flexible and transparent with insights across operations of various business functions – design and sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, order management, customer engagement and partner support.

Solution

Effectus conducted a series of deep-dive interviews with internal stakeholders as well as partners in the ecosystem to assess current processes, operations bottlenecks and challenges in order management, distribution, product demand visibility, customer engagement, sales growth of equipment product line.
Comprehensive assessment findings report along with a roadmap to improve current business operations, automate processes and provide insights to key stakeholders for visibility into current performance.
Our process experts mapped every step and redesigned processes for design and sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, order management, customer engagement and partner support functions. We put streamlined processes in place and unified the entire flow from product design and sales to distribution and customer engagement functions.
The data was integrated from sourcing and order capture systems, Excel spreadsheets, distribution management and partners to create reports with visualizations that provided insights into daily orders, status on order delivery, inventory levels, sales forecasting, the performance of sales agents and effectiveness of sales campaigns driving orders.
Data integration, processing and reports creation were automated to remove manual intervention and faster decision-making.

Results

Optimized and automated processes improved the efficiency of order processing and created better alignment between each function. Timely insights helped improve order processing, effective management of inventories and deliver the best customer experience, which results in double-digit growth in sales of company.

Areas Effectus Worked In

Process Optimization

Process Automation

Unified Data Management

Financial Forecasting and Analysis

Analytics and Reporting

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Tell us your challenges and find out how we can help.

About

US’s leading distributor of quality pet food and animal supplies to pet stores nationwide.

Challenges & Goals

The company receives approximately 50,000 coupons/frequent-buyer-cards/vouchers in any given month from retailers across the US. The vendors are billed for processed coupons before retailers are given the credit back. The manual and arduous processes took a team of 15+ agents anywhere from 90 to 180 days to complete the lifecycle of coupon and loyalty rewards processing, causing payment delays and customer dissatisfaction. The company was looking to transform the resource-intensive customer loyalty program and improve the speed of credit to retailers.

Solution

The Effectus team performed an in-depth assessment of every step in the loyalty program processes – from the collection of coupons at the retailer and receipt of them in the mail to entering them in the system, getting it processed and giving the due credit to each retailer.
Our team remapped the process and introduced innovations to streamline the process and automate it.
The first change was the move toward the digitization of all coupons, frequent buyer cards and loyalty vouchers through the identification of a 3rd party partner and the channeling of all items to be processed through them – freeing up internal resources from the manual and labor-intensive process.
The second change was the outsourcing of all back-office processes of entering data and transactions associated with the items into the central application.
The third change was the creation of a web application housing all the digitized items within the 3 incorporated environments –
- An internal portal that allows for validation of rules as well as the crediting and billing for items
- A retailers’ portal that allows them to view and understand their credits with the ability to look at the digital versions
- A vendor portal allows them to understand what they were being billed for and review these items

Results

The backlog of more than 400,000 documents was cleared in less than 90 days. Record tracking of new loyalty program document arrivals was put in place, providing clear visibility into the aging of rewards. There was a 95% reduction in the processing cycle – what used to take up to 180 days is now done in less than 10 days. Over $10 million worth of credit is processed through the portal on any given year. In addition to the reduction in cycle time, the client has realized savings of more than $1 million per year due to better utilization of employees, the standardization of business rules and the quality checks in place.

Sam Billings
VP Operations, Gatorade

Areas Effectus Worked In

Process Re-engineering

Data Management and Warehousing

Digital Transformation

Change Management and Training

KPI and SLA Monitoring

Reporting and Analytics

Internal and External Portals

Back Office Process Management

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Tell us your challenges and find out how we can help.

About

One of the largest distributors of animal supplies company in the US.

Challenges & Goals

A leading distributor’s Customer Service team of 65 agents that were spread across five geographical regions in the US to take care of order entry and processing. The process was manual and complicating matters further, the team had to use four different Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for order entries and related tasks. With the majority of their time spent on entering order shipment data into their ERPs, the agents only spent less than 50% of total time on their core function of customer service activities that would allow the business to meet its projected growth targets.

Solution

Our team started with a comprehensive discovery to evaluate the current processes, systems used for order entry and processing and identify constraints, bottlenecks and opportunities for process standardization.
Order entry and management processes were standardized and streamlined across all regions to ensure consistency and efficiency.
We developed a proprietary web-based application as a single source for order entry and processing that allowed the agent to upload a wider range of orders despite multiple ERP systems in place. (Consolidation of ERP systems was taken as part of analytics and BI project)
Effectus’ Business Process Outsourcing team took over the entire process of order entry to free-up the agents to focus on core customer service activities.
The entire project was implemented and made live within seven weeks, including the time to test the new web based application and on-board an order entry team with training.

Results

The entire process of order entry and processing was re-engineered and supported by a web application, which resulted in significant time savings for customer service agents, increased the speed of order processing and improved efficiency with a direct impact on the bottom line. Within 30 days of implementation, Effectus’ BPO team was successfully processing orders that consisted of more than 100K lines/week. The customer service agents now spend 90%+ billing hours on core customer service activities (vs less than 50% earlier) and meeting growth targets.

Sam Billings
VP Operations, Gatorade

Areas Effectus Worked In

Process Re-engineering

Enterprise Application Development

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

KPI and SLA Monitoring

Change Management and Trainin

Get in touch

Tell us your challenges and find out how we can help.

About

The largest wine and spirits distributor in the United States with operations in 44 states. The company represents approximately 1,500 wine, spirits, beer, and beverage suppliers from around the world, and markets, promotes, merchandise, and distributes over 5,000 brands to over 250,000 different chain and independent retail and restaurants across the country.

Challenges & Goals

To provide a best-in-class service in a digital world, the company was looking to launch a B2B e-commerce website. The e-commerce website would play a significant role in improving loyalty, market coverage, and catering to the needs of 250,0000+ customer base. The opportunity posed a big operational challenge to source, curate, convert, store and make available for use over 1 million pieces of multi-dimensional descriptive content in less than 3 months . In addition to the upfront content sourcing, the distributor needed to make sure it was ready to fulfill its promise to customers for always having an up-to-date content in a single place.

Solution

The Effectus team took the challenge of not only sourcing and converting over 1 million pieces of content (text and images) but also create a system to use the content on an e-commerce portal and making it easy to access and keep the content updated.

The Effectus team created the core content framework for each product type based on how the content was to be used by suppliers and retailers. The content for each product included various details such as description of raw material used, the regions they came from, the process used in creating the flavour and also associated images. Our team of content and technology experts sourced, curated and validated content for all branded items the distributor carried.
As our team was sourcing, curating and transforming the content, the client’s team had insights into the content being built and progress through a real-time dashboard.
All content was stored in a central repository with appropriate tags to be used on the external portal. Effectus Content Platform was used to automatically build pages and push content to the e-commerce portal.
We built a Content Management Portal for the client’s team that made is easy to add new content, keep content updated in a single place. Automated processes pushed the updated or newly added content to the retailers and customer portal to make sure latest content was available to the customers.
Now the platform acts as a centralized system for all the parties – supplier, retailer and client to interact, place orders, manage distribution and transact electronically.

Results

The massive content sourcing effort was completed in less than 3 months, which was estimated by other companies to take close to a year. The company now has a centralized content platform to easily transform and store curated content as well keep content updated. Internal and customer-facing portals made it easy for all stakeholders to transact electronically and resulted in lower operational costs. The content platform has made internal teams more efficient as well as vastly improved supplier and retailer experience and satisfaction.

Sam Billings
VP Operations, Gatorade

Areas Effectus Worked In

Content Management

Digital Transformation

Internal and External Portal Solutions

Reporting and Analytics

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

Project Management