Supply chain management is not just about operating the supply chain at peak efficiency but also about being more agile to quickly respond to current trends. The most crucial aspect of supply chain management is to ensure the right inventory at the right store at the right time, and this can only be achieved if you have accurate and instant visibility into your supply chain operations.
Reporting is feasible when we talk of a few hundred stores with a few hundred items, but if you have thousands of stores with hundreds of thousands of products that generate billions of records daily, analytics can be extremely time-consuming and in most cases beyond the limits of existing BI infrastructure. To be able to understand the situation at the store-item level would mean scanning hundreds and billions of rows of data to reach the granular details.
In a recent webinar with Kyvos, Walgreens, one of the largest pharmacy store chains in the US, discussed how they found it challenging to analyze 315 billion fact rows of supply chain data from 9,560 stores with around 1 Million products. With more than 200 metrics to report on every day and processing 1-2 years of historical data, they were unable to crunch this data to generate the reports required by their business users.
Their users wanted to analyze all their data but at the same time did not want to let go of using Tableau. After trying several options for over a year, they chose Kyvos to build a scalable architecture that could handle their data volumes and enable store-item level analytics for their business users and suppliers. Smart OLAPâ„¢ Technology helps them instantly analyze two years of historical inventory, operations, sales, and supplier data on their Tableau dashboards and use the insights to drive business outcomes.
The same reports that took hours and days are now being generated in seconds. Their supply chain managers and business users can slice and dice data across several dimensions, explore it to the lowest level of granularity, and get instant answers to all their business questions.
In the case of Walgreens, the combined Kyvos-Tableau solution was transformational. For example, they can now save substantial costs by reducing the number of days of supply by just one day or analyzing why an item is out-of-stock. This kind of in-depth analysis was simply impossible on the scale of their data earlier. Time series analysis of inventory levels on a two-year window helps them correct potential excess inventory problems and improve inventory planning for thousands of items with different sell-through rates. The speed of Kyvos, combined with the ease of use and interactivity of Tableau supply chain dashboards helps them explore their data instantly and use the insights to improve their supply chain operations.
Additionally, Kyvos helps them extend secure, self-service data lake access to thousands of suppliers so that they can monitor their performance and measure up to the KPIs set for them. Since suppliers are vital in ensuring that their inventory reaches the stores in time, analyzing and tracking their performance plays a crucial role in the success of their business.
If you want to learn more about how Walgreens transformed its supply chain management and how the solution can shape the future of your enterprise, watch the webinar recording now.
