Empowering decision intelligence:
How a modern data ecosystem led to millions in savings

The Opportunity

Picture a busy factory floor, with production lines running and workers focused on building home furnishings. Now imagine the amount of information each item creates as it transforms from raw material to finished product. This is the reality for many manufacturers—full of data but struggling to capitalize on it. A large home furnishing manufacturer and distributor came to Inspire11 to solve their difficulties generating valuable insights. The streamlined data solution saved the client millions of dollars across labor costs and inventory reduction.

The Solution

Operating with multiple ERP systems presented a unique set of hurdles for this client. Different standards across these ERPs made harmonizing data a challenge, hindering their ability to generate valuable insights. Drawing from first-hand experience, Inspire11 knew that disjointed data sources leads to inflated operational costs. This became even more apparent when considering the significant time investment required for manual reconciliation between these disparate systems. Consequently, this lack of uniformity also created barriers in achieving full transparency across business operations – something reflected in sub-optimal decision-making capabilities due to inconsistent information flow. 

To solve these problems, Inspire11 took several actions:

• Conducted Exploratory Workshops: To start the journey towards a solution, Inspire11 held multiple stakeholder workshops. These sessions were a platform for understanding requirements and assessing the enterprise system landscape in order to develop critical data architecture.
• Created a Proof of Concept: To ensure the proposed solution would work, Inspire11 built a proof of concept focusing solely on sales data. After that was proven successful, more work could be done to further develop the analytics hub and bring in other systems.
• Designed and Built an Analytics Hub: To eliminate silos and give everyone access to unified views of their business performance, the client needed a centralized location for all of their data. Inspire11 created an environment in Azure that consolidated multiple ERPs with automated ingestion pipelines via Talend. This setup made sure all business-critical information was housed under one roof.
• Built Interactive KPI Dashboards in Power BI: Using the consolidated data model, Inspire11 created interactive dashboards to provide a clear picture of the client’s business performance. This provided real-time visibility into key metrics from various systems, allowing the client to track their sales metrics and forecasting, production and inventory levels, supplier performance, pricing trends, and more.
• Automated Business Processes: After initial recommendations, Inspire11 shifted from dashboards and decision making, to automating processes. They worked up the maturity curve with applied analytics, updating ERPs to manage business use cases and integrating the outputs into systems. This led to the automation of legacy systems, once the foundation was laid.

In a world where businesses are becoming more diverse and complex, the adage “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” has never been more true.