Visibility needed across the supply chain, HELP?
A brewery operations manager with a big problem – and a small budget.
Tuatara is one of New Zealand’s best-loved craft beer breweries, named for the tuatara, a native dinosaur. As with many burgeoning businesses, when Tuatara began to take off, operations struggled to keep pace with growth. The newly appointed Operations Manager gave Walkerscott a call, asking for help. With rapid growth in sales volumes and international expansion on the horizon, he wanted access to key data in the system, but the outgrown MYOB accounting solution was not giving him what he needed. Could we come up with an effective solution on a small budget?
The Challenge
Tuatara’s goal was to reduce capital tied up in raw materials through optimisation of purchasing and sales visibility. The best way to achieve this was to create sales forecasts, and this required accessing of historical sales performance data.
With no capacity to spend on infrastructure a solution was the only option to solving Tuatara’s problem.
The Solution
MYOB Advanced & Microsoft Power BI
A collection of the industry’s best tools led to a Best-of-Breed Business Intelligence solution that has transformed reporting.
The solution components included:
- MYOB Advanced ODATA Feeds
- Microsoft Power BI
- Excel
Following the migration from MYOB AccountRight to MYOB Advanced, ODATA feeds from MYOB Advanced enabled the migration of data to Power BI with remarkable ease, getting the data into an easy to manage format. Power BI connects direct to the new query and drags the data into the data model. Tuatara now have near real-time visibility of sales that they can access anywhere at any time.
For data that is not in MYOB Advanced, the Excel files are stored on a shared server and automatically pulled into the Power BI data model. This ability to add additional data sources as necessary and quickly incorporate them into the model means the solution is flexible and agile while remaining cost effective.
Using Microsoft’s Power BI native scheduling of processes, critical transactional data visualisation is synchronized daily and static data is updated as needed.
The Outcome
A simple, incredibly cost-effective solution (hundreds, not thousands) allows for powerful reporting. Establishing a simple, inexpensive cloud solution for Tuatara – with no investment in infrastructure – has enabled the necessary reporting and tools to plan for spending on key systems. Pressure has been relieved from the source ERP solution as it is no longer interrogated for reports and data, and with a data model and Excel the Operations Manager is now empowered to develop a series of reporting and tools to support the business needs, including:
- Daily sales reports
- Account Manager performance reports
- Production scheduling
- Procurement scheduling
Walkerscott is now involved in the on-going chang
