Introduction
Our client, a leading multinational consumer electronics manufacturer, has a dominant presence across North America, Europe, and Asia. Renowned for their innovative products and exceptional customer service, they’ve achieved remarkable growth in recent years, strategically expanding their product offerings and global reach. However, this very success presented a new hurdle: managing the complexities of a rapidly growing supply chain.
With a network of warehouses, distribution centres, and transportation partners spread across diverse regions, the client faced significant challenges in optimizing inventory levels, streamlining order fulfilment, and ensuring timely deliveries across their vast infrastructure. This challenge demanded a solution to enhance efficiency and maintain their exceptional customer service standards.
Challenges:
Some of the major challenges faced were:
1. Lack of Visibility: Limited real-time visibility into their supply chain operations made identification of bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement very difficult. Decisions were often based on outdated or incomplete information, leading to suboptimal outcomes.
2. Siloed Data: Supply chain data was scattered across multiple systems, including their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Warehouse Management System (WMS), and Transportation Management System (TMS). This siloed data restricted users from getting a holistic view of operations and impeded cross-functional collaboration
3. Lack of Interactive Reporting: Generating reports and analyzing supply chain performance relied heavily on manual processes, which were time-consuming, error-prone, and needed more flexibility to adapt to changing business needs.
4. Reactive Approach: Without comprehensive analytics, clients often found themselves reacting to supply chain issues rather than proactively identifying and addressing potential problems before they escalated.
5. Production Planning and Scheduling Complexities: Beyond managing the expanding supply chain, our client also struggled with the incredible complexities of production planning and scheduling. The constantly updating demand of customers, resource constraints and intricate product configurations made it even more typical to tackle. Even though they were one of the leading industry leaders, they too faced challenges in optimizing production schedules to meet fluctuating demands, efficiently balancing production capacity across diverse facilities and lines and ensuring optimal resource allocation to avoid bottlenecks and delays.
6. Quality Control and Defect Analysis: Maintaining high product quality and identifying defects early in the production process is crucial to minimize rework, reduce waste, and ensure customer satisfaction. They wanted tools for monitoring quality metrics, analyzing defect patterns and identifying root causes of quality issues across their manufacturing facilities.
Solutions:
We implemented the following solutions for our client to overcome the above challenges.
1. Tableau CRM Implementation: We implemented Tableau in Salesforce’s Tableau CRM to create a centralized supply chain analytics dashboard. Tableau CRM’s powerful data integration capabilities facilitated real-time integration of data from various sources, including ERP, WMS, and TMS systems, providing a single source of truth for supply chain data.
2. Data Preparation and Modeling: Using Tableau CRM’s robust data preparation tools, supply chain data from various sources was cleansed, transformed and modelled for analysis. This included handling missing values, standardizing formats, and creating calculated fields for critical metrics such as order lead time, inventory turns, and delivery performance indicators.
3. Interactive Visualizations: With Tableau CRM’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface, interactive visualizations and dashboards were developed. It enabled supply chain analysts to explore and analyze data dynamically. These visualizations provided a clear and concise representation of key supply chain metrics, allowing for easy identification of trends, patterns, and outliers.
4. Customized Dashboard: The supply chain analytics dashboard incorporated key visualizations tailored to the client’s specific needs, including inventory level monitoring, order fulfilment tracking, delivery time analysis, and supply chain flow visualization. This comprehensive dashboard provided a consolidated view of operations, enabling data-driven decision-making and proactive management of supply chain processes.
5. Production planning dashboard integration: Salesforce’s Tableau CRM can be leveraged to develop a comprehensive production planning and scheduling dashboard, integrating data from various systems, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) solutions. This dashboard can provide real-time visibility into production capacities, resource availability, and demand forecasts, enabling more accurate production planning and scheduling decisions.
6. Quality control defect analysis: Salesforce’s Tableau CRM was utilized to create a comprehensive quality control and defect analysis dashboard, integrating data from various sources, including Quality Management Systems (QMS), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and IoT-enabled sensors on production lines.
Benefits
- Real-time visibility into supply chain operations across multiple locations and regions
- Improved data-driven decision-making for inventory optimization, process improvements, and resource allocation
- Enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing among supply chain teams, fostering a data-driven culture
- Reduced manual effort and increased efficiency in reporting and analysis.
→ Click here to Download this Case Study – Delivered Straight to your Inbox
