Sourav Roy
September 6, 2024
People who want to stay ahead of their competition need more than data-informed decision-making in the extremely fast-paced and competitive world that is today’s food and beverage (F&B) industry. The F&B industry moves quickly, and in today’s landscape, deploying micro to macro levels of information for decision-making is not a luxury but essential. Despite having over 9,000 locations worldwide, companies like a household F&B name, which surpassed $1 billion in revenue in 2019 since launching in the mid-1950s, face this problem too. With more than 9,000 retail locations in 35 countries, the client needed to manage billions of pieces of data across disparate segments. As a billion-dollar company—generating substantially more than that for the 2019 fiscal year—their workload was only continuing to grow. This blog post will explore how the organization leveraged Royal Cyber to revamp its business intelligence (BI) strategy in a performance-improving fashion.
The Challenge: Disconnected Data and Slow Decision-Making
Besides this, there were several operational challenges for the F&B company in a multi-store environment. The existing business intelligence system also had to be faster and more cohesive; however, it provided limited sales, labor, and inventory views. In detail, the existing BI system needed to be faster and integrated, with only a limited view of key metrics such as sales, labor costs, promotions, and inventory. This forced store managers to sift through disparate reports on discounts, pricing, promotion costs, and labor, ultimately making the decision-making process very slow and reactive, which negatively impacted revenue and productivity.
Additionally, the company’s system produced reports from a single perspective at a time—whether sales, jobs, or discounts. With over 9,000 stores operating across different markets, making quick, holistic decisions was nearly impossible. They needed a scalable BI solution that integrated data from all their stores, offered real-time information, and minimized downtime. They sought a single, easy-to-use platform providing multidimensional reports to optimize sales, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
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The Solution: Cloud-Enabled Sales Analytics with Power BI
Royal Cyber, as the company’s data analytics consulting partner, designed a cloud-enabled sales analytics solution powered by Microsoft Power BI and Azure Cloud services, including Azure Data Center, Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Server, and Azure Data Lake Analytics. Here’s how this solution transformed the company’s BI strategy:
Seamless Data Aggregation
Data from various commercial point-of-sale (POS) systems—sales, product, pricing, and employee information—was aggregated and stored in Azure Blob Storage. Azure Blob Storage was the company’s central data repository, ensuring seamless data aggregation. Azure Data Factory enabled real-time processing, moving data to SQL databases. This seamless aggregation eliminated data silos, ensuring that no valuable data was overlooked and allowing for comprehensive analysis.
Intuitive Reporting with Power BI
Microsoft Power BI was implemented to display the processed data, providing store managers with multidimensional reports covering sales patterns, top-selling products, and employee labor costs. This real-time access enabled managers to make swift, data-driven decisions, improving operational efficiency and profitability.
Enhanced Decision-Making
This solution provided valuable insights through sales trend analysis, enabling the sales team to identify top-selling products across all stores. By integrating labor cost analysis, managers could assess staff expenses relative to revenue, helping to achieve a comprehensive view of profitability. This allowed the management team to make real-time adjustments to staffing levels during peak sales periods, optimizing productivity and minimizing excess costs.
Scalable and Future-Ready
The cloud-based framework ensured the system could scale as the business grew. Near real-time data monitoring is available hourly, including on weekdays, weekends, holidays, and during special promotions. This scalable architecture allows for continuous improvement and expansion without costly system overhauls.
Reduction in Downtime
The previous system experienced approximately 12 hours of downtime, significantly hindering the company’s decision-making abilities. Royal Cyber’s new solution minimized downtime, instantaneously allowing data processing and availability. This enabled the team to assess and revise sales data, labor costs, and promotions in near real-time, giving the company a competitive edge.
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Results: Driving Growth and Efficiency
Although the analytics solution is still in its pilot phase, the F&B company has already reaped significant benefits:
Improved Sales Performance: By identifying the leading items sold, the sales team can emphasize which high-margin items to prioritize for driving revenues. This analysis of purchase behavior on a granular level helped the company optimize its product inventory and promotions to better suit various customer demand levels.
Reduced Operational Costs: Analyzing labor costs in real time helps managers improve staff deployment and eliminate wasteful spending. Specifically, comparing labor costs with sales data has enabled the company to identify inefficiencies and quickly take action to remedy such issues.
Faster Decision-Making: Having an exhaustive number of multidimensional reports at their disposal, managers can make timely and informed decisions and save valuable time moving forward. What was once a tedious process of retrieving and reporting relevant data now seems antiquated, as near real-time updates provide the sorting immediacy required by managers to have the information they need when needed.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: By recognizing sales trends and customer preferences, the company was able to personalize promotions and optimize stock levels, significantly enhancing the customer experience. Customized offers and strategic inventory adjustments ensured that customers found exactly what they needed, leading to increased sales and fostering long-term loyalty.
Conclusion
The partnership between Royal Cyber and this leading F&B company highlights the transformative power of data analytics in the food and beverage industry. With cloud-enabled BI solutions, businesses can overcome data fragmentation and slow decision-making, turning data into a critical strategic asset. As the company continues to evolve its use of advanced analytics, it will drive sustained growth and competitive advantage. A data-driven strategy is the way forward for F&B companies looking to stay ahead.
Learn how Royal Cyber helps your organization use data analytics to gain a competitive advantage. Reach out to us today to learn more about our Cloud-enabled solutions and how we can drive growth and efficiency for your business. For more information, you can email us at [email protected] or www.royalcyber.com.
Harini Krishnamurthy
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