Improved Customer Relationships
As ABS has grown in numbers and reputation throughout the years, the company struggled to keep stock at a profitable level. The company's traditional business intelligence (BI) system monitored financials and sales, but employees needed more critical insight for end-to-end visibility into the business.
The enterprise resource planning (ERP) system generated purchase suggestions without external information to support the purchasing department. This lacked any true insight into ABS's leading indicators, leaving employees on their own to guess the "why" behind each number. As a result, they constantly faced an overstock problem.
"We had too little inventory of high volume goods and too much of older slow moving goods," explains Mats Hofstra, ABS Marketing Manager. With an understanding of how a proper business intelligence solution for manufacturing could change how ABS did business, Hofstra pushed hard to bring TARGIT on board.
Once ABS implemented the TARGIT Decision Suite, the benefits of a truly operational BI solution were evident almost immediately. Stock levels began to decline within a month. Within a year, stock levels dropped by 20 percent, and stock rotation tripled. In that time, all of the company's high stock levels had disappeared. In total, ABS saw an increase in sales of 33 percent, with stock levels that were lower than ever.
Instant Access to Important Information
TARGIT is integrated with several business processes, such as sales and procurement. This means every major purchase order is validated and controlled with exception reports, and vendor performance is regularly measured and discussed with the suppliers. And employees rely on TARGIT's automatic alerts to warn them of important purchase cycles.
Before TARGIT, ABS couldn't track order histories or delivery information, leaving employees in the dark about important service quality information, such as how long deliveries took, lost items, and number of reorders. Now, employees have instant access to all of this information. They have insight from the moment an item is on ABS shelves to the moment it's been delivered to customers' hands.
TARGIT delivers daily reports and analyses on ABS's service levels and product deliveries. In the past, employees at the order desk often lacked all the information they needed to answer client questions when they called about particular orders. Today, every order desk employee is armed with a comprehensive picture of every client, their order history, and the exact status of any current orders, resulting in significantly improved customer relationships.
"At ABS, we are convinced that the operational BI system actually helps the purchasing department to do their jobs more efficiently and that the company can execute their business better than before, even better than the competition," says Hofstra. Pleased with every outcome of their TARGIT solution, ABS is currently looking to expand the solution into even more business processes throughout the company.
