Food manufacturer Santa Maria is using a new data visualisation tool, SKUview from Atheon Analytics, in order to identify issues in the supply chain, to gain greater control of its data, identify issues in the supply chain, and speed up its internal decision-making process.
Santa Maria supplies spices, Mexican food and international food concepts in Northern Europe.
In line with the brand relaunch, it was decided that there needed to be a new approach to customer management, with a focus on data from EPOS and the supply chain to drive benefits through to the customer.
Ben Penrose of Santa Maria said, “Previously, each day I would have to manually log in to the data system, select the report I wanted to find, load the data into a spreadsheet, manipulate the data, and then put it into a different report. Each of those reports is an hour’s exercise, so what used to take hours of data reviewing and manipulating is now a five-minute job.”
Santa Maria does not have the resources needed to trawl through pages of data and present it back to its customers.
Therefore, having SKUview to present back the data in an easy-to-understand and visual format is giving Santa Maria greater control as to what is happening and when.
“The system is extremely powerful in supplying vital information. For example, if we have an availability issue and we know that we are going to be out of stock of a certain product, we can log in to SKUview, find out what the store and depot stock is, along with what the availability of the product has been in store, and we can then produce a report to summarise this.”
The report is then ready to send across to the supply-chain controller, giving them visibility of stock levels in order for them to manage any issues.
“The time savings we have made using SKUview to date have been extremely perceptible."
Ian Hall of Atheon Analytics said, “We help clients solve critical business issues by visually tracking product performance at an in-depth yet easy-to-understand level to help manufacturers understand and predict behaviour and performance."
© 2014 - European Supermarket Magazine
