How we helped this $1 billion snacks manufacturer streamline warehouse and logistics operations
At a Glance
The customer, a US $ 1 billion snack manufacturing firm, was looking to automate and streamline its warehousing and distribution operations with a next-generation solution built on the cloud.
The company choose us for our domain experience (in food and beverage retail) and technology expertise after an elaborate vendor evaluation process. The company wanted to pick the right partner who could build out a solution that would be suitable for a large, diversified snacks manufacturer that had revenue streams spanning restaurant operations, retail sales, and exports of packed snacks.
The Context
The customer operates 8 manufacturing locations, operates 20 restaurants, and exports its packaged snacks and food products to 80+ countries across the globe. Its overall revenue is over US$1 billion, and the company wanted a “better, more streamlined way” to run warehousing and logistics operations.
Specifically, the company wanted to improve the following operational processes:
- Need to segregate, record and track 100s of incoming material
- Have a “finger on the pulse” of stocks in the warehouse – item-wise and category-wise through dashboards
- Track all outgoing material with dashboards to track both fast-moving and slow-moving inventory
- Better decision-making around supplier management and inventory planning
- Ability to track “status of goods” both finished goods and incoming raw materials – from any time, anywhere
- It was critical to design an end-to-end supply chain solution that integrated with other business systems
The Solution
Digitech Labs built a cloud-native Warehouse Management System (WMS) on the AWS ecosystem for this customer. The key was to ensure the following:
- Complete visibility across the supply chain - from all incoming raw materials to finished goods delivered to distributors and retailers
- The platform was designed to analyze and run analytics on “near real-time” supply chain data
- We implemented a supply chain control tower for senior management to have a finger on the pulse of all top-level data and metrics
- The solution was also relevant for warehouse and distribution heads to “track and monitor” data for their location or factory
- We ensured the dashboards were accessible on mobile devices, and links were shared on e-mail when a delivery was made or an item was accepted into inventory
- The key was to build a scalable architecture keeping in mind the high volume of real-time data being generated and the scale of operations
- The analytics layer was built to help decision makers slide-and-dice data by product category, pricing, etc.
- The WMS seamlessly integrated with other third-party solutions that were used by key suppliers and distributors.
The Outcome
The company continues to work with Digitech Labs on a range of engagements including migrating a few legacy processes to the cloud.
The CIO of the company went on to share with us some of the key benefits of working with Digitech:
- Digitech understood the value of real “data visibility” and built out the underlying architecture to support this. Without this, it would have been tough to capture insights from operational data
- The solution built integrated seamlessly with our legacy ERP solution
- Last but not least, the team had expertise in food products retail and distribution. They understood what underlying metrics are important, and why real-time data is critical and built a system that took all of this into consideration.