Business Objectives

• In the foodservice industry, most of the products that are distributed by the company have a limited shelf life
• Tracking the products that are reaching their expiry date is important
• The lack of visibility into the stock often leads to inventory write offs, thus impacting the bottom line of the company
• The client wanted a tool that could track all this information, helping them churn the products in their inventory effectively and reduce their losses.

The Solution

The TekLink Consultants and the business partners worked together to build the prototype, that is tested for its functionality by rolling out in four test markets.

• The reporting solution was also built to identify the different at-risk products by category and involved the following aspects:
  • Combining the data from the source master tables into a unified view for reporting.
  • The report consisted of all the active products, locations, and attributes of these products such as shelf life, product value, and others.
  • Developing an intuitive and functional reporting system that allows the switching between different metrics with use of simple filters
  • The risk metrics could be total costs, discrepancies in expiration dates, nearest to expiration, and others
  • Building a simple and effective user interface in Tableau that is considered both practical and easy to use

Key Benefits

• The report saved the employee time to retrieve and analyze data by 50%
• The initial trials have shown the potential of nearly $500,000 in loss-reduction activities in one single market
• The helps to prevent any spoilage, and saves costs
• The project gave the teams much greater visibility into their warehouse and the associated risks
• It also allows the team to generate various continuous improvement ideas