Industrial Automation Provider Refines Inventory Management

About the Company

Our client is a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest providers of industrial automation, IIoT and control solutions. They serve a multitude of industries globally - from bio-fuels, life sciences, oil and gas, refining, pulp and paper, industrial power generation, chemicals and petrochemicals, to metals, minerals and mining industries. Their mission is to help their industrial customers operate safe, reliable, efficient, sustainable and profitable facilities, leveraging their technologies and expertise.

The Challenge

This vendor was experiencing issues with tracking inventory throughout their global channels. They needed an accurate, up-to-date view into inventory levels amongst their distributor partners, to help track partner compliance and identify growth opportunities. However, their existing processes were heavily manual, slow and cumbersome. It relied on partners remembering to populate and submit monthly POS reports in enormous Excel spreadsheets. Once received, the vendor would spend a significant amount of time and resources on manually cleansing and analyzing this data. The administrative burden of manually collecting, cleansing, processing and interpreting this information led to severe data integrity and validity issues. The data/report was already out of date by the time it was ready. As a result, the vendor was unable to gain a clear understanding of their business and missed out on potential growth opportunities each month.

Solution

The vendor was searching for a solution which would help streamline and automate their inventory and product lifecycle management. By doing so, they hoped to accelerate the entire process and gain greater visibility into their channel. After careful consideration, they chose leading installed asset lifecycle management platform – iasset.com to do this.

With iasset.com, they are able to:

1. View, analyze and interpret sales data in one place, with ease.
2. Track partner sales history, performance, reporting compliance.
3. Leverage intelligent reporting at geo/market/partner level.
   
   

How it Works

Sales order data (i.e. products sold to each distributor partner) gets fed into iasset.com. Distributor partners are then able to import monthly Point of Sale (POS) data, including information on what was sold, who it was sold to, where, when and in which vertical.

The iasset.com platform automatically cleanses, consolidates and validates the POS and sales order data, matching it to respective contracts, entities and products. It scans the POS reports for missing, incorrect or duplicate data and automatically accepts/corrects/rejects them. Partners are notified of rejected reports, prompting correction and resubmission.

A suite of reports are available in real-time, to enable the vendor to drive sales growth initiatives and distributor reporting compliance. These offer valuable insights into their entire installed base, predominately focusing on tracking “Sales In/Sales Out” for partners, with each report broken into different views, e.g. by region, vertical, product group or end customer.

Benefits

As a result of the automation and analytics provided by iasset.com, this vendor can now:

• Identify inventory needs and improve customer/partner support.
• Gain sales intelligence – where/when/who are buying what.
• Automatically cleanse, validate and consolidate all POS data.
• Accelerate sales tracking/reporting from weeks to minutes.
• Track partner status and discount levels, in real-time.
• Achieve greater data integrity, reduce likelihood of human error.
• Leverage data for further insights, such as market segmentation, YOY performance, POS credit/compensation, etc.