Why
This $60M medical distributor was experiencing customer dissatisfaction due to their inability to accurately serve their customers.
- The sales team did not have near real-time information to help their employees sell in the field. The team (50-60 people) were unable to meet customer needs because their inventory reports were often inaccurate.
- The sales teams were unable to effectively cross-sell to customers because they didn't have the analytics to recommend new or differentiated products based on the client type.
- Sales team members spent hours per day trying to assemble the right data to present to their customers, thereby limiting how many actual customers they could serve each day.
What
Edge R&D used our Data Hub technology accelerator to:
- Identify legacy data sources on the existing AS400 warehouse management system
- Stand up a greenfield enterprise data warehouse (EDW) in Azure to land the existing data
- Map the data from the existing AS400 warehouse management system to a new data model in Azure (EDW)
- Create new extract, transform, load (ETL) jobs to translate the old data to new, usable data in the Azure EDW
- Build and manage the persistent ETL jobs so that data was now available near real-time (no older than 4 hours)
- Implement real-time monitoring and notification of the new infrastructure and ETL jobs to increase availability and resiliency
- Expose all the new data in the EDW to PowerBI, empowering the sales team with fast and accurate data
Impact
- By decreasing the time to gather/compile data and increasing the accuracy of the data, sales reps increased the number of daily customer visits by 4x
- During the first 60 days after implementation, the distributor saw an increase in cross-sales at existing customers by 20-30%