A $100 million food ingredient manufacturer was struggling to manage sales forecasts. With nearly 500 customers, including some of the world’s largest food companies, the company had thousands of variations of potential demand forecasts each month. Managing the customer files using Excel spreadsheets became extremely tedious, and so the reforecasting process was only done once or twice a year. This meant that the production team was planning for sales that did not always materialize and inventory was building up while stockouts were on the rise. 

One of the core differentiators of the manufacturer is its product flexibility. Almost 10% of the overall portfolio of items sold were new products (developed in the past 12 months). In order to continue delivering on the flexibility and customization their clients expected, the manufacturer needed to reinvent their forecasting process to optimize material availability, drive business planning activities, mitigate risk and manage an efficient operation.

Customized dashboards impact day-to-day business

The manufacturer had previously worked with their Baker Tilly advisor to implement Tableau. At all levels of the organization, Tableau dashboards were playing an increasingly critical role in the day-to-day management of the business, including inventory management, sales pricing and volume monitoring, and P&L analysis. After meeting with company executives to evaluate challenges with the current forecasting processes, the advisory team recommended building a sales forecasting tool into existing dashboards.

Leveraging Anvil X, the advisory team rapidly developed a Tableau extension customized to the manufacturer’s needs. The application included role-based permissions to limit visibility for sales reps to only view their individual portfolio of customers. By integrating with the organization’s key systems, including the Sage accounting platform and Salesforce, team members no longer needed to wait for Microsoft Excel sheets to become available to enter customer updates – all changes made through these dashboard extensions were live immediately in the forecasting database. The forecasting database was then linked back into the existing Tableau dashboards to provide sales representatives with a complete understanding of past, present and future performance in familiar, digital environment.

By creating an interface within the existing sales forecast visualizations, the organization’s sales representatives could better:

• focus on the most important clients and products,
• rapidly identify “stale” forecasts,
• integrate historical performance as a reference for all forecasting activities, and
• report on a mix of projected and actual values for accuracy calculations.  

The live forecasting also compares against fiscal year budgets to provide current data with on-demand visibility to executive management. At the end of the month, intuitive dashboards support management in explaining variances at the customer and product levels, above or below plan, and all data can be exported to support ad hoc organizational analysis.

Looking to the future

The company is projecting a 23% increase in revenue in the fiscal year following the deployment of the sales forecasting application built using Anvil X. With improved visibility into where sales are occurring (i.e., what products are going to which customers) and faster notification for when sales are falling behind, the company can proactively manage customer relationships and refine business strategy to capitalize on new opportunities, decrease risk and reduce inventory carrying costs.

We help our clients make better decisions using data. Connect with the Baker Tilly team or learn more about Anvil X.