Agility Chemical Logistics (Agility) has significantly improved customer service and business results in one year through enhanced procurement and a deeper and more intelligent customer engagement. This has shifted management time from repetitive tasks to strategy and is changing the way the business operates from reacting to events, to seeking enhanced solutions and service improvements
The Challenge
Agility is an information business. In Europe it is an asset-free chemical logistics solutions provider, serving the demanding needs of the Chemicals Industry and always with safety, quality and compliance at the heart of its delivery.
For Chris McCormick, IT Director, improved operational excellence and productivity are the major factors that the IT function is contributing to the business through their Business Intelligence (BI) initiative.
In order to deliver this to the business, the following needs were identified:
to understand service and financial performance drivers
deep operational insight
to track freight markets continually
immediate visibility of transactional data.
The Solution
The new BI system is delivering a sizeable increase in the speed of report generation that in turn allows for more rapid business decision making for improved business performance and customer service. In one example, a query response time has moved from 30 minutes to 4 seconds, a 99.8% decrease in dwell time. This enables the business to use information very differently, more proactively and immediately.
DSCallards worked with the Agility team to design and build an analytic database with an SAP BI user interface. Each individual in the Procurement team is now using SAP Web Intelligence against the analytic database. Analysts are using SAP® Lumira to discover previously hidden data trends and SAP Dashboards to present meaningful and appealing insights for customers and senior management.
Through the analytic database and Universe meta layer, accurate and consistent answers are provided to all users, regardless of the format they use to interact.
Scheduled data refreshes and automated reports contribute to a more pro-active business. Users spend less time looking for information and more time using it.
Our business enjoys, a really good working relationship with DSCallards. From day one, DSCallards always respond positively and within twenty minutes. Any identified gaps are built into our training, which is bespoke based upon DSCallards’ knowledge of our data and our business needs
Simon Mather, Business Analyst
The Business Benefit
The business is now more pro-active. They are able to quickly identify trends and shape procurement strategy to identify and execute cost optimisation targets in the best interests of Agility and its client base. Previously, the business had to wait until month-end to identify improvement opportunities, whereas now they are able to find them instantly.
From having more time to analyse data, Business Analyst, Simon Mather, can now identify client shipping trends and feed objective data to Procurement and Account Managers to proactively pursue improvement opportunities. Whether it is identifying dips in volume or opportunities for more cost effective carrier sourcing, the cycle time between opportunity identification and improvement is now greatly reduced.
The enhanced data visibility is also supporting new business development. Existing global shipping profiles can now be used to complement opportunities for prospective clients.
The Finance function previously had to manually produce its reporting requirements, but BI is now saving significant resource time every month.
Our team now has on-demand access to financial performance reports, which are on average 15 to 20 days more up to date than we could achieve previously. Rather than constantly looking backwards to review what has happened we are now a much more proactive Finance team, adding greater value to the business.
Rob Davenport, Senior Management Accountant
In the next phase of the project, the Procurement team will improve their ability to benchmark Agility shipping reliability against the market, which will be another customer service value-add and differentiator.
