Helped a retail chain find 7 million rubles with the help of four BI system dashboards
The owner of the chain didn't know that 7 million rubles were lying around as dead weight. This is a true story. We can often assume, but numbers and reports are more accurate than assumptions. I'll tell you what helps in this case.
A true story about money lost in business
In 2022, the commercial director of a retail chain, which at that time consisted of 85 stores, approached us. He came with the following request: “There is a pressing need to implement business analytics, can you help?” I note that there were already 85 stores, but reports up to that point had been generated for quite a long time and therefore rare for a business that needs to track results daily.
GIVEN: a retail network of 85 stores, 3 accounting systems where different data is stored, rare reports using 1C.
We got to work. In 2.5 months, we set up unloading from the customer's accounting systems and implemented a set of dashboards “Analysis of commercial indicators of the retail network”.
The final stage of our work is training in BI. And when we reached the final stage, the owner of the chain joined us. He started asking questions and gradually came to the question, “How can I see the balances that have not been sold for the last 3 months?” This was an important question not only for the business, but also for us. It helped us see the needs of the retail chain. So we started developing a set of dashboards, “Analysis of Retail Chain Stock Balances.”
RESULT: a month later, when everything was ready, the owner saw on the dashboard a product that had not been sold for more than 5 months. The total amount was 7,000,000 rubles more than he had expected. This made the owner think about what to do next.
Why Businesses May Be Missing Important Metrics
Many may have a legitimate question: “Didn't he know before that he had such a volume of stale balances?” I answer: no, I didn't know, in 1C there were many different reports for analyzing balances, but there was no one that would quickly calculate by supplier/category/store/rubles.
In most cases, we encounter the fact that company owners simply bypass accounting systems. To build the necessary report, too many filters need to be set, too many exceptions need to be made, for example, do not look at this warehouse, delete this directory, etc. Reports in the 1C:Enterprise 8 system, and in any other, take a very long time to analyze large volumes of data selected over a long period. What does long mean? An hour, two, and one report the client started to generate overnight. The data is uploaded to Excel, and then the magic begins… As a result, the figures that are not always correct are displayed, which managers use in their daily work.
Another example. Another client developed a report called “Inventory Turnover” in “1C: Trade Management 10.3”. However, the complex calculation algorithm heavily loaded the accounting system, sometimes for several hours. And to add another parameter for analysis, it was necessary to reload the report again. And wait again… Is it possible to monitor inventory daily in such conditions? Difficult. At best, several times a week. Usually, this happens less often.
