Background
Based in Jacksonville Florida – AWD has been distributing top-quality car parts to their customers with a level of service recognized throughout the industry as exceptional since 1981. With 7 wholesale branches and 3 luxury showrooms located throughout the United States, AWD’s success is directly linked to providing premium customer service by maintaining a highly educated team of employees and embracing new, innovative technology.
Challenge
The automotive wholesale supply industry is fast paced, complex, and highly competitive. Most organizations see a sub-zero bottom line. AWD recognized that a data-driven solution was needed to increase profitability while maintaining their competitive pricing, ease-of-access, and timeliness of delivery. In the Spring of 2016 AWD reached out for expert help from Alphabyte to implement their Analytics strategy to maximize net profitability.
Fix This for Us!
AWD faced a number of challenges with regards to its reporting and operations:
- AWD’s ERP system and General Ledger were lumped into one place, offering no real way to perform complex financial calculations
- With 7 Branches and 3 Showrooms, AWD did not have a method to detail the breakdown of their P&L at the line item level
- With hundreds of products and sub-products, there was no way to identify the Cost of Goods for individual items.
Enterprise Solution
AWD needed 21st century answers to a complex 21st century question. Quarterly P&L reports simply were not enough. They left many questions unanswered – like what is the net profit on each item or branch? Who are our top sales execs? Who are our top customers and how much profit are we generating from them? We dug wide and deep into AWD’s ERP and financial systems and produced an automated product that helped them answer these questions on a Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Annual Basis.
A Bird’s Eye View
Our reporting solution allowed AWD to slice and dice its P&L data in a way that highlighted challenges as well as opportunities
Executive View
The executive dashboard provided management with insights into business performance to enabled efficient and more data driven decision making
A Success Story
AWD was able to get an overview of the exact breakdown of their P&L using a Tableau Solution. With a daily refresh, completely automated, cleansed, formatted, prorated and aggregated Database – their analytics team is now able to dive deep into Revenues, Costs, and Profitability. They can ask question and gather insights to ultimately make informed decision with surgical precision. While many organizations see a dashboard, AWD sees 13,723,207 different breakdowns of its bottom line, and a way to manage and forecast their supply chain and inventory to increase their bottom line.