When Nucleus Supply Chain Management, a leading South African outsource/co-source supply chain management group needed an interactive dashboard solution, it turned to Yellowfin BI.
Nucleus provides a high level of specialised services and skills to clients seeking world-class supply chain management solutions, says Premie Naicker, MD at Yellowfin South Africa. "In essence, the company integrates key logistical processes, such as transport, warehousing, inventory management and customer service, to reduce overall logistics costs. It also offers outsourced, turnkey or joint venture logistics management services and is the only independent, asset free, supply chain management business in the country."
Nucleus needed these interactive dashboards for monitoring distribution and reporting operational and financial performance, including subcontractors outstanding POD, subcontractors delivery SLAs, gross profits and subcontractor calculated cost vs actuals.
"We chose Yellowfin primarily for its adaptability," says Lance Kiggell at Nucleus. "In addition, it is easy to learn and easy to use. It was selected from a shortlist of BI tools from other vendors, although the others were more expensive. Moreover, the Yellowfin product was expandable which allows us to use Yelllowfin across other clients, and it offered mobile dashboard and reports."
In terms of how Yellowfin was deployed and used, he says within a week, Nucleus received its working proof of concept, and after the three-days of rollout support, it received a further month worth of support on queries until it was up and running. "Yellowfin sent a developer to Nucleus's offices to assist with any issues, and is currently being used by users who have direct access to the reports. A dashboard is also being projected in our command center area for monitoring our operations."
He adds that besides some small issues with connection to Nucleus's servers and databases, and with building reports due to errors in the SQL views, the implementation went smoothly. "A Yellowfin technician communicated with our developers to resolve the database connections, and our external developer wrote a complete set of SQL views for our reports."
Kiggell says Nucleus has benefited tremendously from the implementation. "We now have access to customised reports, which are easy and fast to run. In addition, we have a customised command center dashboard giving us an overview of operational and financial performance. Finally, we can now produce presentable reports to show to our new clients. The impact is significant, and ongoing."
"Yellowfin is a great product, and with continued use and time, we will manage our operations and subcontractors with greater efficiency," he concludes. "Yellowfin staff also showed great professionalism in the sales and support area and we appreciate their commitment, and assistance in showing us how to use all the features of the Yellowfin solution to our best advantage."
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