Analytics as a Service Helps a Logistics Solution Provider Generate and Support More Business at Half the Team Size and Improve Productivity by Over 110%

Business Need

The logistics customer already had a data warehouse and operational Power BI reports and dashboards in place with their Transport Management System that was implemented by Synoptek. The data warehouse implementation was successful and enabled business users and data analysts to leverage near real-time reports and dashboards on day-to-day basis to meet their reporting needs.

However, the logistics customer required dedicated support and maintenance to monitor existing ETL jobs, maintain performance, support issues, perform data validation, and develop new reports/dashboard. They also wanted to expand their data warehouse to sustain and maintain the level of stability and easily address new analytics requirements on an on-going basis.

Given the fact that Synoptek had already implemented the TMS solution in the past, the customer reached out to us again to meet their Analytics as a Service requirement.

Solution and Approach

Synoptek offered dedicated Managed Services Support to the logistics customer with fixed bucket of hours to address all their on-going analytics needs. We followed standard business processes and addressed client feedback in UAT while stabilizing new changes/implementation and pushing it to production after required approval processes. We also made sure to follow all the required best practices across three different environments – Dev, Stage/UAT and Production – followed by through QA/Unit Testing to ensure the existing implementation is not affected by the new changes.

To meet the analytics needs of the logistics customer, we:

• Developed new Power BI reports, enabled improvement/enhancements in the existing reports, and expanded their existing data warehouse
• Followed data modelling standard guidelines for the already implemented data warehouse which includes star schema with FACT and DIM tables
• Conducted Power BI hands-on trainings for end-users and business analysts and worked with them to ensure better adoption of the tool within the organization
• Integrated a new 3rd party data source for call logs data integration and analysis within the data warehouse
• Monitored existing ETL jobs and provided instant support in case of job failures to resolve issues, so the business in not affected due to refresh lag
• Carried out performance optimizations as and when required to deal with the ever-increasing data volume

Business Benefits

As part of the engagement, Synoptek has taken an optimized solution approach in enhancing the new and existing requirements. Under Synoptek’s guidance, the logistics customer has been able generate and support more business at half the team size compared to a year back – which translates to over 110% improvement in productivity – which is a huge win in a post-COVID world.

• With dedicated support of BI and Datawarehouse systems and components, the logistics customer can run the system with virtually no down time or performance issues
• Due to offshore support, turnover time on tasks and new development is greatly reduced
• With Synoptek’s data warehouse and Power BI implementation, the customer is able to improve Sales/Carrier Representative performance by 25-30%
• Near real-time (30 mins) data analytics allows the customer to take just-in-time decisions and further maximize productivity
• The ability to develop new reports/analytics and adding new data sources hugely benefitted the customer with the right kind of KPIs/matrix at the right time