Case Study

Motor Manufacturer Gains Data-driven Insights and Optimizes Business Operations with Azure Data Services and Power BI

Customer: A leading comprehensive motor manufacturer Profile: A leading global manufacturer of commercial motors, industrial motors, appliance motors, and controls

Services: Business Intelligence

Size: 100,000 employees
Region: Missouri, USA
Industry: Manufacturing

Business Need

Dealing with a wide array of global clients across several industries, the motor manufacturer has to manage large and disparate volumes of data related to sales and clients. They used Dynamics AX ERP to manage data from their B2C business and Oracle to handle their B2B business. With the exponential growth of data and fragmented data management, they were facing challenges in aggregating, managing, and creating value from the data. To overcome this, they decided to shift towards a centralized data management strategy.

The manufacturer was in search of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution provider that could help them develop a sophisticated data management solution, merging the enterprise data collected in the two ERP systems, to provide advanced visualization and critical data-driven insights.

Solution and Approach

To evolve and enhance their data management practice, the manufacturer partnered with Synoptek to develop a comprehensive reporting and BI platform that uses their enterprise data and provides powerful, richly formatted, and dynamic dashboards and reports.

Synoptek used Microsoft’s cloud-based data integration service, and Azure Data Factory, to import data from Dynamics AX and Oracle ERP systems. In addition to this, Microsoft’s Azure SQL Data

The warehouse was used as the data management system.

Considering the specific requirements of the manufacturer, Synoptek developed the following dashboards and KPI reports utilizing Microsoft Power BI:

Common Dashboard: Contains visuals of data from both the data sources (AX and Oracle) with graphs for:

1) Sales quantity by customer name

2) Gross profit and gross margin by month

3) Location map

4) Sales order detail

5) Dimension filters

  • a) Source
  • b) City, state
  • c) Sales person
  • d) Year
  • e) Month

AX Dashboard: Contains reports built on data obtained from Dynamics AX with graphs for:

1) Score cards

  •  Average unit price
  •  Gross revenue per month
  • Total sales order per month

2) Net amount by month and year

3) Sales quantity by customer name

4) Location map

5) Sales order detail

  • Dimension filters
  • City, state
  • Sales person
  • Year
  • Month

Oracle Dashboard: Contains reports built on data obtained from Oracle ERP with graphs for:

1) Sales quantity by model description

2) Total cost vs. Gross sales

3) Sales order details

4) Net amount by customer name

5) Dimension filters

  • Market channel code
  • Market class code
  • City, state
  • Product line

KPI Reports: Contains reports related to the key performance indicators of the business:

1) Net amount and customer rank by customer name

2) Top 10 sales persons

3) Top 10 selling items

Business Results

The BI solution developed by Synoptek provides the manufacturer a range of data analytics tools/reports to analyze and manage operational data. The solution’s rich visualization capabilities allow them to monitor sales, logistics, and productivity.

Power BI consolidates data from the two ERPs, and brings all the company data together in one place, which helps management visualize it as a whole and gain actionable insights. They can readily track and analyze KPIs against key business goals and gain a better understanding of how the business is performing.

With Power BI’s simple drag-and drop user experience, employees are now able to quickly find the insights they are looking for and visualize them in beautiful, interactive reports.

Incorporating BI in ERP System has proved to be a game changer for the manufacturer, with optimized business operations and greater profitability.

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