The Wonderful Company, a health food company, implements Power BI for low total cost of ownership, AI capabilities, and flexibility to utilize company data in business units such as finance, farming, and manufacturing

Implementing an effective reporting structure

The Wonderful Company was hoping to modify its transactional and business intelligence (BI) reporting structure so that it could handle BI reporting in real time. 

By building a data pipeline, completing data validation, and establishing user training and documentation on data models, the company was able to quickly get its Microsoft Power BI reports and dashboards up and running.

Data is stored in a variety of sources and systems and transferred to a data lake, which serves as the foundation for both real-time reporting and the data warehouse. Hosted in Microsoft Azure, the data warehouse serves as the foundation for data visualization in Power BI. 

The Wonderful Company found that Power BI provided the lowest total cost of ownership and that the company could effectively adjust analytical reporting, self-service, and IT governance.

Over the course of a year, The Wonderful Company also added more data sources, such as Internet of Things devices, cloud systems, and plant automations. The seamless addition of these new data sources confirmed the flexibility and robustness of its new system.

Power BI delivers more KPIs 

The newly implemented structure also gave The Wonderful Company new deliverables. The company started using Power BI as the reporting solution for sales, farming, financials, and manufacturing. 

The new structure allows for numerous key performance indicators (KPIs) to be closely monitored. An important KPI currently being targeted is inventory roll forward, which allows users to look at snapshots of inventory records to make more data-driven decisions.

Power BI dashboards simplify and break down data

Wonderful’s new sales and analytics dashboard provides instrumental insights that were difficult to achieve before it implemented Power BI.

The main analytics of the dashboard include units sold and dollars sold from 4, 13, and 52 weeks prior. Users also have the ability to compare and analyze the measures from different periods of time. 

The company’s dashboard can also break down tremendous amounts of data and go from a specific customer to associated distribution centers. The data can also be filtered by dates, warehouse, customer name, growing region, salesperson, and other characteristics. This easy and seamless filtration gives users the opportunity to quickly access and compare specific focus points. 

The Wonderful Company also developed the Dynamic Analysis dashboard, highlighting the trends in sales based on quantity and the price per unit. This dashboard showcases relationships between customers, sales, quantities, and salespeople.

Through the Power BI–based Dynamic Analysis dashboard, users can now see the constantly changing data associated with each customer. Users can also conduct product attribute–level analyses by specifying data with specific varieties and sizes. The Wonderful Company uses this technology to quickly make data-driven decisions. 

The Wonderful Company also wanted to see the trends and patterns of its top 20 customers in relation to its overall customers. With the dashboard, users can look at patterns from either a data visualization standpoint or a table view. Statistics and data involving fields such as order count, sales, and fruit amount are directly compared on the dashboard. Customers can also use the dashboard to get a more detailed breakdown of the information.

The Wonderful Company also implemented a dashboard for ad hoc analysis. Users can view and analyze various dimensions within this dashboard. 

By using the decomposition tree in Power BI, The Wonderful Company can break down key metrics in its dashboards and get the most out of its data. The decomposition tree uses AI to automatically find the next dimension of data to drill into based on user criteria. The data is automatically aggregated, and the user is able to explore the dimensions in any order. 

A user can select a category, such as the amount of fruit sold, and quickly break down the underlying data to understand the amount of fruit each customer is selling, the variety of fruits at a specific customer, and how each size of that fruit is selling.

The Wonderful Company created Power BI reports that source data from transactional reporting and also developed a live order fulfillment report. Since the data is pulled from a dynamic database and constantly refreshed, teams can keep up with needs and information in real time. 

Dashboards were also created to highlight real-time changes in revenue streams based on current budgets, and users can access specific data, such as warehouse information. Similar dashboards were created to monitor expense streams. These dashboards can be broken down by departments and time frames to see how funds are flowing through the company.

Since The Wonderful Company is part of a capital-intensive industry, an important metric to track is maintenance spending. The company created its Maintenance Spend dashboard to effectively track and compare maintenance expenditures over different periods of time. The report is interactive, and users can gain information needed to make data-driven decisions.

Key drivers in user adoption

The Wonderful Company effectively trained users to adopt the new solution and defined clear goals and purposes with respect to KPIs.

One key driver was the top-down approach where management used and clearly defined crucial KPIs. The company also used a bottom-up approach, assessing key needs of current users and taking this feedback to upper management. 

Three types of data velocities were brought into focus: real-time needs, analytical needs, and streaming needs. Identifying these three data velocities early on was critical for encouraging user adoption. 

By integrating and consolidating data on its comprehensive dashboards, The Wonderful Company used Power BI to change how it uses its data. Through this new solution, The Wonderful Company has been able to maximize its large amount of data by creating Power BI reports that are clean, thorough, and easy to use.