The Challenge:
The customer uses historical information for their work processes. The lingering practice was to upload the historical information manually. This resulted in several challenges, including inconsistent and out of sync data. Updating data was a long painful manual process that took about 10 man-days every month. The process was causing significant delays in reporting and planning. While the obvious answer was to use API to automate data integration, prior experience of long projects and high costs were the perceived barrier.
The Solution:
Once the customer understood the ease of API integration with SCA PlannerTM and the overwhelming business case for doing it, the customer chose to integrate daily API feed into SCA PlannerTM. The integration effort was simple and took 3 weeks. The API data structure was shared and is usually mostly common among companies. API data dictionary – a common industry standard data structure used in SCA PlannerTM – was shared, two trial runs were completed and the integration was cut into production. The sample data flow and its verification, including data validations, took two trials and then the integration was deployed in production. With SCA PlannerTM, API data integrations are easy given the in-built data validations, data transformations and notifications. And the benefits of higher data quality and consistency with full automation can be operationalized within days. Further, with API integration, the data scope and granularity can be easily extended without any additional effort.
The Results:
The customer now has real-time visibility and a consistent basis of historical information. The reporting cycles are reduced from 3 weeks to within a week. Process automation has reduced the effort of 10 man-days every month. The historical data visualization has created further insights and findings for additional value such as identifying peaks or product transitions as a source of variance. The extended granularity and scope resulted in additional high value insights for the customer.