Case Study: How This Madurai-Based Manufacturing Company Streamlined Its Logistics Process With Augmented Analytics Amid Crisis
With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the supply chain has seen a significant disruption with declining revenues as businesses are shutting down, and customers are changing their buying patterns. Also, with a lesser number of employees working at the site, it became difficult for manufacturing and construction aggregate supplying companies to continue their business amid this crisis. The subsequent impact has led to several job losses of workers, and therefore businesses are relying on automation in order to have a smoother logistics process. Concretia Rock Products is one such mining, manufacturing and construction aggregate supplying company that has realised the potential of leveraging technologies to survive this pandemic and maintain business continuity in the post-pandemic world. With its own leased quarries and a fleet of trucks, this Madurai-based company manufactures crushed aggregates and rock products for district’s construction companies and manages to procure orders from approximately 400 customers including engineers on a regular basis. The company has seen an immense potential of expanding and streamlining their business in the whole Madurai district, and therefore decided to restructure with technology-led solutions to take advantage of it. Concretia also realised that their business process required a holistic approach with scalable models customised to Madurai district, which can later be scaled up across other geographies. In the traditional logistics management, Concretia was working under several human interventions as middlemen in their business processes, which, in turn, slowed down the whole supplying operation of the company. With sales personnel manually jotting down critical details of customers on papers, it made the process even more vulnerable to errors. This manual intervention was also creating insufficient datasets on customers, and therefore creating hassles for the company to monitor the loopholes and bring out efficient sales conversation customised to targeted customers. Further, these manual datasets on paper were also taking up a considerable amount of efforts by their employees to understand and bring out key insights beneficial for the business. Consequently, the company was looking to automatise this tiresome process of analysis and streamline its supply chain management. Alongside, in order to survive in this competitive landscape, the company was also looking to create transparency in their logistics process by optimising every department of the company starting from lead generation and sales to routing process and delivery management. The site in Madurai, Tamil Nadu The Solution & Benefits The company was looking for a holistic new-age solution that can help the leaders monitor their business and employees better and interact with stakeholders. Taking everything into consideration, Concretia decided to implement Salesforce’s AI-powered analytics platform — Einstein Analytics to make smarter decisions for their business. Einstein Analytics is a platform powered by artificial intelligence, deep learning and predictive analytics by combining dynamic and interactive data visualisation with the power of machine learning, which helps businesses with data-driven insights. With Einstein Analytics, Concretia managed to eliminate the human intervention in their business processes, starting from lead generation, creating order to preparing the dispatch and collection of the orders. Einstein provides a single view dashboard for every customer, which again helped their sales employees to have relevant data while pitching their business. Alongside, the team also used the solution to geo-tag their construction sites and created a real-time upload of site images, which generated a comprehensive dataset for the sales personnel to take advantage of. Such extensive data — including the status of the site, type of customers and also the materials used — aided the company, sales personnel and business leaders to understand their customers better and strategise smarter ways to enable sales conversations. Einstein further uses predictive analytics on the granular customers’ data that allowed sales employees to pitch the right product to the right customers, depending on their requirements and previous buying patterns. Other aspects of the business such as booking, ordering, invoicing, as well as customer complaints have also been automatised with the help of Einstein Analytics platform, which provided transparency for their customers while doing business with Concretia. “These well defined robust and streamlined processes started providing business benefits for the company,” stated Rajesh K, Founder & Managing Director, Concretia. Post the implementation the company managed to onboard 70-100 customers without human intervention and foresees to convert 400 customers every month in the future. Concretia also utilised the collected data and its analysis to ensure vehicle availability for the supply of the aggregates and also optimised their route management process to speed up their delivery schedule. Another critical aspect that has been revolutionised post the implementation of Einstein Analytics is employee monitoring. With the advanced solution, business leaders of the company were able to micro-manage their employees and also monitor the activity and efficiency of their salespeople. The company noticed that with these defined processes, “customers are influenced positively and are more likely to convert since customer data is leading to more relevant conversations,” stated Rajesh. “Digitisation of processes has tremendously improved the productivity and morale amongst the sales team. The time taken to train our sales team has also drastically reduced,” said Rajesh. “The implementation of Salesforce has also enabled us to serve our customers better, as we’re able to have a smarter and more relevant conversation based on granular customer data.” Apart from utilising the platform for enhancing daily customer relationship, Concretia is also leveraging the collected data analysis to forecast the potential business benefits of a particular area in the district and map out future sales budget across sites. Wrapping Up Post automating the business processes, Concretia managed to speed up its supply chain and logistics process without human intervention, which again freed up their sales team to focus on creating critical business strategies. By the coming year, the company is aiming to expand its business with more products and solutions to scale up the business module to multiple geographies.
With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the supply chain has seen a significant disruption with declining revenues as businesses are shutting down, and customers are changing their buying patterns. Also, with a lesser number of employees working at the site, it became difficult for manufacturing and construction aggregate supplying companies to continue their business amid […]
Concretia decided to implement Salesforce’s AI-powered analytics platform — Einstein Analytics to make smarter decisions for their business.
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["AI", "artificial intelligence", "machine learning", "ML", "deep learning", "analytics", "Aim", "RAG", "predictive analytics", "R"]
Sejuti currently works as Associate Editor at Analytics India Magazine (AIM). Reach out at sejuti.das@analyticsindiamag.com