Managing half a million products across a massive wholesale operation is no small feat – just ask anyone trying to track inventory across multiple warehouses and sales channels. For Kramp, a Netherlands-based agricultural and construction wholesaler, the solution to streamlining its complex product management lay in the power of data – and the company’s journey offers valuable lessons for any business looking to improve their operations.
Kramp serves over 50,000 customers with over half a million products – and when you’ve got that many items to manage, it can be overwhelming to keep track of them all. New hose clamps are popping up in the inventory. Are those sugar-beet harvesters in stock? Where are those hazard signs in the classification workflow?
What all those issues have in common is data, and that data can be used to implement robust business strategies and amplify internal efficiency for your organization. Kramp’s team utilized Stibo Systems’ audit messaging framework to improve business processes, and Jan-Willem Pothof, Manager of Data and Content Management Development, shared how data capture and visualization revolutionized the classification process and significantly cut lead time.
You can do it, too – read on for four steps you can take to wield data to make your business procedures easier and faster.
1. Identify the problem and key stakeholders
It’s difficult to address a problem without properly articulating what it is and who it impacts. Say a store has just acquired a shipment of new inventory, but the clerk thinks that inventory is the store manager’s job, and the store manager thinks that falls under the clerk’s job description. Now there are boxes of inventory in the back room that weren’t counted or distributed, creating a gap in both data and revenue.
What’s the problem? Nobody knows whose job it is to inventory the new items. Now that the issue has been identified, the responsibility can be clearly assigned, and the problem cleared up. Let’s look at this in real life:
Kramp acquires around 40,000 new items annually, and each of them must be processed, labeled and presented accurately across its sales channels. This process is called onboarding, and onboarding tens of thousands of items sounds like a lot of work, right? A long lead time in item creation was causing delays and confusion surrounding item availability timelines, so Kramp got to the root of the issue and narrowed it down.
Write a problem statement
Pothof and his team drafted a statement that clearly addressed the problem and the issues it caused: “The item creation process is unclear in the areas of responsibilities, reliability and item availability.”
Let’s break that down. What’s at stake here? The item creation process, or the onboarding of these new annual acquisitions. What is causing the issue? A lack of clarity in three specific areas: responsibility, reliability and item availability – three things that can now be amended, streamlined and measured.
Consider who’s involved
Once you know where to look for the issue and what areas need to be improved upon, you need to know who the process impacts. For Kramp, the item creation process involved three key teams: data and content management, procurement (including contracting and stock delivery), and product management and marketing.
Now Kramp knows exactly who needs to be consulted while reworking the onboarding process.
Set a measurable goal
Just like a problem statement makes the issue easier to understand, a solution statement – or a written, measurable goal – marks a clear project completion milestone. For Pothof’s team, a solution statement looked like this: “Have an efficient and effective ‘onboard-to-publish’ process implemented that is stable and predictable.”
Language matters here. Efficiency and effectiveness here emphasize the relevancy of items and timelines, and stability and predictability prioritize reliability over speed.
2. Utilize data tracking processes to review workflow
The key to both identifying and solving problems like this is data capture. Kramp, which implemented the Stibo Systems Master Data Management (MDM) platform nearly a decade ago, also utilized Stibo Systems’ audit messaging framework to gather creation-focused data.
“It’s a really powerful tool to implement,” Pothof said. The framework tracks every transaction in the item workflow: entry to exit, onboarding to publication.
Who doesn’t love a good workflow chart? Knowing which members of your team are working on an aspect of a project at a specific time is key to any successful project management, and this is the type of process that needs to be consistently reevaluated to make sure things are functioning at peak efficiency. Be open to reconfiguring this structure by reviewing collected data and finding those gaps in optimization.
Visualizing data
After all this data is gathered, total and individual workflow steps can be presented in graphic format using tools like Tableau. Post-data capture, Kramp could see on a graph that about 80% of newly created items would “arrive” on time, but 20% were more sporadic. Ideally, the curve of the data points would become a straight, vertical line, meaning that each item would have the same timeline and stability. Now, Kramp had a visual goal and a way to see progress in real time.
3. Clarify responsibility and cross-functional decision making
Because Kramp identified a lack of clarity relating to position responsibilities, adopting a cross-functional mindset was necessary to enable strict, clear, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
Reworking meeting structures to include all the key stakeholders we identified earlier – data and content management, procurement, and product management – meant any confusion around accountability for various parts of the onboarding process was eliminated, saving on internal communication and lead time. These teams met to identify root causes of that more sporadic 20% of items and traced them throughout the onboarding process.
4. Implement data technology to save time and energy
Implementing MDM and the audit messaging framework yielded big benefits for the company. Kramp replaced five disparate solutions with MDM, which now serves as the central repository for all its product information. Gathering, maintaining and publishing data is much easier and more efficient.
After comprehensive capture, visualization and analysis of data, Kramp reconfigured its workflow and meeting structure to create clear responsibilities and a stable, predictable item onboarding process. The company’s “on-time delivery” of item creation shot from 50% to 80%, increasing the accuracy of stock availability, improving marketing efficiency and saving time by reducing internal communications.
Make your data work for you with Stibo Systems
Visualizing and understanding your data can transform the way your organization strategizes. You could save time, energy and money while increasing employee and customer satisfaction by making your data work for you.
