Supernova Award Category

The Problem

At Citrix, my responsibilities encompass Sales & Operations Planning, Order Management, Manufacturing, Quality, Materials, Logistics, Services Supply Chain and Engineering organizations. Business decisions require visibility into operational data for material planning, manufacturing, fulfillment, sales and post-sales support. The challenge is the data comes from more than 400 sources, including Siebel, Salesforce, and multiple ERP systems. The problem we faced was that key metrics were being captured in more than 150 spreadsheets, and by the time the team wrangled all the spreadsheets for analysis, the data was out of date. We had no single version of the truth. We couldn’t trust the data, and it just took forever.

The Solution

With data from multiple systems of record across the value chain, we needed an aggregator to view metrics holistically. We needed to architect a digital supply chain to provide real-time supply and demand-matching information for analysis across changing hierarchies (customers, regions, suppliers).

Birst demonstrated a model that aggregates data from multiple applications, contract manufacturers, payment processing, and other sources to enable analysis across 120 suppliers and 130,000 customers. On the back end, Birst Automated Data Refinement (ADR) automates the extraction, transformation and refinement of data from multiple disparate sources to prepare it for analysis. Birst Live Access connects to the pre-aggregated, highly rolled up KPI data. Consistent metrics are then defined and maintained in the Semantic Layer. On the front-end, Birst’s Adaptive UX provides executive dashboards for KPIs and diagnostics, as well as detailed drill-down and ad hoc discovery for analysts.

The results

Following implementation of Birst, my team quickly digitized the entire supply chain. We gained real-time visibility into sales forecasts, bookings, backlog, shipments, inventory, material forecast, product reliability, and more. We have self-service access to order fulfillment information to make decisions on what to ship, where, and when. Event-driven email alerts give us proactive notification of potential customer satisfaction issues, such as inventory levels and on-time delivery rates, so my team can act, instead of react. Now, we can see a problem before or as it happens, instead of a customer calling to tell us about it. Additionally, we provide external suppliers with access to Birst, so they can easily view forecasts and plan accordingly.

We have improved our business operations end-to-end with visibility and analytics. Things move so fast these days, most departments adopt workarounds to maximize their own KPIs at the expense of another. If on-time delivery is a priority, inventory is stockpiled to ensure product availability. If days in supply is the focus, some customers are left short-handed as the product runs out. With end-to-end visibility and consistent metrics, our business functions are working in concert to optimize various levers and improve the entire enterprise value chain. As a result, we’ve improved on-time delivery, days in supply, and the inventory balance – and maximized shareholder value as a result. All at a low technology cost of ownership.

Metrics

We’ve achieved a more than 99% on-time delivery rate and a five-fold increase in inventory turns that has lowered costs, increased profitability, and improved our gross margins.
Additionally:
Days in Supply has reduced 35%
Reliability up 10 percentage points
Live in less than 90 days with very limited involvement from IT

The Technology

Birst

Disruptive Factor

The overarching challenge is the data comes from 400+ disparate sources. Each source represents only a piece of the end-to-end supply chain, and they don’t talk to each other. An important piece in this end-to-end set of processes is the contract manufacturer (in this case Flextronics), whose data is outside our firewall. But we need visibility into that data for sales and operations planning. This interaction is typically a pain point; the manufacturing locations are global, and the manual wrangling of data is time consuming and error prone.

All these different slices of data, which are in themselves complex, need to be integrated so anyone along the supply chain can access information quickly, see the same metrics everyone else is seeing where needed, while protecting access to information that not everyone needs to see for security reasons. Plus we wanted low overhead on the technical administration of the data model, so it wouldn’t be cost-prohibitive.

To solve this dilemma, we went to Birst, which was able to stand up the environment in less than 90 days. My analysts get the information they need every 7 minutes; executives have a holistic view of the business in dashboards; and only one FTE maintains the back-end for 2,000+ users. We have a digitally connected supply chain from suppliers outside Citrix to material planning, manufacturing, fulfillment, sales and post-sales support, with one unified view of data, in the form of dashboards for each team.

Shining Moment

With respect to Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMA’s), we were able – by analyzing data across our supplier network – to identify trends in the process, rather than just viewing the RMA’s as one-off transactions. As a result, we identified recurring issues that were tied to a particular supplier and a particular part. This was one of several examples where we, over time, were able to improve product reliability/quality by more than 20 percentage points.