Anstel Brands are a wholesale company located in Melbourne that use DEAR inventory across their business. “Bringing beautifully designed baby products to quality conscious parents”. They sell baby products, predominantly to retail baby stores. These products are mostly imported with some sales direct to consumer and they also manufacture some of their products in house. What I like about working with Anstel is that it’s a family business with a long history but most importantly have adapted and kept extremely current. This can easily be seen at how their various sales channels have grown, adapted and accumulated. They are an extremely data-driven company and are serious about their numbers. Exactly what we like! They have also taken to creating their own dashboards off the base reports we have built for them, which is exactly what we want and in fact, Bryce is editing reports directly himself. Self-service analytics here we come!
“dataSights provided us with a central source of data that is accurate and easy to read. With this data, we have been able to create dashboards that are updated every few minutes and given us visibility of things that we didn’t have before.”
dataSights provided us with a central source of data that is accurate and easy to read. With this data, we have been able to create dashboards that are updated every few minutes and given us visibility of things that we didn’t have before. Bryce Millot, Finance Officer, Anstel Brands
The benefits of the DEAR Inventory dashboard solution we came up with
- Single source of Inventory, financial and goal data
- Multiple sales reports with highly tailored goal requirements
- Ability to update goals at any time in GoogleSheets
- Flexible base reports that Anstel can create their own dashboards over
- Pending Orders reports that help with Advanced sales part filled reporting
- Data updated every 15 minutes
- Fully automated solution
What is it and how does it work
1.The DataLake
Every 15 minutes we update Anstels “datalake” which is a single source of data combining DEAR, Xero & Target data from GoogleSheets.
From here we build the reports in PowerBI in Direct Query mode. What this means is that there is no manual updates or refreshes required. What you see in PowerBI.com is as up to date as the datalake is. Look Ma, no hands!
2. The Reports
Based on the requirements Bryce gave, we built a set of base reports with the necessary filters that would allow the creation of dashboards for various time periods and audiences within Anstel.
3. The Dashboards
What does the end result look like?
“We now have a way for the whole team to see how we’re tracking against our goals and what we need to do to reach them. And also providing data on metrics that we couldn’t track before”
Summary
It was fantastic to work with Bryce. Personally, we learnt a huge amount around not just sales dashboards but how to calculate the metrics in order to reach sales goals. The pending orders reports were challenging, however, DEAR has a fantastic API and makes ALOT of data available, so, that makes us happy, very happy and in turn we were able to make Anstel happy by giving them the visibility of the data that works for their business.
Thank you for reading and please feel free to get in touch!
kevinw@datasights.com.au
