The organisation reported huge staff costs to complete planning and buying work and very low trust in the data. The mandate was to develop insights to equip the business to manage order and inventory performance, to ensure great experiences for customers, during events, and optimise spend.

Discovery workshops uncovered poor ability to accurately forecast and identify causes of order or inventory problems due to the following data challenges:

• multiple sources with poor accuracy and accessibility
• lagging timing and latency
• significant time-consuming manual work.

Data complexity created trust issues compounded by a lack of standardised process, different calculations for shared metric definitions and an inability to reconcile existing reporting. However, executive support to solve was very strong. “If the team manage to solve this problem, they have quite simply solved the biggest data challenge in our history,” the CFO stated.

Our discovery workshops articulated pain points and enabled a prioritised list of requirements using the MoSCoW method. Next, we explored the use cases and witnessed the issues.

After data discovery, the hard work began – data engineering. With 30 million records of data, and billions of dollars in orders raised, this was a big fish to fry.

As development progressed, expert champions provided guidance to ensure quality design outcomes. At key stages, we hosted open business showcases to demonstrate progress, build buy-in and provide visibility on next steps. Excitement was growing!

For launch we:

• released communications and sought guidance on suitable training opportunities
• hosted multiple recorded launch sessions to areas of the business that were accessible over time
• offered a series of drop-in sessions to enable ongoing adoption
• collected improvements identified by business users that fed into refinements and next stage developments.

Over multiple releases, the business walked away with a trusted, responsive and fit for use tool. This tool ignited an enormous appetite and commitment to chase other important insights tools giving the business optimised ability to plan and buy, to move, and to sell products to its customers.

Beyond the insights the business now had, we demonstrated improved ways of partnering to understand problems, gather requirements, build and deliver iteratively and truly support adoption.