Supply Chain Analytics at FACQ with Microsoft Azure and Power BI

About Facq

Founded in 1880, FACQ has grown into a key player in the Belgian market as sanitary, ​heating and ​renewable energies distribution specialist for professionals in the construction sector​. FACQ employs around 900 people in 45 Sanicenters, 15 showrooms, and 3 regional warehouses totalling over 60.000 m².

Business Challenges

FACQ wants each Belgian construction professional to have access to one of their Sanicenters within max. 30 minutes from his workplace. Thanks to the availability of a wide range of products in all Sanicenters, those professionals can be served immediately, and products can be delivered fast. When a product is not available on site, but in one of the regional warehouses, FACQ’s logistics are put to work to deliver overnight to any chosen Sanicenter.

 

Nicolas Van Caster, IT & Quality Director at FACQ, is responsible for several initiatives around Operational Excellence and explains: “All data at FACQ resides on an AS400 system in a tailor-made application. Advantage of this is that everything is kept together in one place and data quality is good. The reporting part however was limited to a PDF bundle which was distributed monthly and often printed before being used by the people in the Sanicenters. Issues were not only the many lists that circulated and the fact that the organisation is bilingual, but it was even more important that the monthly PDF distribution was not as actionable as required nowadays.”

The strong growth of FACQ clearly required another approach, so Nicolas Van Caster took the initiative to start building a new reporting solution based on Microsoft Power BI. An initiative that quickly gained support from the FACQ management as well as from the people involved in logistics.

FACQ Bathroom1

Solution Implemented

At this stage, element61 came in and established the basis for a Modern Data Analytics platform, fully running on Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure, using Azure Synapse to efficiently crunch large datasets. A first project phase included the setup of a data warehouse with Power BI, delivering a pre-defined set of Supply Chain related KPI’s for the Sanicenters and central warehouses.

Meanwhile this initiative has evolved to a complete Supply Chain Analytics environment based on KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) like “Stock Rupture” and OPI’s (Operational Performance Indicators) like “Minimal Required Stock”. To reduce stock ruptures, the combination of both Performance Indicators allows for a better understanding of driving factors behind such stock ruptures. The drill-down-to-details allows for individual Sanicenters to immediately take action upon the gained insights.

 

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The so called “Lambda-architecture” whereby near real-time reporting is combined with analytical reporting in a single Power BI front-end, fits perfectly in FACQ’s Cloud First strategy and forms a solid fundament for Advanced Analytics.

FACQ and element61 realized this project in delivery sprints of 2 weeks with a deployment demo to key users and feedback session at the end of each sprint. Crucial to the success of the project was the direct collaboration between key users from the logistics side, FACQ management, and the development team. The pragmatic project approach by both parties, combined with FACQ’s long-term experience of how to optimally run a Supply Chain, allowed the collaboration to quickly turn ideas into results and tangible Return on Investment.   

FACQ Bathroom

Benefits

Dashboards that are continuously refreshed and detailed reporting -where required- now replace the old reporting in PDF, resulting in a remarkably high adoption of the new solution. 

The new Supply Chain Analytics environment brings:

  • focus on the data with KPI’s
  • relevance to the data with intelligent filters & sorting​
  • actionability of the data with real-time refresh 

Nicolas Van Caster testifies: “Not only do we see significant improvement on all KPI’s, the ownership in the field has also increased. And the organisation demonstrates a huge appetite for more.”

Read More: Facilitating Better Business Decisions with Azure