Image of inside a warehouse.

Telecommunications Company – Cloud Device Inventory Management Solution

Introduction

A well-known telecommunications company approached our partner, TeleWare 365, about getting help to improve how they manage their inventory. The organisation works with several third-party logistic organisations and cloud telecom devices manufacturers including Cisco, Poly and Yealink.

The customer used Microsoft Excel as a mechanism for planning and recording the stock levels and establishing metrics such as the velocity of sales and despatch of stock. The approach was becoming increasingly more difficult to manage as there were multiple Excel files being sent around every week. The analytics were simple and trend analysis was difficult.

The customer asked for something that would give them a central dashboard which integrated with their various suppliers and warehouse vendors to automate the data capture and processing. They wanted to have quick insights and quickly establish which products were going to need to be reordered. The recent pandemic means that a substantial proportion of their customers were moving to cloud-based telephone systems and chip shortages meant that they needed to be creative to keep up with demand.

The solution

iThink 365 working with our Power BI partners, Aptemus, built a solution based on Azure Synapse and the Power Platform to allow the customer to manage their product information, codes, and warehouse locations with a Model-Driven Power App. The data in the Power App was kept in sync with the data warehouse using Azure Synapse Link.

The data was integrated from the various vendors using several mechanisms including Secure FTP and Email. Using Azure Logic Apps and Azure Synapse pipelines this data was imported into the Cloud Inventory Management Reporting data warehouse.

Power BI was used to visualise the data and enable the team to quickly gain insight and see the actions that were needed.

Support for the system is managed by iThink 365 and Aptemus. A sophisticated monitoring tool was created and integrated with the Power BI and our help desk system so that issues if they arise are quickly resolved.

A screenshot of the Power BI overview report showing run rate information and the biggest selling cloud device products by volume.

Technology used

The Power BI Logo
Power BI

The Power Apps Logo
Power Apps
The Azure Synapse logo
Azure Synapse
The Microsoft Dataverse Logo
Microsoft Dataverse
Azure SQL Logo
Azure SQL

Outcomes

The customer within the first week had several wins including noticing several discrepancies being reported between the tool and the previous system. The run rate calculations allow them to be more responsive to demand and the integration with their Sales Force platform helps them see and plan for future sales demand.

The system saves the customer £1000s a week with more precise stock management planning and 8 hours a week when managing the stock process.

The Power BI report showing run rate information and allowing the users to compare differences in run rate between 4 weeks, quarter and previous two quarters.