Operational decisions based on realtime information
Customer: Vitafor
Expertise & industry: Information Management & Operational Reporting for the Feed Industry
Technology: SQL, SSIS, SSAS, Microsoft Power BI
Vitafor, a Belgian company established in 1974, is a producer and supplier of feed additives such as minerals, vitamins, pigments and other ingredients for the feed industry in both liquid and powder forms. Vitafor operates globally and delivers premium quality nutritional products for feed and drinking water tailored to the needs of livestock. Vitafor’s ambition is to continue developing its reach geographically and expand the business of Vitafor Solutions. Vitafor operates globally in more than 90 countries.
The need to turn Big Data into Smart Data
Maintaining easy and clear overview of all the processes involved, including service levels, product quality, throughput time, cost, safety, production uptime, energy consumption and many more in such a production environment is very complex. Clear information is vital and used to keep up and meet all requirements and assure all business activities.
For the Finance Manager for example, operational reporting is crucial and used multiple times on a daily basis. That includes data on all these processes and many more. Missing data can quickly cause immediate and big impact.
Migration to Powerful Real-Time Dashboarding
The former reports did no longer support all functional requirements. Vitafor saw indications of decrease in performance and growing loading times were detected. To tackle this and provide Vitafor with better insights, Axians Belgium and Actemium Belgium partnered up in close alignment with Vitafor. Axians Belgium
- put their team of Data Specialists at work to do the functional requirements analysis,
- built and implemented a new data model with data coming from various sources (MES, WMS and ERP-systems),
- migrated to the powerful Microsoft ecosystem,
- created clear and central Power BI dashboards that provide real-time data,
- added additional features for future reporting, inventory and warehousing management.
As a result
- loading times decreased from almost 10 minutes to a few seconds,
- about 2.000 connections give clear overview of all daily operation,
- decision making support for order and price acceptance,
- new features can easily be added to provide extra insights,
- Vitafor’s operational reporting is more accure than ever.
