About customer

YE-KSR imports electronic and electro-mechanic components mainly to large industrial organizations, research institutes and labs. Being a part of Finnish YE Holding, that is listed on stock market and was quoted on the Nasdaq Helsinki, it is now one of the leading providers operating in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Company’s management relies on cloud technologies and plans to reach even higher performance using machine learning.

Challenges and solutions

Logistics processes at YE-KSR are very complex and include logistics cost optimization that is typical for such businesses. Most importantly, customer’s list of items\product grid contains over 3 000 000 active components, as well as automatically updated price lists with various terms of delivery. All these specifics require exceptional approach of implementation team and key customer’s representatives.

Requirements

The customer was looking for a turnkey solution that would cover sales, logistics and warehouse processes. It was also critical to make employees effectively work with enormous amount of data. In its turn, this required easy-to-use communication tools between departments. As there was excessive amount of data at all company’s levels, another requirement was to avoid bookkeeping and tax accounting operations in separated systems. One of the key requirements was to minimize the amount of hardware and devices in customer’s office. PCs and routers were more than enough.

Solutions

Non-trivial logistics and warehouse processes were the main challenge and main reason why quick implementation of the new system was almost impossible. Additional integration with various third-party contractors made this task even more complicated. Agile methods were actively used while managing this project. Pre-study analysis and implementation was followed by go-live stage, later short “sprints” were added based on user’s experience.

The following systems are now used at YE-KSR: Microsoft Dynamics NAV in Azure, Office 365, Power BI analytics. It means there are no hardware items in customer’s office except for PCs or laptops.

Results

• Time significantly reduced due to automated product\price grid creation and terms of delivery. Calculations and integration does not influence employees’ productivity. For instance, previously price calculation and components’ data import took several days. Simple and convenient data import tool (using Excel) also helps users in their daily activities.
• Deal’s profitability prediction is more accurate. We succeeded to completely avoid selling items at lower prices. Deals margin is now 2,5% higher. It is a significant growth, as annual turnovers were reported in billions. Top managers are now able to make high accuracy predictions including all key cost factors – logistics, customs, exchange rates fluctuations.
• Better analytics and corporate reporting. Power BI and analytics cubes are actively used to analyze corporate data.
• Unified user interface. All users work with unified system that is closely integrated with Office 365. Accounting operations are in Dynamics 365, with accounting, tax and management reporting relying on consolidated data. This data is entered and processed at all company levels, by all employees with no exceptions.
• Integration with various third-party contractors. This integration aims to help YE-KSR end customer: availability of required items at initial contractor’s warehouse is available within Dynamics. This approach makes sales team more effective, as they deal with each customer in real time and make quick decisions on terms of delivery or book goods at warehouses.