Case Study

The Challenge

As one of Australia’s largest integrated suppliers of Liquid Petroleum Gas, industrial, medical, specialty and helium gases, this organisation have cemented a reputation for success by delivering quality products and exceptional customer service in a competitive market.

With state-of-the-art facilities and specialised labs dedicated to the development, testing, manufacture and processing of a diverse array of critical gas products, this organisation has built a national network of distribution centres and logistical infrastructure, all geared to ensuring fast, reliable and safe deliveries.

However, legacy processes within the business were consuming precious oxygen. Hamstrung by manual reporting processes, the business recognised data capture was laborious, costly, and susceptible to error. Vital data wasn’t being stored in easily digestible and reusable structures, couldn’t be easily modelled, and wasn’t presented in ways that made sense. This led to challenges in creating timely and accurate reporting and forecasting, leading to blind spots in business-critical areas like inventory, vehicle loading, servicing, and accounts.

When the CFO and Head of IT sought to drive root and branch reforms but were let down by a previous vendor, they turned to us for guidance in data engineering and analysis.

Augmented with support from Microsoft, we set out to shed light on our client’s data landscape and align their business goals with a strategic data approach. We provided examples of how internal forecasting challenges could be addressed, how our approach aligned data strategies and data governance with business goals and showcase how our Azure and Power BI solution could spearhead internal innovation to create wider economic advantages. We rigorously tested the project’s scope, emphasised the importance of key performance measures, the operational linkage between the client’s facilities and warehouses, and how the business wished to view and utilise that data within their reports.

Our collaborative approach fostered a transparent exchange of knowledge, building trust and enabling us to guide our client from what could have been a complex, visualisation-heavy solution to a more elegant, content-focused approach. This partnership not only addressed immediate challenges but also laid the groundwork for long-term success, empowering our client to innovate and thrive in a competitive market.

The Solution

Having refined the project scope and demonstrated how sophisticated Azure and Power BI is for data ingestion, modelling, and reporting, we were able to underscore how available technology, when applied in novel ways, can create elegant, effective, and tailored solutions that solve complex problems.

Guided by the overarching goal of enhanced data visibility and usability, we set to work creating a Freight Dashboard. Seeking to refresh freight reporting to address long-standing operational challenges – vehicle volumes, driver requirements, what inventory was needed where and by when – our solution utilised data and engineering resources, enabling our client to ingest, marshal, and manipulate data in a Power BI environment.

By standardising disparate data and manual processes into a unified, automated whole, our client is now able to refine crude data into actionable insights. Where certain divisions were once constrained to rolling year-on-year reporting, Power BI reports now pull and marshal data into a single Freight Dashboard, allowing the business to accurately forecast granular changes over time – by division, depot, date range, driver, and more. Reports are continuously and dynamically refreshed as new data drops, eliminating the need to manually input and batch migrate data, and bypassing associated project fees.

This revitalised forecasting visibility is not only delivering economic benefits, it’s also supporting broader company-wide initiatives. By ensuring vital data is centralised, referenceable, and represented in clearly expressed and easily manipulatable versions, our client is now turning their data into a strategic asset.

Internal resources are finding fresh ways to unearth and visualise valuable insights. The project is facilitating conversations on fresh lines of reporting our client hadn’t imagined they’d be capable of capturing. And fresh avenues of innovation are opening up across a larger breadth of service offerings and opportunities company-wide, not just within the IT Team.