Data & Analytics

Fortude helps Australian brand distributor future-proof operations with a data-backed digital strategy

The success story

A leader in the market, the distributor faced operational inefficiencies due to manual, repetitive work and complex reconciliations across departments, as well as data challenges stemming from outdated tools, siloed processes, and limited visibility.

Challenges

The brand distributor runs their business on multiple systems, including Infor M3, their ERP system, and business forecasting and CRM systems.
Insights and reporting were primarily obtained off legacy Cognos cubes, QlikView and supported by Excel-based analysis.
Siloed, de-centralised analytics due to widespread use of Excel for data consolidation across multiple source systems.
Absence of a single platform or portal to consume analytics for users across the organisation.
Near real-time insights/analytics requirements of marketing and supply chain were not met.
Analytics users were not empowered appropriately with the right tools and up-to-date metrics for self-service analytics.
A standard architecture and methodology for analytics; that stores standardised, historical data, and provides a base for different types of analytics, was absent

Solutions

Fortude began with an Analytics Assessment, conducting discovery workshops with stakeholders across functions to evaluate systems (ERP, CRM, Cognos, QlikView) and reporting needs. The result: a detailed report outlining the current state, proposed architecture, and a roadmap for the business’s analytics journey.

Based on this foundation, Fortude introduced an enterprise business intelligence (BI) framework that supports both standardised, organisation-wide KPIs and flexible, self-service reporting at a departmental level.

Fortude also engaged their automation consultants who helped automate 17 workflows for better data processing and ingestion.

Key Components

Centralised, curated master data source to drive consistency and accuracy across all KPIs and metrics.

Built on Microsoft’s “Discipline at the Core, Flexibility at the Edge” BI strategy, enabling core enterprise reporting as well as team-specific insights.

Dashboards and models organised by business function, allowing both executive-level and department-specific reporting.

Leveraging Microsoft Fabric and Azure-based technologies like a data lake and enterprise data warehouse for advanced analytics.

Impact

Improved data consistency and trust with a unified source of truth for all business metrics.
Reduced time-to-insight with self-service analytics and department-level flexibility.
Enhanced collaboration across departments, using common metrics and shared dashboards.
Enabled faster, data-driven decision-making through instant access to up-to-date data and key metrics.
Positioned the company to scale analytics capabilities as the business evolves with a robust foundation for accelerated AI adoption.

Customer Comments

” The assessment was super critical because it allowed us to take a step back and really analyse our value chain and where those key pain points were for us. What came out of it is a set of really strong recommendations… “

What's next?

Expand solution to cover analytics requirements of other business functions in turn covering the analytics requirements of the entire organisation.
Automation of supply chain, sales, logistics, and inventory with Microsoft Power Platform.
Leveraging positive human-AI relationships and agentic automation.

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