Bring together data from ERP, WMS, TMS, planning, quality, fulfillment, maintenance, and finance. This creates a single, coherent view of what is happening across the supply chain: from expected receipts and available inventory to order processing, delivery, service, and financial results. This enables planning, operations, sales, and management to identify shortages, delays, or additional costs sooner and adjust capacity, delivery reliability, and profitability earlier.
In supply chain and logistics, much depends on timing. Goods must be available, orders complete, capacity appropriate, and deliveries on time. High capacity utilization and large numbers of processed orders may seem positive, but they mean little when inventory is in the wrong place, urgent work increases, products spoil, or additional handling erodes margins.
The priorities differ for importers, trading companies, fulfillment companies, distributors, and logistics service providers. But their questions overlap. What is arriving, and when? Which inventory is actually available? Which orders are at risk? Where are delays occurring? And which customers, products, routes, or services are sufficiently profitable?
The necessary data is often spread across ERP, WMS, TMS, planning, quality records, telematics, fulfillment, service, and finance. Bringing this data together creates a single view of the supply chain: from expected receipts and inventory to orders, deliveries, returns, maintenance, and financial results.
Operations move faster than reporting. Orders, inventory, planning, transportation, quality, and costs are constantly changing, while data from different systems does not align automatically. As a result, discrepancies often become visible only after an order is already late, inventory has to be written off, or the invoice does not match the work performed.
A total inventory position means little without a clear view of what is available, reserved, in transit, blocked, undergoing quality control, or already allocated. An item may therefore appear available on paper even though an order cannot be delivered in full.
An order or shipment is running behind schedule, but the cause may lie in receiving, quality control, picking, production, transportation, a carrier, or missing data. Without a coherent view of the process steps, the analysis stops at the observation that something is late.
Planned staffing may appear sufficient overall, while a shortage develops at a specific location, line, shift, or on a particular day. Without insight into expected incoming work, outstanding work, and historical processing rates, adjustments are mainly made after the fact.
Additional handling, expedited transportation, waiting time, spoilage, returns, claims, and the use of subcontractors are not always attributed to the same customer, order, or service. As a result, a contract may appear commercially attractive while making an insufficient operational contribution.
Surcharges, additional stops, storage days, returnable packaging, rush jobs, or additional handling are carried out but not always correctly recorded or invoiced. As a result, discrepancies between operations and finance are not identified until later.
When data from ERP, WMS, TMS, and Excel is combined manually, the overview is already outdated by the time it is delivered. Planning and operations are then managing based on yesterday’s information, even though inventory, demand, and capacity have already changed today.
Effective supply chain analysis does not start with a standard list of KPIs. The relevant questions depend on the organization’s position in the supply chain, but they usually address the same topics: availability, flow, delivery reliability, capacity, quality, and profitability.
An ERP, WMS, or TMS contains a great deal of operational data, but rarely tells the whole story. An order may be recorded commercially in the ERP, processed in the WMS, included in a trip in the TMS, and handled financially in another system. Quality, planning, maintenance, and workforce deployment may be managed outside these systems as well.
To manage the entire supply chain, orders, order lines, products, batches, inventory positions, shipments, trips, stops, locations, customers, and invoices must be aligned in terms of meaning. Times and statuses must also have consistent definitions. Only then can you reliably drill down from an overall view to the process step where a deviation occurs.
The sources required vary by organization. In a fresh produce supply chain, quality, shelf life, and grading data play a major role. The sources required vary by organization. In a fresh produce supply chain, quality, shelf life, and grading data play a major role. The sources required vary by organization. In a fresh produce supply chain, quality, shelf life, and grading data play a major role. In floriculture, this also includes industry-specific issues involving batches, availability, processing, and reusable packaging. In fulfillment, the focus is more often on order peaks, picking and packing processes, and delivery dates. When that fulfillment is driven by online store orders, online conversion, and returns flows, our approach to E-commerce is also relevant. Service logistics also involves maintenance, parts, assets, and failures.
Orders, order lines, delivery dates, priorities, customer agreements, SLAs, and sales channels form the commercial foundation. Connecting them to execution and invoicing reveals which commitments are being met and which customers or order types require a relatively high number of exceptions.
Available and reserved inventory, batches, locations, holds, shelf life, quality inspections, rejections, and expected receipts determine what is actually available. This makes shortages, surpluses, waste, and quality issues visible sooner.
Receiving, putaway, picking, packing, production, consolidation, loading, and the work backlog show how orders move through operations. Analyzing volumes, capacity, lead times, and corrections together reveals where the flow is stalling.
Shipments, trips, stops, vehicles, carriers, planned and actual times, proof of delivery, and failed deliveries determine transport performance. When connected to orders and costs, service levels and performance by route or customer can be assessed together.
Assets, parts, maintenance events, failures, work orders, and usage data make it possible to connect service and logistics. This allows you to investigate which combinations are reliable, where recurring failures occur, and when maintenance is likely to be needed.
Procurement, personnel, transport, subcontractors, fuel, storage, handling, waste, claims, surcharges, and invoices determine the financial performance of operations. Connecting this data to customers, orders, routes, and services provides insight into cost and profitability.
Bringing demand, inventory, execution, delivery, quality, and finance together creates a single foundation for daily operations and longer-term decisions.
Combine historical sales, open orders, available and reserved inventory, expected receipts, shelf life, and planned capacity. This makes shortages, surpluses, and urgent sales or purchasing decisions visible sooner.
Track every step from order to delivery and compare planned and actual times. This reveals not only which orders are late, but also where delays occur and which location, product group, carrier, or process step is involved.
Use expected incoming work, outstanding work, available people and resources, and historical processing rates to understand the upcoming workload. This allows planning and operations to respond sooner to peaks, disruptions, and shifts in demand.
Connect quality inspections, shelf life, inventory movements, sales and write-offs. This reveals which products or batches require urgent action, where spoilage occurs and which suppliers or process steps cause quality issues relatively often.
Compare completed activities, storage days, trips, stops, surcharges and service work with contract terms and invoices. This helps identify missed billing, incorrect rates and work outside the original agreement sooner.
Combine revenue and volume with labor costs, transportation, subcontractors, handling, storage, spoilage, claims and other operating costs. This reveals which customers, routes, products and services truly contribute to profitability and where pricing or processes need to be reviewed.
These insights can be translated into daily operational dashboards, alerts, planning reports, management overviews, budget monitoring and forecasts. This enables planning, operations, sales, finance and management to work from the same definitions and figures.
We discuss the challenges you currently face, what data is available and where the greatest opportunities lie to improve control over inventory, planning, delivery reliability, quality and profitability.
Our experience ranges from international fresh produce supply chains and fulfillment to logistics services and service processes for maintenance and parts. The focus varies by organization, but in every case, operational data must be available quickly enough to act on it.
Nature’s Pride delivers thousands of orders to retailers and wholesalers across Europe every day. Inventory, incoming volumes, quality inspections, sales and financial settlement come together in a supply chain where speed, freshness and accuracy are critical.
Using TimeXtender, we built a scalable data layer that brings together data from ERP, AFAS, quality control systems, sorting machines, OutSystems and Excel, among other sources. The Power BI reports are used by more than 230 employees. Some processes are refreshed every five minutes, allowing planning and sales teams to quickly identify which products need to be sold urgently and reduce waste.
Topgeschenken Nederland operates multiple consumer and business brands, including Topgeschenken.nl, Topbloemen.nl, Toptaarten.nl and Topfruit.nl. Seasonal patterns, peak days, delivery dates and availability directly affect daily operations.
Qlik Cloud Analytics brings together sales, order, inventory, marketing, service and financial data. Operations and management use this environment for daily performance management, planning and demand forecasting across multiple brands and systems.
Medux works with multiple organizations, brands, channels and systems for the delivery and maintenance of assistive devices. A central data foundation in Azure SQL and TimeXtender brings together data from different sources for analysis in Qlik.
By combining maintenance data with order data, Medux can investigate which combinations of devices and parts work reliably and which are more prone to failure. The same data foundation also provides scope to predict maintenance needs earlier in the future and improve service planning.
For VGK Cool Logistics, we support an analytics environment that uses data from Boltrics. Operations, planning, and management use the environment for operational insights, supply chain performance, and forecasting.
Supply Chain & Logistics spans several disciplines at once. Procurement, planning, operations, sales, service, and finance each view the same orders, inventory, capacity, deliveries, and costs from a different perspective. We bring this information together and ensure that teams can make decisions based on the same definitions.
We start with the questions that need better answers. We then map the processes, definitions, and data sources and determine which data is needed to connect demand, inventory, orders, capacity, execution, delivery, service, and costs.
If the question extends beyond a single application, we can help with strategic advice, data strategy, AI Readiness, or an independent BI tool selection.
For example, we connect ERP, WMS, TMS, planning, quality records, telematics, maintenance, fulfillment, finance, and additional files.
In doing so, we account for differences in order and product structures, inventory statuses, timestamps, locations, units, service agreements, and costs. This ensures that orders, batches, inventory, shipments, trips, assets, and invoices are aligned in terms of content.
On that basis, we develop dashboards, analyses, and reports for areas including:
Where needed, we add alerts, periodic reports, scenarios, planning, and user input.
Depending on the existing environment, we work with Qlik, Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, TimeXtender, or a combination of these.
If you already have an analytics environment, we build on it when that makes sense. We can add sources, improve models and dashboards, harmonize definitions, or support a migration. If you have doubts about the current approach, a Second Opinion Data & Analytics can be a good first step.
After delivery, we can support and manage the environment, so that new locations, customers, processes, products, and data sources can be added in a controlled manner.
We start with the decisions that need to be better informed. These may relate to inventory, planning, capacity, lead times, delivery reliability, quality, service, invoicing, or profitability.
We then determine which definitions, processes, and data sources are needed to answer those questions reliably. This prevents a broad data platform from being built before it is clear which operational problem it needs to solve.
We can connect to ERP, WMS, TMS, planning, quality, maintenance, and financial systems. Data from telematics, scanners, customer portals, Excel, and other operational sources can also be integrated.
The type of connection available depends on the available API, database, export, or other means of accessing the data. We consider not only the technical aspects, but also how orders, products, inventory, shipments, trips, locations, assets, and invoices relate to one another.
No. Discrepancies between systems, missing definitions, and manually maintained files are often precisely what prompts a project.
We identify what can be used, where the greatest risks lie, and which improvements are necessary. Not every data problem needs to be resolved in advance, but critical discrepancies must be made visible and manageable.
Yes. We can connect order data with inventory, warehouse processes, shipments, trips, deliveries, costs, and invoicing.
This makes it possible to investigate, for example, why a delivery was late, which additional activities or costs resulted, and what the ultimate contribution of the customer, order, route, or service was. The possibilities depend on the available linking keys and the level of detail in the source systems.
Yes. We can compare planned and actual times across different process steps, such as receipt, release, picking, production, loading, and delivery.
This shows which orders were handled in full and on time, where waiting time occurs, and which locations, products, carriers, or process steps consistently deviate from expectations.
This is possible when sufficient data is available on expected incoming work, outstanding work, available capacity, and historical processing rates.
This data can be used to build scenarios and forecasts for warehouse utilization, workforce planning, transportation capacity, or future maintenance work, for example. The outcome remains dependent on the quality of the planning and the assumptions in the model.
Yes, provided that costs and revenue can be allocated in sufficient detail. This may include labor, transportation, subcontractors, fuel, storage, handling, losses, returns, claims, and additional work.
We explicitly distinguish between costs that are directly available and those allocated using allocation keys. This makes it clear how the result is calculated and which conclusions can be responsibly drawn.
We implement checks on order numbers, shipment numbers, trips, customer codes, product codes, locations, and other linking fields. This reveals where data is missing, has been recorded twice, or uses a different structure.
An analytics environment does not automatically fix data capture at the source, but it does reveal where integrations are unreliable and which processes need improvement.
Yes. We first map the existing data sources, models, dashboards, definitions and management processes.
We then determine what can remain, what needs improvement and where additional sources or applications are needed. This can range from adding operational sources to restructuring a data model or supporting a migration.
If you would first like an independent assessment of whether your current approach, architecture or choice of vendor makes sense, you can use our Second Opinion Data & Analytics.
That depends on the data source, how it is accessed technically and the application. Some processes can be updated several times per hour or in near real time, while other sources only provide new data daily or periodically.
For each source, we determine what update frequency is feasible and useful. Not every management report needs to refresh every five minutes, while planning or inventory monitoring may require this.
Subject-matter involvement is needed from employees who understand the processes and figures. This may include people from planning, operations, warehousing, transport, procurement, sales, service and finance.
They help establish definitions, assess exceptions, verify results and set priorities. A small group of subject-matter owners and decision-makers is usually more effective than a large project team.
Would you like to know what insights can be gained from your current ERP, WMS, TMS and other operational systems? Barry and Eric would be happy to discuss inventory, planning, capacity, delivery reliability and profitability with you. In half an hour, you will know whether we are a good fit. Email us, call us or schedule a call right away.
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Available on weekdays between 8:00 AM and 6:00 PM (Amsterdam time)
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