How Fable saved $60k+/year on data analytics

Challenges

Fable started out in Australia but quickly expanded into the UK and US markets. Each location has its own sales team who report back to the executive team in Australia, while thousands of tons of products move between warehouses and are shipped around the world.

Such geographic distribution made it challenging to track inventories worldwide and proactively address issues, like products nearing their expiration dates. The data on inventories in different logistics centers was spread between different files and people, unnecessarily prolonging and complicating decision-making. It wasn’t uncommon for soon-to-expire inventory to be a surprise to local teams, leading to potential financial losses. Quickly and easily reporting on what exactly was stored where was not possible because each region the company operates in had a separate entity and a different inventory management system.

Compiling financial reports for the entire company, rather than individual entities, also proved difficult. Each report required gathering data from different departments and entities, converting them to a single currency, exporting each piece separately, and gradually building a joint report. Even then, the data was sometimes not aligned due to different reporting periods, overlooked transactions, or simply errors.

All in all, Fable lacked a reliable, transparent consolidated source of visual reporting about their company that would enable them to optimize distribution, make realistic forecasts, and know how the business was doing at any given time.

How Coupler.io helped solve the problem

Together with Fable’s team, we chose to build a set of reports in Microsoft PowerBI. Each location relied on a separate instance of Fishbowl Inventory with a connected MySQL database to manage inventory and siloed Xero entities to store financial data. We set up Coupler.io importers to automatically fetch data from both apps into BigQuery and then plugged the datasets into Power BI. For live currency rates, we used public APIs.

The results were the three separate live dashboards:

• Inventory report helps the company understand its stock levels around the world. It lists all products on offer, their expiry dates, prices, whereabouts, and more.

• Financial report offers a complete overview of Fable’s finances consolidated into a single currency. It provides a detailed breakdown of all vital financial metrics for all individual entities and for the company as a whole.

• Customers report lists all customers and vendors with a complete history of their orders. A separate report highlights clients that suddenly decreased or increased their order volume and are worth nurturing further.

These robust dashboards auto-update on a daily basis and quickly became an essential piece of the team’s toolset. It helped the company not only to better understand where they are but also to locate cost-efficiency improvement points and better tackle the most profitable customers. All of the findings showed that business is on the right track and Fable could stay on top of their metrics right from the get-go in their newly opened US entity.

Impact on business

Inventory management has become extremely transparent and clear, and the company leadership has gained an easy way to oversee each location, proactively raise issues with local managers, and enable local teams to self-service their data requests. Simultaneously, the board now has all the essential information about the state of the business at their fingertips, 24/7. As a result, they can make conscious, informed decisions without repeatedly requesting custom analysis and reports.

The new way of reporting at Fable also led to some remarkable results:

• 0% product expiration rate in recent months

• The quantity of close-to-expired products dropped 2-fold

• Fable established a predictable budget planning mechanism which lowered the budget variance to 6-8%

• 1 full-time business analyst saved on business queries and end of month reporting

• Front line staff able to self-service financial and inventory data requests.