On Data & AI
Customer cases
CoffeeRoots Cantata: building the foundation to become a data-driven business
CoffeeRoots Cantata is a manufacturing, distribution and retail company that produces premium coffee and tea products from around the world. In addition to producing for private labels, the company also operates in retail, with more than 350 stores in 6 countries. CoffeeRoots Cantata is an ambitious company, eager to grow and expand its product lines and store locations.
CoffeeRoots Cantata is a family business with a long history, founded in 1907. It is a manufacturing, distribution and retail company that produces premium coffee and tea products from around the world. In addition to producing for private labels, the company also operates in retail, with more than 350 stores in 6 countries. CoffeeRoots Cantata is an ambitious company, eager to grow and expand its product lines and store locations. The company is based in Antwerp, Belgium.
Over the past 15 years, the company has rapidly evolved from a local family business to an international hot beverage innovation center. The basis of this rapid expansion is a mix of entrepreneurial experience and courage, of constant innovation and the ambition to develop products and stores that literally create a "wow" effect.
But while the group's strategy is clear and important steps have been taken, the company did not yet have reliable reporting and insights, which are indispensable for managing operations, optimizing the customer experience and ultimately realizing its ambitions. Looking for clear insights and the right strategy to become a data-driven company, the management came to the HSO Data & Analytics team.
The HSO team began with an analysis and solution modeling phase, where we gathered requirements and defined a data roadmap: where do we want to go and what do we need to get there?
“This project has transformed sales data management and virtualized the entire retail operation, providing real-time insights and increased efficiency for the team.”
Building the foundation first
Brendon Pienaar, Managing Consultant at HSO: "When we started the analysis phase, we interviewed management and operational teams to find out what their most pressing information needs were. For example, one of their most urgent requests was to understand the minimum required inventory levels in the stores. The team did not have a clear picture of which products should go to which location. And because some of their products are very expensive and scarce, you don't want to overstock in one location and create a shortage in another store."
"The company did not yet have easy access to collected sales figures and trends: which product categories are growing, in which regions? Are they pods, flavored pods, ground coffee? This information helps them tremendously in forecasting sales and planning marketing campaigns, for example. Another pressing issue is staffing, a challenge for many retailers. CoffeeRoots - like many other retailers - struggles to find well-trained staff for their stores, so the information that really helped them here was the data on how much goes over the counter, in which store, per hour. Based on that information, they can staff the stores much more efficiently because management knows when they need one, two or more employees in a store.
We were also able to help CoffeeRoots with insights to optimize their purchasing strategy. With more insight into (expected) sales figures, they can forecast volumes for the coming year or years and plan their purchasing strategy much better. This information helps tremendously to take advantage of better prices in the global coffee and tea market.
But before we could start building out the reports, HSO set up the data foundation: an Azure data platform. For this, we engaged the Cloud Transformation team to set up a cloud environment to which all data sources, such as the ERP system, are connected. The big advantage of the Azure data platform is that we can easily add new data sources."
Next step: use insight to improve the business
Now that the basics are in place, and HSO has delivered as many as 21 pages of reports, CoffeeRoots is ready for the next step. We call that "from data-rich to insight-rich. Much more information is already available, and now they have the ability to translate those insights into actual decisions and actions.
HSO and the CoffeeRoots team are working closely together to translate the insights generated into concrete actions. One goal is to enable more predictive analytics, for example, sales forecasting and inventory optimization. But also to use marketing campaign performance insights to develop more effective marketing campaigns and increase customer loyalty and engagement.
Teams eager to move forward
Together with the CoffeeRoots team, HSO laid out several use cases in a workshop, and mapped their expected economic value versus implementation probability into a matrix. That way, we create a clear picture of which use cases add the most value to the business, relative to the effort it would take to build and manage them.
The HSO team thoroughly enjoyed the project and looks forward to the next steps. Brendon responds, "It's great that we can move so quickly. The project process, from our initial conversations to the delivery of the cloud environment, data warehouse and first set of reports, took about six months. Azure cloud technology for Data and AI offers many features, including speed and flexibility. But we are also honest with our customers that developing a data-driven strategy takes hard work.
For example, the data governance aspect is not something you can avoid. If you want reliable insights, you have to have your product catalog in order; you have to establish clear definitions and business rules that apply across the company. And we should never underestimate the human factor. Becoming a data-driven company requires a willingness to change traditional ways of working and to actually see the opportunities and added value that a data strategy and its outcomes have to offer."
“The Power BI dashboard delivers comprehensive analytics for both product and store performance, including margins, product overview, and inventory tracking etc. The real-time data visualization and easy-to-use interface have made decision-making a breeze for the team.”