Published on the 31/03/2022 | Written by Newsdesk
Investment business using analytics to drive group accountability…
Private investment group Millennium Corp is a big player in telco supply chains across New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific Region. Its portfolio includes such brands as Pacificomm, Fonefix and Digital Mobile, as well as a retail joint venture with Vodafone NZ.
To measure improvement and ensure it was achieving the right outcomes, the company has invested in data and analytics. Rather than relying on historical trends and intuition when maintaining inventory, pricing solutions, or hiring employees, Millennium Corp found through improved data collection and better insights using analytics, they could help partners drive more fact-based decision-making.
The company has implemented cloud-based analytics tool Sisense to deliver real-time, accurate data and reporting across the group, using it to improve accountability and add operational value to subsidiaries, their employees, and partners.
Stuart English, Group IT Manager at Millennium Corp said, “Our branch managers and business leaders use Sisense to glean insights from disparate data, such as foot traffic, data from our rostering systems, as well as sales, inventory, and procurement data from our ERP systems. These insights help us drive improved business performance, enabling better contextual business benchmarking.”
Market insights
To add value to partners, Millennium taps a range of data sources to understand the true context of market activity. English said the company’s data journey began with a need to plug raw data into spreadsheets – an activity that spurred employee motivation that a data dashboard like Sisense was needed.
For its distribution business, Millennium can go back to vendors and provide consolidated insights across channels, using Sisense’s reporting tools and platforms. Collecting customer sell-through data is key to the company’s planning process, enabling it to provide vendors with a line of sight, from product arriving in Australia or New Zealand, all the way to reaching the customer. This allows Millennium to give its businesses important insights into their supply chains.
Sales reporting has also been key, helping the company align its salespeople and track their KPIs. Initially, its reporting platform was tied to its ERP based on sales information, but the company wanted to take it a step further and begin reporting on other operational data as well.
English said by leveraging Sisense, the company can overlay HR and timesheet data from retail stores to understand where it should be focusing resources to drive the best outcome. Millennium also uses the tool to keep an eye on key retail shrinkage indicators.
Data: the ‘secret sauce’ for vendors?
English said a data-driven approach has been of tremendous value to vendors because if they were to do it individually, they would need to go through numerous layers internally to source and digest data.
“We wanted a system that can pull the data from multiple sources, digest it, and then provide a top-to-bottom view of the world. Rather than printing out reams of data, we wanted to make it easy for the business to consume data at a very high level while also providing access to granular data as required,” English explained.
Rohan Persaud, Director of Channels and Alliances at Sisense, said it is encouraging to see that a solution like Sisense has helped Millennium better understand how its businesses are faring through the power of infused analytics.
“Large investment organisations like Millennium Corp rely on that ‘hard data’ to understand how their subsidiaries are progressing. Sisense provides real-time, up-to-date data through infused analytics to ensure organisations are evolving and maturing. Together, they provide the transparency that is required to operate efficiently and at scale in the complex telco industry,” he said.
