Streamlining inventory management in Large‑Scale Retail through automation and Fast Data

The Retail company featured in this success-case chose Mia-Platform Fast Data to automate and speed up the process of updating and managing the inventory with real-time data, reducing the – once manual – work of data-entry and data-update. The goal is to provide different systems (including, for example, Business Intelligence tools, e-Commerce, Inventory System) with real-time updated data from various data sources.

Industry: Large-Scale Retail

Main Benefits

Enhancement of omnichannel strategy

Real-time update of stock availability

Real-time sharing of product and customer data to all company systems

Automation of the inventory update process (putting an end to manual work)

Key Numbers

130 MIL

daily events

7

Systems of Record

+2 MIL

Single Views

24/7

Availability of Single Views updated in real-time

The issue

The client company was, at the time, compiling the annual inventory for the end of the fiscal year through a manual process that required a significant consumption of company time and resources.

In fact, a dedicated team was responsible for developing custom logics to collect data from the Warehouse Management System (more than 600 million records) and transfer them to the Inventory System. Using this procedure, the inventory was usually closed approximately 3 months into the next year.

The client

The company is one of the leading large-scale retailers in Italy, with more than 7,000 employees, over €2 billion in revenues in 2021 and 100 points of sale throughout the country.

The Solution: Mia-Platform Fast Data for the Digital Integration Hub

The customer has adopted Mia-Platform Fast Data to build Single Views based on product availability, and share them immediately and constantly with the Inventory System in 3 simple steps:

The warehouse management system sends the raw data of warehouse movements to Mia-Platform Fast Data;
The Inventory System receives the inventory status in real-time from warehouses located throughout the country, with Mia-Platform Fast Data taking care of aggregating, cleaning, processing and displaying the data, therefore ensuring data consistency;
Inventory movements are aggregated in Single View, easily accessible via API.

Benefits

e-Commerce

The e-commerce uses the stock data to evaluate which and how many products are available for sale: the data is triangulated with the orders data on a different management system to know how many pieces are available.

BI - Data Warehouse

Business Intelligence can make business analysis with real-time data always updated

Data Exposure via API

Now data is exposed via API, this allows to read and consume the data quickly and easily

Inventory System

It is now possible to calculate inventory at any time through the connection between the Warehouse Management System and Mia-Platform. This allowed the calculation of the annual inventory on 31/12 through the use of our systems.

Project developments

Due to the solution’s success, the customer has progressively broadened the scope of the project and has integrated other business functions in Mia-Platform, including receipts, product price updates, related promotions, useful data for the supply chain, integration with CRM for marketing initiatives and so on.

The company has decided to adopt Mia-Platform as a core tool for the incremental construction of a Digital Integration Hub (DIH) which manages all business initiatives that require high data reliability relating to the management of logistics, orders, sales through both online and physical channels.

In a sector where the speed and efficiency of data management is essential for optimizing the supply chain, the DIH based on Mia-Platform Fast Data is an indispensable ally to ensure the perfect integration of data into all business processes.

In this way, the company has successfully supported new business initiatives and enabled the effective integration of B2B and B2C applications that enable the management of the entire supply chain, more easily exposing data to internal and external partners and channels, through an ever-expanding set of APIs.

The DIH based on Mia-Platform Fast Data currently supports more than 130 million daily events from 7 System of Records, which contribute to creating more than 2 million Single Views, updated in real-time and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Benefits

Greater integration and omnichannel

The company has strengthened its omnichannel strategy, thanks to the high level of integration of the various SoRs and the constantly updated information on the status of the inventory.

Better data sharing and interoperability

The Digital Integration Hub facilitates data sharing across multiple channels and applications thanks to APIs.

Greater visibility on customer data

Thanks to the optimized integration of the CRM with other SoRs, the customer company benefits from customer data updated in real time, which helps in making its customer centric strategy more efficient.

Defining Mia-Platform Fast Data

Mia-Platform Fast Data is a set of ready-to-use microservices that optimize data management and interoperability and makes updated data available to the company in real-time 24/7.

In particular, Mia-Platform Fast Data allows you to:

Collect data from existing internal and external systems of the company, and organize them according to specific business logics in Business Single Views;
Keep data updated in real-time in a high-performance database;
Making data available in real-time and 24/7 to all company services, channels and applications;
Create your own Digital Integration Hub, building an event architecture across a data management layer that decouples Systems of Records from external channels.

Defining a Digital Integration Hub

The Digital Integration Hub is a cutting-edge, emerging architectural paradigm that allows you to aggregate data from different sources in real-time via API. The DIH provides for the insertion of a data management layer that decouples the communication between the Systems-of-Record and the external channels, avoiding the overload of the SORs and ensuring streamlined service performance.