Synopsis
Optimizing data pipelines in the forestry industry involves navigating the nuances, from consolidating metrics across product varieties to balancing financial volatility driven by international trades. Fastloop delivered a solution that is nimble, fact-based, applying domain expertise to navigate and operationalize key performance metrics.
Highlights
Time spent to produce executive reports reduced by 97%
Increased financial forecasting efficiency by 75% by consolidating data into a centralized source of truth.
Replaced 104 manual reports with 3 Looker dashboards
Eliminated the need to consolidate 28 spreadsheets
Challenges
Western Forest Products sought out a solution that improves accuracy, speed and automation to meet their data and analytics reporting needs.
Core challenges include:
Western Forest Products has 7 business units operating with individual Profit and Loss. Financial and operational complexity were exposed from managing products that touch multiple units.
Existing stop gap solutions to understand the business were based on outdated technology and required manual effort.
Businesses operating in a commodity-based industry need to react quickly to price swings and volatility.
Solution
Working with a fixed-fee discovery process, Fastloop focused on increasing the Value of Production in Western Forest Products operations by modernizing technology solutions and key operational aspects to support real-time insights and analytics, transparent and accessible reporting across departments and data capture and management.
Key components of the solution:
- Built a cloud ecosystem that unified all data egresses from their operating systems, including Dynamics365 and other forestry and manufacturing-specific systems.
- Automated ingestion of over 2 billion rows of data across these multiple sources through Google Cloud Functions into Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery.
- Captured additional data from mill operations via a custom-built data capture app.
- Developed an integrated data model and KPI hierarchy that enabled consolidated business analytics and ensured they were broadly available to end users via self-serve Looker dashboards.
- Created a product recommendation engine that automates the financial forecast system operators use to generate the maximum profit out of their mill operations. This is a system based on market rates, exchange rates and other external spot market and commodity factors that previously required the manual management of 28 spreadsheets.
- Implemented the Vertex AI stack to begin harnessing the power of AI and exploring the most impactful use cases that AI solutions can tackle.
KPI hierarchy and data modelling
Critical financial and operations data points have been mapped to understand and track how all the granular aspects of the business can ladder up and impact total revenue. This is built into a semantic model in PowerBI that translates real-time data into actionable metrics.
Low-code data capture app
A mobile app that enabled employees at the mill level to log data during mill operations that the business previously wasn’t able to capture.
Results and Impact
Fastloop’s customized solution for Western Forest Products provided immediate strategic value across the business by consolidating, standardizing and automating data systems. Following the implementation, Fastloop transformed enterprise reporting from a spreadsheet-reliant, labour-intensive process into a technology-enabled team with the tools and mindset to fully embrace data-driven decision-making.
Automated analytics reporting saved business units across Western Forest Product on average 100 hours per week, effectively reducing the need for manual processes. They also have the ability to share reports with decision makers faster than ever.
Fastloop was able to understand my business needs, and their bench is very strong, so they could support the whole solution.
– Rob Ponis, Director of IT, Western Forest Products
Why Fastloop.ai?
Short time to value
Fastloop created a roadmap leading to a POC that demonstrated short time to value and generated buy-in from the organization to continue doing impactful work.
Personal, nimble and business-focused approach
Unlike bigger firms that can be rigid and require long-term contracts, Fastloop offers customizable fee models to co-deliver with them and prove incremental values quickly.
Manufacturing and supply chain experience
Fastloop speaks the industry language and quickly learns from client stakeholders to understand the business.
Expertise in Google Cloud ecosystem
Fastloop’s knowledge meant they were able to show the value of GCP products.
Future Outlook
Fastloop and Western Forest Products continue to explore use cases for scaling their data platform and implementing the benefits of AI, including:
Predictive maintenance
IoT sensors monitor condition of equipment in real-time, detecting potential maintenance issues and allowing for proactive scheduled maintenance that reduces downtime and lowers repair costs.
Supply chain optimization
Harnessing AI for on demand, predictive analysis of inventory, transportation and other supply chain data to optimize production schedules, reduce waste and improve delivery times.
Demand planning
Enable leading indicators on demand and production line volumes to improve operations, profitability and labour utilization.
Process automation
Remove and replace manual tasks – especially between manual data transfer and input areas.
Forecasting & budgets
Enable forward looking Budget, Planning and Forecasting scenarios to improve planning and execution across the organization.
Anomaly detection
Explore vision-based artificial intelligence that can identify quality, anomalies and outliers well ahead of the production line and improve response times to predictable falldown.