Data visualization aiding to indemnify against freight damages and optimize cargo securing costs

Asian Paints uses SAS Visual Analytics to get up-to-the-day visibility of outbound logistics and fleet performance enabling operational decision making.

Committed to its strong consumer-focus and innovative spirit, Asian Paints turned to SAS Visual Analytics for its outbound logistics and analytical needs for transit damage reduction.

Asian Paints, India’s leading Paints Company, along with its subsidiaries have operations in 19 countries across the world with 26 paint manufacturing facilities, servicing consumers in over 65 countries. With such a complex supply chain coupled with high volumes of transactional data accumulating by the day, it was imminent to create a multi-level visibility across facilities to empower logistics managers for data-driven decision making.

With SAS Visual Analytics, the outbound logistics team no longer need to wait for end of the month to analyze the fleet performance and respective KPIs. Instead, executives have up-to-the-day visibility of latest insights based on refreshed data, which enables them to make nimble decisions swiftly and confidently.

From daunting to transformational

Before deploying SAS Visual Analytics, the corporate office used to download reports from different transactional systems for each of the many manufacturing plants in Excel every month. Transforming this information into a coherent dashboard was a daunting task because of the volumes of data. This monthly reporting sometime resulted in missed opportunities.

Where logistics analyses were previously done on a monthly level, with SAS Visual Analytics there’s a quick turnaround time of daily-level granular reporting enabling faster decision-making capabilities.

Ensuring data quality

Effective data manipulations were built in SAS Enterprise Guide, with necessary exceptional business logics and
scenarios designed in the process to harmonize data coming from varied transactional sources.

Utmost faith in the quality of the data enabled Asian Paints to make quick informed decisions and outpace the market.

SAS Visual Analytics helps Asian Paints reinforce that faith with confidence. With exhaustive data manipulations and business logics built in the solution, combined with an appealing interface, analysts can focus more on fetching answers rather than validating business scenarios.

Collaborative Visualizations

With SAS Visual Analytics, officers and logistics managers have the freedom to dissect their data and run their own analyses and discovery without requiring extensive IT support. They can generate and share their own reports, dashboards and visualizations simply by clicking or drilling into items of interest.

For example, senior management can take an extract of these reports before getting into vendor negotiations for revisiting contractual terms with existing and new fleet operators.

With compelling visualizations and easy drill-down capabilities, logistics executives can quickly decipher meaning of the data and make informed decisions. KPIs like ‘volume damage per ton’ are crucial and are monitored more closely with renewed focus. There seem to be a steady shift from reactive to proactive approach where more than damage incidents, the focus now is on the root-causes for the incidents and measures to quell them in future.

Having deployed SAS Visual Analytics, the logistics management team envisions to build on that foundation and gradually incorporate advanced sophistication through variants of cost apportionment analytics namely ‘Cost per ton’ and ‘Freight cost analyses’.

Challenge

Reduce non-accidental damages by gaining visibility at a day level granularity.
Dynamic reporting to optimize costs incurred in securing cargo.

Solution

SAS^® Visual Analytics

SAS Enterprise Guide

Benefits

Secure multi-level visibility with varying combinations to isolate transactions with maximum non-accidental damages.
Identify root-causes for damages by route, truck, mode, product mix combination.
Aiding to make informed decisions by securing in-transit cargo and for mitigating damage incidents.
Identifying data patterns like seasonality and trends for deeper investigations to indemnify against damages.
Quicker turnaround of reports and explorations at varying hierarchies.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.