The problem
The client explained that they felt they were losing money on inventory every year. They would overbuy, and then when they needed to make space, sell product as a steep discount, often at a loss. This client had the infrastructure to transfer inventory between stores instead of buying new inventory when a particular store was running out. However, their POS system did not offer a proper interface or the proper metrics for: 1) Determining when inventory was truly getting too low at a given store for a given product 2) Alerting them which other stores had that product available for transfer.
What we built
For this client, we created an entire data management system, including: Automatic Data Flow We set up a PostgreSQL database and wrote a Python script that automatically extracted data every day from the POS system and added it to the database. Dashboards for Decision-Making we connected the SQL database to Power BI and created dashboards based on the data. The dashboards answered those crucial questions the company had – which merchandise can be transferred? When does it make sense to buy more of a particular product? What are our top products for this week? The PowerBI dashboards also automatically refresh so that users at the company are getting the most up to date information every time they login.
