Challenges
Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics designs, manufactures, repairs, overhauls and exchanges aircraft instruments, avionics and advanced power solutions.
To maintain the high levels of service and quality products Mid-Continent’s customers have come to expect, the company needed access to real-time sales and operational analytics to better understand key drivers of profitability by product, service and customer.
Better, faster decision-making
Mid-Continent needed to drive decision-making through real-time queries, compelling dashboard visualizations and best-in-class analytics.
Understanding profitability and improving margins
Mid-Continent had plenty of data but not the means to tease out actionable information. Excel pivot tables hid subtleties and insight.
Solutions
From a feature/function perspective, Logility was selected based on ease of use, visual appeal, intuitive design and drag-and-drop dashboard creation. Another important capability was data consolidation from Excel and Mid-Continent’s ERP system.
The team believed that starting the Logility roll-out with Sales offered the quickest ’wins’ and a good opportunity to build the skills needed for self-sufficiency. After Sales, Inventory and Purchasing were implemented. There are now up to 15 ’power users’ across the company accessing Logility every day.
Advanced Analytics
Data Management
Inventory Planning and Optimization
Lack of data was never the problem at Mid-Continent; teasing out the underlying meaning of the data and turning it into actionable information was the challenge. Using Excel pivot tables, subtleties were easy to miss. By contrast, while tracking the performance of a sales promotion for a key customer, Logility analytics surfaced a slow-moving product. Within two minutes, sales management understood the root cause and took corrective action, calling the finding “eye-opening”.
“With Logility, answering questions — and the inevitable follow-up questions — takes just a couple of clicks,” says Lindsay Koster, director of finance. “For example, it’s very easy to change the time horizon on a report. Using pivot tables in Excel usually took us hours.”
With Logility, Mid-Continent can also view transactions that fail to meet minimum contracted pricing. “Thanks to Logility, our transactions are now analyzed in real time. This helps the company better understand profitability by product, service and customer,” says Steve Macari, Director of Information Technology.
Mid-Continent employees can now monitor activity and look for trends and exceptions every minute of every day. Performance metrics and “what-if” analysis can answer questions such as, “How are current sales promotions working versus goal?”, “What has shipped / can be shipped today?”, “What’s been invoiced today?”, and “Where will the business end up this month compared to goal?”
Another big win for Mid-Continent has been the improvement in data quality. Logility has helped the company detect holes and mistakes in its master data, most noticeably in pricing. Correcting these errors helped streamline operations and created a positive feedback loop by increasing the trust that employees have in the data.
Results
With Logility, Mid-Continent was able to increase sales margins with a clearer view of pricing strategies, accelerate in-depth root cause analysis and reduce the amount of its slow-moving stock. Data quality improved, and employees came to trust the data they were seeing and using every day.
