FMCG — Snacks
Reduction in manual reporting effort
Cut from the monthly review cycle
About
A leading Indian FMCG snacks manufacturer (Crax) where consolidated regional reporting took two to three weeks to reach the executive committee, and arrived too fragmented to trust. We built a unified data warehouse and an executive command centre that gives every region and function the same daily view of sales, inventory, and distributor performance.
Industry
FMCG — Snacks
Company size
10,000+ employees
Founded
1975
The Company
A leading FMCG snacks maker with a reporting infrastructure that had not kept pace
DFM Foods (Crax) operates a multi-brand FMCG snacks portfolio through a large distributor and retail sales network across multiple geographies. Regional operations maintained their own reporting systems, in their own formats, on their own timelines.
The result was a monthly consolidation exercise that consumed significant analyst and regional-finance capacity, and still delivered a picture that was two to three weeks old by the time it reached the executive committee.
The challenge
Fifteen data sources that never agreed with each other
Sales, inventory, distribution, and financial data lived in separate regional systems with no automated consolidation mechanism. The monthly close required extensive manual extraction and reconciliation before any analysis could begin.
By the time a stockout, an underperforming distributor, or a promotional shortfall showed up in the consolidated numbers, the window to act on it had frequently already closed. Consolidated reports also aggregated at a level too coarse to identify the specific SKU or geography driving a variance, which meant further ad hoc analysis before anyone could act.
The Solution
A three-layer data and reporting infrastructure
We built a centralised enterprise data warehouse on Azure, fed by automated ETL pipelines pulling daily from SAP, distributor management systems, trade-promotion platforms, and financial reporting tools, with data quality checks replacing manual reconciliation. On top of that we defined a unified KPI architecture — one agreed calculation for every metric, across SKU, brand, region, distributor, channel, and time period — so every team was finally looking at the same number.
The delivery layer was an executive command centre built in Power BI, giving daily visibility down to individual SKU performance in specific regional markets, with automated commentary flagging significant variances before the monthly review even started.
The Results
60% less reporting effort and a materially faster review cycle
Manual reporting effort fell 60% across regional and central teams combined as the automated warehouse replaced the extraction-and-reconciliation cycle. The monthly review shortened by two weeks, moving leadership from a monthly slide-pack cadence to a daily dashboard view.
The quality of executive discussion changed accordingly — less time reconciling discrepancies, more time on the decisions the data actually revealed. Weekly dashboard reviews replaced the monthly consolidation as the primary vehicle for performance discussion across the group.
For the first time, every region and every function is looking at the same numbers. That sounds simple. It is not. And the difference it makes to how quickly we can identify a problem and act on it is enormous.
Regional CFO, DFM Foods (Crax)
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