DC Dental Streamlines Supply Chain Processes and Optimizes Warehouse Management with AlphaBOLD’s Power BI Solution
About DC Dental
Established in 2002, DC Dental is the fastest growing independent dental supplier aiming to satisfy its customers’ needs through three key ingredients; commitment to value, large variety of products with fast delivery, and high-quality customer service.
DC Dental is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland with a state-of-the-art equipment showroom. They offer technical service to dentists in Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Maryland. DC Dental is dedicated to helping dentists operate efficiently by offering the best prices on dental supplies and equipment.
About AlphaBOLD
AlphaBOLD is a technology services company headquartered in Carlsbad, California. We aim to use technology for solving complex business problems. AlphaBOLD specializes in a range of Microsoft services such as Dynamics 365, SharePoint, BI, AI, IoT, DevOps, and Oracle NetSuite solutions. AlphaBOLD also provides custom solutions for clients from various industries. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, AlphaBOLD has delivered 100+ successful projects.
AlphaBOLD is committed to redefining success in consulting by enabling its worldwide customer base with digital transformation through harmonizing people, business processes, and technology innovation.
Challenges Faced by DC Dental
Basic level interface for warehouse management
DC Dental was using WaveTrack as their warehouse management system. While this system perfectly fits small-scale companies, as DC Dental branched out, it outgrew the basic functionalities offered by this warehouse management system. As a result, DC Dental could not seamlessly fulfill customer orders and would often face backlog due to poor warehouse visibility and lost data.
Disparate data between ERP and warehouse management solution
DC Dental uses NetSuite as ERP to track order fulfillment and sales orders. Even though the back-end APIs syncs NetSuite with WaveTrack, these systems would usually show different information for the same order because of glitches in synchronization processes and delays in sync frequency. Employees would have to double-check data and spend hours rectifying data discrepancies. Not only would this waste time and money, but it would also result in lowered productivity due to grunt work.
Inefficient tools to measure employee performance and productivity
With growing operations, it was becoming difficult for DC Dental to manage excel sheets to measure employee performance. They needed a more organized, optimized, and efficient method to gauge employee performance and isolate problem areas behind late orders. Managing excel sheets was not only proving to be a time-consuming task. It was also becoming increasingly impractical as operations grew.
Therefore, DC Dental was looking for a solution provider to help them simplify their internal processes by introducing new technological advancements that would help them gain more visibility into their warehouse management processes.
Streamlining the warehouse – Enter AlphaBOLD.
AlphaBOLD and DC Dental partnered together to address these challenges and achieve the company’s end goal of warehouse management optimization.
Optimizing interface with warehouse management analytics
As DC Dental relied on the WaveTrack warehouse management system to monitor its inventory and warehouse processes, this system merely provided very basic level interfaces. By utilizing Power BI for data modeling and data visualization, AlphaBOLD developed analytics for DC Dental that give them a complete and comprehensive view of all aspects of their warehouses in one single, interactive dashboard.
The new analytics allowed DC Dental to gain more visibility into warehouse management and inventory tracking without navigating back and forth with employees. They could easily manage and track warehouse activities from the dashboard and thus become more time and cost-efficient. This also allowed DC Dental to focus on capacity planning which, as a result, helped reduce the overall risk for the company. They now had efficient inventory monitoring and were able to minimize problem areas such as the impact of replenishment on delivery.
Correlating the warehouse management system with NetSuite
AlphaBOLD was able to help DC Dental overcome the basic glitches that would result in data discrepancies between their ERP system, i.e., NetSuite, and their warehouse management system, i.e., WaveTrack. Our experts used an in-house built Power BI data connector to fetch data from NetSuite. This was tricky for our BI experts because Microsoft does not support Power BI connectivity with NetSuite. However, the custom connector designed by our talented BOLDEnthusiasts was able to bridge this gap by connecting Power BI with NetSuite.
Our team created a detailed discrepancy report for DC Dental that identified any outstanding orders between NetSuite and WaveTrack. This allowed them to stay ahead of things enabling a proactive approach that kept their systems synchronized.
Employee Performance Visibility
Our solution offered more visibility to DC Dental by creating a powerful dashboard that facilitated them in getting necessary answers about employee productivity and reasons behind late orders in just a few clicks. This empowered them to optimize their resources further and focus on areas of improvement. With improved visibility, DC Dental consistently spotted inefficiencies and reduced associated risks by foreseeing future delays and mistakes. Furthermore, with the ability to gauge the performance of warehouse workers, DC Dental focused on increasing its productivity and boost performance by zones.
"By partnering with AlphaBOLD, we were able to streamline our supply chain processes. We now have a much more sophisticated and user-friendly warehouse management system that allows us to track our inventory and the performance of our employees. AlphaBOLD has provided us with the right tools we need to stay ahead of the crowd!"
