About Trilations

Trilations is a consultancy company, dedicated to assist companies to translate their company strategy in effective processes and to streamline organizations and supporting systems, thus maximizing stakeholder value and setting the adequate basis for benchmark business performance.

Perfect solutions for your business

One of the focus domains at Trilations is Business Intelligence. Below you can find a case study of one of our projects.

Cost to serve derived from activity based cost model

For a brewer client we have created an Activity Based Costing (ABC) model making the actual Cost to Serve (CTS) transparent on a monthly basis.

The CTS was calculated for thousands of Point of Sales (POS) starting from several warehouses taking into account reception of goods, stock movements, order picking, cargo loading and milk run deliveries (limited direct deliveries). Thousands of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) were taken into account.

In the first phase of the project we defined the cost model and identified the needed data in the SAP environment.

During the second phase we identified and created all data transformations needed to calculate the monthly ABC model in CostPerform.

In a third phase we created a clear and easily interpretable CTS dashboard. This dashboard was created in QlikView, based on exported data from the ABC tool. 

Training was given to internal controllers to perform monthly monitoring tasks without the need for our intervention.

As an add-on to this project we defined a budget model (more aggregated, sales forecast driven) and a variance analysis model to explain the difference between budget and actual figures.

Project goals

• Create a Cost To Serve (CTS) model based on Activity Based Costing (ABC)

• Create the SAP data transformation queries

• Use ABC tool

Technologies & methodologies used

• Activity Based Costing

• CostPerform

• SAP

• QlikView

• CostPerform

• DAR principle

Project flow

• Define ABC model integrating thousands of SKUs and thousands of Points of Sales (POS)

• Define SAP data extraction & transformation needs for uploading in ABC tool

• Enable monthly calculation with minimal human input

• Develop dashboards for management

Results

• Monthly calculation of the CTS based on SKUs and per POS

• Clear insights into CTS variances

• Reduction of CTS by identification of the most profitable POS