Driving Innovation in Organic Food Manufacturing - Becoming Data Driven with FreshBI
Company Description – Nature’s Path
Nature’s Path, a leading organic food producer, is committed to delivering high-quality, innovative products to its customers. With a focus on sustainable and health-conscious choices, Nature’s Path seeks to continuously enhance its ability to track and analyze the performance of its new innovative items and product groupings.
Software Solutions Used – Power BI, SharePoint
In addressing the challenge of tracking the performance of new innovative items, Nature’s Path partnered with FreshBI, a trusted business intelligence firm, leveraging a combination of Power BI and SharePoint technologies.
Initial Problem
Nature’s Path lacked a systematic way to track the performance of its innovative items and product groupings, and more than that, lacked the analytics to make data-driven business decisions around the longevity or sustainability of these items, development of new innovative items, and more. This lack of visibility hindered the company's ability to understand past performance, visualize current performance, and prescribe new business actions to create their own desired outcomes. Nature's Path recognized this and looked for a partner who could take them to the next level of business intelligence, perspective, and data maturity, and enable them to operate with increased confidence, efficiency, and profitability.
Our Solution
In collaboration with Nature’s Path, FreshBI implemented a comprehensive solution:
SharePoint Integration: FreshBI created a SharePoint list containing all “Innovation” items and their relevant attributes. This list served as a centralized repository for tracking and managing innovative products.
Data Blending and Dashboard Creation: FreshBI blended the SharePoint list with Nature’s Path's existing Products table to create a unified dataset. Using Power BI, FreshBI then built a dynamic dashboard comparing individual innovative item performance and margins against other items, as well as specific product groupings. This dashboard provided Nature’s Path with actionable insights into the performance of its innovative products.
Customizable Analysis: FreshBI developed a customizable and exportable table within the dashboard, allowing users to conduct ad hoc analysis and explore data further as needed.
Value Delivered
The collaboration between Nature’s Path and FreshBI resulted in significant savings in time, money, and other resources that otherwise would have been required for Nature’s Path to develop a similar solution in-house. Additionally, product managers and finance leaders at Nature’s Path now have enhanced visibility into the performance and profitability of new innovative items and product groupings. This visibility enables informed decision-making, leading to cost savings by discontinuing underperforming products, faster cross-functional alignment, and greater efficiency across the organization.
Conclusion
By partnering with FreshBI and leveraging Power BI and SharePoint technologies, Nature’s Path enhanced its ability to track and analyze the performance of its many products and gained the ability to understand what happened, why it happened, predict what was likely to happen, and create their own desired business outcomes. This strategic collaboration underscores Nature’s Path's commitment to innovation and data-driven decision-making in delivering high-quality organic products to its customers.