Welcome to the Dashboard Effect Podcast. I'm Brick Thompson.
Caleb Ochs:And I'm Caleb Ochs.
Brick Thompson:How's it going, Caleb?
Caleb Ochs:Not too bad Brick, how are you?
Brick Thompson:I'm good. So we're going to try something a little different today. We're gonna try to hold ourselves to 10 minutes, and just kind of tell a quick story about a success with a client. See if we can do it.
Caleb Ochs:I have faith.
Brick Thompson:Okay, I'm glad you do. All right, well, why don't you get us started? Maybe you could sort of lay the context here for the company we're gonna be talking about without giving their name.
Caleb Ochs:Sure. So I guess, where do I want to start? Do I want to start with ultimately what we did for them? Or do I want to start with... leave the listener in suspense till the end?
Brick Thompson:Let's tell the good news up front.
Caleb Ochs:Okay. All right. So this company, I'll give a high level of what they did. Essentially, we saved them, or we enabled them to find a million dollars worth of uninvoiced stuff.
Brick Thompson:One million dollars.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, with a "M", Pinky to the mouth.
Brick Thompson:Exactly.(laughs)
Caleb Ochs:So they were able to find that through the reporting that we built for them. This company, what they did, is they handled some material in the oil refining process that you're able to reuse after it's been used in the refining process. So what they would do is they would take it, go clean the material up, and then ship it back to the refinery for use again. And as you can imagine, that takes a lot of shipping back and forth, to the refinery, to their plant, to the refinery to their plant, and that's their biggest cost and their biggest thing that they have to manage. So a lot of demurrage, a lot of just shipping, looking at routes, and that's really what we're going after, when we set out to do the reporting. Let's optimize some routes. Let's make sure that they're scheduling their trucks to go pick up at the right time, that type of thing. They were also going through an ERP migration, so we're actually helping them look at their data and make sure that their data was being migrated into this new ERP correctly. And that's kind of how we got started.
Brick Thompson:Okay, so our main mission was to improve their efficiency, and reduce their costs around, basically pickup and delivery and demurrage.
Caleb Ochs:Right picking the right carriers for the right routes. You know, that type of stuff.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. Okay. All right. But as part of that, we also did some financial reporting.
Caleb Ochs:Yep. So as we went through, you know, pulling together these reports, building things out, we did do some financial reports for them. As they were looking at them and doing some of this validation to their new ERP -- essentially, this company used to run an all spreadsheets, and they made a ridiculous amount of money doing it. So they decided let's get an ERP. Maybe we can get better and make even more money. So as they were doing that, they were looking at their old spreadsheet, looking at the ERP, looking at our reports, making sure everything was lining up. And what they realized is that they found that they missed a million dollars worth of invoicing, through that process.
Brick Thompson:Oh, my gosh.
Caleb Ochs:I know, just shocking. So I guess that's the meat of it, right is that they had this huge benefit, like right away, and that's not even, that's a side benefit really is where that came from. We were setting out to help them save costs. And I think that we ultimately did that, and showed them what carriers to use on what routes, and where they're, you know, having poor rates compared to other routes, that type of stuff. And, you know, when you're in the logistics industry -- that was me in the past life -- and one of the things that we looked at all the time was this carrier charges x, and then we have four other carriers on the same route, and they charge way more. So we're going to go with the cheaper carrier. You can actually use that to negotiate rates with the carriers. So they got all of that good benefit out of the reporting. And they got the million dollars in savings.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. Recovered invoicing. Yeah. Well, what I love about that is they reported they were able to go ahead and do that invoicing, and they got paid for it. I went back in our books to look at what it cost them to do all of the work they did with us. So, building out the data warehouse, onboarding a new ERP system, all of the reporting around deliveries, pick up, demurrage, all that stuff, and then the financial reporting. And the total cost for all of that work over a few months was $95,000. And this sort of side benefit that emerged, gave them a 10x return on that investment immediately. And this is not an uncommon thing that we see in BI projects. Once you're able to see your data, it's amazing what you'll discover.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, right. I mean, I'd spend $95,000. Right now to get a million back.
Brick Thompson:I would too.(laughs) Yeah, so I think sometimes the concern is, okay, we're going to spend some money, some tens of thousands of dollars on this project, sometimes hundreds of thousands, depending on on how big the project is, how many data sources and so on. You know, are we going to get return for that? It's amazing how quickly you get return once you can start looking at your data and seeing what's really going on.
Caleb Ochs:Right. I mean, this is kind of an exceptional story. But, you know, it's not totally uncommon or unheard of, maybe not to find a million dollars right away. But, you know, to realize some of that return very quickly in some BI projects. And that's, I know, we've talked about it before, but it's worth reiterating that you really have to do that analysis of what is the return on this thing going to be, because good BI projects are not cheap. But they do have a high potential for good ROI.
Brick Thompson:Yep. Yep, that's definitely true. Well, we've got other stories, too. We might pepper a few more in here. But this was a good one. I was I was glad to revisit it. I had forgotten about it. And talking to the visualization engineer who worked on this project, She remembered hearing from the client just sort of as an aside,"Oh, by the way, we found a million dollars of invoicing, we're able to go ahead and get that," just sort of as a throw away. And that was just great news. So nice to see that ROI immediately.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, yeah. I mean, we love hearing that type of thing. You know, and, you know, we try and be intentional with every project that we do of what's this going to do, and how is this going to impact your business. But you know, those kind of unexpected wins, those are always great to see. Makes us feel like we're doing good in the world.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, that was a good one. Most of them usually line up with what we meant to do, or the client meant to do. This was just a nice side benefit.
Caleb Ochs:Right, right.
Brick Thompson:All right. Well, we're at, what, about seven and a half minutes. I think we kept ourselves to the 10.
Caleb Ochs:That was all right.
Brick Thompson:Good job.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, you too.
Brick Thompson:All right. I'll talk to you soon.