Institutional Sales – Big Impact from Big Data

At Hashbrown Systems, we have developed ourselves in to a powerhouse when it comes to managing institutional sales; nimbly, swiftly and efficiently, especially in HoReCa i.e. Hotel Restaurant, Catering and Café.

Due to our association with one of the biggest Indian companies in processed food industry, we have acquired a thorough and deep understanding of the sector. From farmers to retail, we have followed each step and have interacted with almost every stakeholder that affects the final product. 

The technology tools that we created for our client, especially the inclusion of real-time data into the system, demonstrated numbers that took the guesswork out of decision making. In our case, in our association with a processed food marketing company, the trade-off has always been between, price versus volume, cost of inventory versus stock-out or worse - wastage due to over stocking and not to mention the logistics involved in storage and transport.

Not a Data Challenge, but Analysis Challenge

Employing a new set of tools, we cleaned, sifted, and sorted huge amount of data and were able to gather insights about customer behavior, product movement, lead time, almost everything that hid in plain sight.

To misconstrue Sherlock Holmes, ’There is nothing more elusive than an obvious fact.’

As a matter of fact, it was never a data challenge, the food company had troves of data going back decades, but it was in non-machine-readable format to begin with and scattered around in too many files, folders and formats. The exercise spread around departments and employees, who had long forgotten existence of such material and had not imagined if the purchase orders from their distributors during the festival seasons would ever be required for non-tax audit purposes.

An organizational shift is required and essential for Big Data to succeed in any meaningful way. In fact, the management would need courage and perhaps imagination to act on the insights revealed by analysis of business and customer data. Now, if you know your business but you have never employed data analytics, you are essentially leaving a lot of money on the talent and the competition will exploit the space created by your absence.

A major shift has taken place in the way business in conducted today, with decision making getting dependent on data and metrics. One may choose to ignore that at his own peril but transforming an organization to fully capitalize on the treasure horde of data that it possesses, is in itself, a daunting task.

There are numerous reasons why organizations and business fail to incorporate data insights into their decision making. Foremost is the lack of expertise; unless skilled data analysts are part of an organization’s team, collaborating with managers, or any such endeavor shall not come to pass. Another observation that we have made is lack of or insufficient systems and data infrastructure. Right infrastructure is the primary enabler for delivering insights to the right people at the right time. Insight-generation must happen swiftly and efficiently for it to be effective during decision making.

The Role of Hashbrown Systems

Hashbrown Systems designs and builds Data Systems that herald operational efficiencies into legacy organizations. For application of Big Data and insight-generations, we develop middleware that processes the information and data that is owned and processed by the business. One retailer employed our purchasing application to reduce the time of order creation from an average of 45 minutes to under 5 minutes. Using the same application, he was able to reduce the inventory requirement of his business by 13%.

At Hashbrown Systems, we create cloud solutions that process organizational data for managers to take data-driven decisions; we automate set or sub-set of rigorous processes that churn data into insights in timely fashion; we provide skills, impart training and in some cases even consult in the hiring process of data analysts and data engineers.