Nowadays, being data driven can be seen as one of the biggest industry buzzwords, however, for enterprises that really think of data as an asset and consequently use it to improve decision-making, a whole new world of opportunities opens up. Stedin, a Dutch utility company, is facing increased complexity and is required to adhere to faster changing internal and external needs, as a result of the ongoing energy transition. The Supply Chain department within Stedin is an important business function and one of the department's ambitions is to leverage data more, to become more data driven in its decision making across the board to better face the aforementioned challenges of the energy transition. Maximiliaan Apel from the Data & Analytics team at BearingPoint helped Stedin with initiating and establishing a Business Intelligence team to facilitate this ambition.
Stedin is a distribution grid operator that provides gas and electricity to around 2 million households, which makes it one of the three big distribution grid operators in the Netherlands. Stedin is responsible for renewing and maintaining the gas and electricity grid and is mainly active in the Utrecht, Rotterdam, the Hague and Zeeland areas. In 2020 Stedin merged their Logistic, Procurement and Facilities division into one Supply Chain department.
To enable data driven steering for the Supply Chain department, a Business Intelligence capability and a corresponding team was advised to be initiated. This team was to be a central information point regarding all data-related matters within the organization; whereby data generated by the Supply Chain was to be reported in a visual and manageable way, with the intention to create actionable insights and support decision-making by the Supply Chain department. Guided by these preconditions, BearingPoint assisted in the set-up of this new business function.
The team’s foundation, to realize a more data driven Supply Chain department, was built upon a four-step approach:
Alongside the four-step approach, the Business Intelligence team is organizing all its activities on three distinct levels in the Supply Chain department: strategically, tactically and operationally. Which means that at each of these levels the four steps are executed, thus per level the relevant insights/KPIs are defined, and a recurring meeting centered around these insights/KPIs is organized with the appropriate people for that level. Resulting in a meeting-architecture that is well connected per division as it branches-out along the organizational levels (see Figure 1).
The reason for organizing according to these distinct levels is twofold:
“By means of the top-down KPI-tree and the bottom-up reporting cascade the Stedin’s Supply Chain department, through the Business Intelligence team, has taken the first steps into becoming data driven and thereby is able make better informed decisions”, says Maximiliaan Apel. “BearingPoint helped Stedin with the conceptualization, structure and growth of the Business Intelligence team, which is now a fully functioning team within the Supply Chain”.
Lucas van Luijtelaar
Manager