CBL join hands with Microsoft to transform island-wide sales operation

Ceylon Biscuits Limited (CBL), the home of Munchee and one of the oldest confectionery manufacturers in Sri Lanka, has partnered with Microsoft to transform the largest field sales force in the country. The manufacturer will use the business analytics solution, Power BI, to help them visualize data and share insights across the organization. 

The partnership will allow CBL’s field sales team to make data-driven decisions about the future based on historical restock information, gain insight into sales progress against forecasts, and analyze the performance of specific geographies. 

To help improve the sales team’s productivity, the Group IT team had prototyped and deployed a mobile application for its sales personnel to automate the paper-based invoicing and manual reporting procedures. However, with the large volumes of data being generated daily, the team was faced with the challenge of deriving actionable Business Intelligence (BI) from the raw data. The manufacturer needed to analyze, visualize and extract deep business insights in real time to improve its end-to-end KPIs.

"We chose Power BI because of its self-service capability, scalability and ease-of-use,” said Chandrima Rodrigo, Group General Manager Information Technology, Ceylon Biscuits Limited. “With Power BI, data visualization is made simple with its ‘Get Data’ capabilities. This, combined with the scale of a SQL server-based Data Warehouse allows us to create dynamic reports in minutes against terabytes of data. The cloud ensured that our solution was deployed with low upfront investment and minimal deployment time while Microsoft and their solutions partner, Fortude, helped us with the seamless integration.”

“CBL was looking for the right partner to implement an enterprise-scale BI solution.  With our experience in delivering projects across the globe, we were able to meet expectations in all aspects,” said Gaurika Wijeratne, AVP – Business Intelligence, Fortude. “Our goal was not only to craft an analytics solution which could tap in to sales insights, but to design and architect a cloud-based analytics platform which could serve as the base for future data & AI scenarios.”

“CBL is looking at BI as a means to drive change and open up new business opportunities,” said Hasitha Abeywardena, Country Manager for Microsoft Sri Lanka and Maldives. “With Power BI, CBL will be able to harness the intelligent cloud and benefit from Microsoft’s investments in predictive analytics and machine learning. As CBL looks to embark on its sales transformation journey, our partner Fortude will play an active role as the manufacturer’s technology advisor and enabler.”
Microsoft is committed to fuel the digital transformation of the FMCG sector with the best-in-class cloud services like Power BI, that are not only efficient as a productivity solution but are also highly robust, secure, and scalable.

To learn more about the partnership, visit https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/ceylon-biscuits-powerbi-sql-server-consumer-goods-fortude-sri-lanka-en.