KYOWA automates inventory management with Yellowfin Signals

Innovative use of automated business monitoring systems reduces manual reporting and stockout events - and delivers more efficient and precise inventory management.

Melbourne, 29 September, 2020 - Yellowfin, the only analytics vendor that combines action-based dashboards, automated discovery and data storytelling, today announced KYOWA, a provider of cosmetic and health foods, has reduced opportunity loss caused by stockout to almost zero by implementing Yellowfin Signals.

Japan-based KYOWA has built a long-standing reputation for its focus on putting customer health first and supporting people with their lifestyle goals since 1960, through its range of high-quality beauty and healthcare products, primarily delivered through mail-order systems.  

KYOWA has used Yellowfin since 2017 for data discovery and collaboration and as part of its ongoing initiatives to improve services for customers, has aimed to further augment their analytical capabilities to enhance decision-making, consolidate reporting in one platform, and eliminate out-of-stock (OOS) events. Also known as stockout, these occur when a large number of items have different lead times.

As Hirofumi Mukaida, Team Leader of the Data Management Team and Group Leader for KYOWA’s Information Strategy Group, explains: “The shortest lead time is 30 days, and the longest is 90 days. We used spreadsheets to enter and manage the inventory count on a daily basis, but we relied on specific people to organise this task, so they sometimes missed items with a small stock, and misjudged timing to order. We wanted to improve the system of relying on such people.” Yellowfin was identified as the best fit solution.

To execute its strategy, KYOWA consolidated its employee monitoring and analysis of metrics by linking its disparate data sources with accounting software and creating a Yellowfin report used to manage their inventory. It then deployed Yellowfin Signals, Yellowfin’s automated business monitoring product offering, to automatically detect and notify their users of important changes in data they may have missed, by simply viewing their reports and dashboards. 

Signals provide automatic detection by taking into account a specific trend with each item and is optimized for use with a large number of products with different stock levels and lead times. It has allowed KYOWA to set trends, such as moving average and the confidence interval of number of shipment, so the team can operate more closely in line with real-world product flows - while removing reliance on previous manual processes.

“By implementing Yellowfin Signals,” Mukaida explains, “we are highly expecting that opportunity loss previously caused by stock-out will be as close to zero as possible in this fiscal year.’

About Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a global BI and analytics software vendor with a suite of world-class products powered by automation. Yellowfin is recognized as an innovator by the world’s leading analyst firms. More than 29,000 organizations and over 3 million end-users across 75 countries use Yellowfin every day. For more information, please visit us at www.yellowfinbi.com.

YELLOWFIN PR:
Kasey Thomas
SSPR
925-285-6449
kthomas@sspr.com