Indiana Carton, based in Bremen, IN, is a leader in the folding carton industry with an emphasis on high quality products and environmental stewardship. The team at Indiana Carton is embracing the potential of data-driven decision-making and recently completed a project in collaboration with Industry Labs and the Applied Analytics & Emerging Technology Lab at Notre Dame to implement advanced forecasting dashboards to improve customer service.
It is sometimes difficult to get accurate forecasts from customers, which led to the development of internal forecasting methods at Indiana Carton. The sales representatives ended up spending a significant amount of time pulling static data from the ERP system and everyone had different methods for demand estimations. This ultimately led to cross-functional misalignment, specifically affecting production schedule and inventory levels. In response, Industry Labs helped develop a dynamic PowerBI forecasting dashboard which pulls ERP data and visualizes it for easier analysis.
This tool will result in a whopping 500 hours of estimated annual reduction in forecasting manhours and standardize forecasting calculations across sales reps. In addition, the tool will increase visibility into demand planning for the Indiana Carton executive team.
This project was completed in colaboration with the Applied Analytics & Emerging Technology Lab.