Linde MH — a subsidiary of KION Group — manufactures a wide range of counterbalanced forklifts and warehouse trucks and provides its customers with logistics design and consulting services and solutions. The company wanted a better understanding of its business operations, and built a BW (SAP Business Warehouse) data warehouse to manage and report on important metrics such as inventory, sales and financial data. However, it quickly discovered that this installation was inefficient, costly and didn’t provide adequate insight. Business leaders were left without visibility into information as basic as how many orders were coming in each month, or how much inventory was on-hand.

Struggling to unlock the full value of its data, Linde MH understood that establishing a more modern and efficient analytics platform was critical to its growth. Without the in-house skills to implement the upgrade itself, Linde MH needed the help of an experienced technology partner.

Avanade helped the company build a roadmap to completely transform its analytics process by leveraging the cloud. By implementing a Microsoft SQL server and Power BI as its primary reporting and business analysis platform, Linde MH will reduce costs, increase efficiency and gain a greater understanding of its business performance, allowing executives and stakeholders to be more agile in their decision-making. In addition to detailed reporting and analysis capabilities, the solution includes an executive dashboard component so that key stakeholders have quick and tailored visibility of important KPIs.

Thanks to Avanade’s access to the Microsoft ecosystem, we began developing the solution on Power BI before the platform had even been launched in China, and it is entirely cloud-hosted in Microsoft Azure.

• The new platform has made reporting far more efficient and is expected to save Linde MH the cost of one full-time employee per department.
• Employees now have access to relevant information in near real-time through a self-serve, user-friendly interface that has dramatically reduced the IT service backlog.
• Linde MH leadership has much greater insight into their company, allowing them to act with increased agility based on the information they receive.