New business intelligence modules for Cybake make decisions quicker, more accurate and better informed
Three business intelligence (BI) modules have been added to Cybake that users can deploy totally free of charge until September 25, 2020.
The three new BI modules analyze sales, profit, and retail stock, respectively, giving users a clear, at-a-glance, visual picture of how their bakery is doing at any time. This was achieved by exploiting the Power BI capabilities within the Microsoft Azure cloud framework that RedBlack uses to deliver Cybake to its subscribers.
Cybake users can now check visualizations of their bakeries’ operations in sales, profit, and retail stock, at any time. They can also slice and dice their views and interrogate the data in a myriad of ways.
Analytics of key performance indicators (KPIs) in all three new BI modules are represented in graphical pie charts, bar charts and graphs. Graphical, as opposed to numerical, KPIs are far more easily seen and understood by colleagues across a business.
At the same time, the three new sales, profit and retail stock BI modules make bakery management both easier and more detailed, leading to better, more accurate, decision making.
Jane Tyler, managing director of RedBlack and Cybake’s creator, says: “Our work with bigger bakeries and supermarkets has always kept Cybake at the cutting-edge of analysis, forecasting and production planning.
“By making full use of the cloud, we have now made it so that everyone across a bakery can easily see where they were, where they are up to, and where they need to go.
“The volume of data that our new BI modules process, the speed with which they analyse that data and the amount of detail they drill down to, makes decision-making with Cybake quicker, more accurate and more informed.”
Put broadly, the new BI modules better identify sales trends in both a bakery’s customers and its products. Furthermore, as management users now have the full picture, they can share it with colleagues across the business at the same time.
The modules avoid bakeries having to pull together, say, a dozen reports into Excel spreadsheets or, worse, manually process the data and do their own calculations.
Whereas before, bakers may have needed twelve reports – which would then have to be deciphered and considered – Cybake’s new BI modules present all this data in just three graphical screens.
Meet the modules
The first of Cybake’s new BI modules is an Invoiced Sales Analyzer which shows high-level sales trend reports for customers and products that can be interrogated down to individual transaction level (see screenshot above).
As just some examples, the Invoiced Sales Analyzer shows you how much discount you have been giving on each account; whether sales of product x are increasing; whether product y’s are decreasing; and who is (or isn’t) buying product z.
The second new BI module is a Sales Profit Analyser that shows trend information and detailed margin data for invoiced sales from both product and customer perspectives (see screenshot below).
For example, it shows you whether you are still profitable on certain lines after customer discounts, or whether you are staying on track on margins for each and every one of your bakery’s products.
Importantly, this module also identifies data anomalies on products that may be tagged with incorrectly set up recipes and/or costings, which could skew margin data.
Finally, and specifically for retail bakeries, Cybake’s new Stock Analyzer displays all retail stock movements for the previous twelve weeks.
The Stock Analyzer displays all retail stock transactions and unaccounted items, quickly identifying stock that is unaccounted for in your bakery business.
The Stock Analyzer also provides reports on retail stock reconciliation by shop and by product. Plus, it reports on every waste transaction recorded by retail outlets for the last twelve weeks and, crucially, the reasons given for the waste (as shown below).
Data from all three of Cybake’s new BI modules can be outputted easily to Excel and .csv. formats.
All three new BI modules are now available to Cybake subscribers and can be used free of charge until September 25. Please contact the Cybake support team to arrange activation.
Seamus Quinn is the head of communications for Cybake, Cybake USA and Cybake Australia.
