Executive Summary

An innovator in its field, AP&G (formerly Atlantic Paste & Glue) is the manufacturer of Catchmaster® glue traps, GLOstik and SilenTrap Flying Insect Traps, Ovi-Catch mosquito traps, and Catch ZoneTM large area solutions, as well as a wide range of other highly regarded solutions for pest management. A company who literally built a better mousetrap, they needed a solution to track inventory and generate reports and turned to MIBAR.

Stacks of Spreadsheets: Life Prior to Power BI

Prior to the implementation of Power BI, AP&G employees spent hours downloading reports from Dynamics GP, putting them into a spreadsheet each week, and combining this spreadsheet data with other spreadsheets.

Forced to download multiple detail reports and manually create inventory reports, this led to slow, laborious, and error-prone reporting. After hearing about MIBAR’s success with the Power BI solution, they turned to us to expand and automate their reporting and improve their visibility.

Power BI Delivers New Insights from Dynamics GP and Excel

When AP&G initially spoke with MIBAR, they were entering output data from GP into Excel by hand, which resulted in inaccurate data and other calculation issues.

Like any manufacturer, AP&G needed a solution that could track labor and compare it to output and productivity. They couldn’t afford mistakes regarding employee hours, overtime, holiday pay, and the necessary payroll taxes that went along with it. In this, we were able to customize their Power BI implementation to include two reports—a logistics report and a manufacturing report—each providing a deeper understanding of the spreadsheets.

New Visibility into Logistics

With many of their clients’ reputations relying on minimal errors in manufacturing and shipping, AP&G needed to ensure products had minimal defects, orders were fulfilled accurately, and in the event there were issues, the company could track and address anything. AP&G needed visibility into how much they were expending on defective products, to whom those products were being shipped, the frequency of issues, and take steps to fix errors on the logistics side.

With Shipping Credits reports, they could track credits by customers, which month defects occurred, the reasons credits were offered, and much more. This provided them a better look into their facility and offered insights into when they may need to hire new people, as well as key metrics like orders per error, credits per item shipped, and more.

The Bigger Picture in Manufacturing

In addition to their logistics concerns, AP&G needed to understand productivity and challenges at their own facility. Following the success of our logistics reports, they again turned to us for better insights into their manufacturing. Initially relying on a variety of Excel spreadsheets rolled up weekly into an aggregated report, AP&G wanted to track things like efficiency, quality, labor costs, and more without the manual processes and errors that plagued their processes.

With Power BI, they were able to automate this process, in turn being able to track by day, not week. This allowed them to better understand month-to-date and year-to-date efficiency and take control over their business. Power BI dashboards made it easy to get at-a-glance information when needed, but also provided drill-down reports for others in the organization.

Power BI Delivers Dynamic Reports and Greater Visibility

One of the biggest challenges faced by AP&G was the amount of manual reporting they had to complete. Labor costs, logistics errors, and more were all tracked manually in Excel, leading to a time consuming process to get even a basic understanding of processes in the organization. With Power BI, these reports were more dynamic, automatically updating and tracking information in an easy to understand table. While spreadsheets are still a key part of the equation, Power BI offers a cleaner view with fewer errors.

Today, whether they need year to year, year to date, or month to date analysis, AP&G can see it with a few clicks. No more hours spent aggregating spreadsheets and hoping everything turns out right.