Project Description

Whyte and Mackay approached Bridgeall to undertake a discovery phase on several key projects related to capturing data across the Whyte and Mackay business.    

One of these projects was the provision of a solution for sustainability reporting, looking at the recycled content and makeup of packaging in use for Whyte and Mackay products. This data, when collected, would be used to prepare statutory reporting for Whyte and Mackay for the Plastic Tax and Extended Producer Responsibility. 

About Whyte and Mackay

Founded in 1844, Whyte & Mackay are a market leader in the global spirits business with an award-winning portfolio of world-renowned brands. As well as making their own single malt and blended Scotch whiskies, Whyte and Mackay also own renowned brands Dalmore, Jura, Tamnavulin and Fettercairn single malts, along with Glayva liqueur and Vladivar vodka.

Challenges facing Whyte and Mackay

Whyte & Mackay were constructing the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) reports manually in Excel, which was proving to be a very time-consuming task. Data was extracted from the existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, then manually transformed into an appropriate format for reporting, and then was calculated for the purposes of EPR reporting. 

Whyte & Mackay also struggled to get visibility of product comparisons, which is vital when looking to re-use components. They were able to save some metadata, but the storage format was cumbersome and restrictive. Their existing ERP system also didn’t allow them to save certification and accreditation files that would be linked to specific components or suppliers. 

With potential new legislation, and changes to existing ones, Whyte & Mackay wanted to be in the position to adapt quickly and have the appropriate data available thanks to flexible reporting. With the existing limitations of their ERP system this was not feasible, and extra processing was needed outside of that.

Bridgeall proposed to create a Power Apps canvas application, which meant there was complete freedom to design the interface, as there are complex rules and relationships between the entities. We made use of Dataverse as the storage mechanism for the data. Dataverse is highly available, scalable, and provides built-in complex security capabilities. It also offers the best performance regarding data storage within Power Platform. 

We needed to extract data from Whyte & Mackay’s existing ERP system in order to have a listing of the stock keeping units (SKUs), components and suppliers, from which we could provide functionality to store additional data using Dataverse. This meant that Whyte & Mackay could continue to utilise their ERP system as usual, but then also had access to a fine-tuned dataset specifically catered to their products. 

One of the new features enabled the ability to copy the metadata from one component to another. This means that data entry is now incredibly quick where the components share similarities. Whyte & Mackay are also able to control the content reaching their reports via a publishing feature, ensuring that data is fully populated and validated first. The publishing features also mean that versioning is possible, to account for where the components of a product would change over time. 

Environmental accreditations and certifications are now able to be stored against specific components or suppliers of components, so Whyte & Mackay can highlight which suppliers are working towards reducing their environmental impact. 

As a result of our efforts, the team has been able to realise the following benefits:  

  • Reduction in manual effort for reporting  
  • Increased visibility of product components  
  • The ability to store more information about the products  
  • Increased searching and filtering capabilities  
  • Started a platform for further improvements 

In future the data required by this solution will grow as the reporting requirement for the regulatory schemes is further defined. As an example, End Producer Responsibility is set to become Enhanced Producer Responsibility and will require additional data points to be captured and used to produce the report. 

A side benefit of this solution is that the new product development team will have visibility of the makeup of the components that go towards making products. This will allow them not only to compare components and SKUs but allow them to potentially streamline components and suppliers in future based on value for money and sustainability.
 

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