Project Description
Market leader in the global spirits business Whyte and Mackay, wanted to fully digitise their processes. Each department used a mix of digital and paper records as well as a mix of communication methods. This meant that information could easily be lost, misplaced, processes were more difficult to learn, and analysing records was extremely time consuming. Bridgeall helped the team to create a Power Apps maturation and warehousing solution by combining their network of departments into a unified powerhouse.
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
Just like many industries, digitisation is rapidly changing expectations for business processes. Users from all departments are expected to gain a complete and up-to-date picture of what is happening around the business – this was the case with Whyte and Mackay.
However, this was being made difficult due to their existing paper-based systems and manual processes. As well as this, each department was in a different physical location and needed to pass information between each other. The admin team would schedule tanker deliveries, which the security team would log once they had arrived. They would check the details of the delivery and then pass their recorded data to the warehouse team.
Each department was using a mix of digital and paper records as well as multiple communication methods. This meant that information could easily be lost, and processes were all the more difficult to learn. In addition to this, different calculations were performed by different teams inside the warehouses and as this was a manual process analysing the data was made more difficult.
Bridgeall worked with the team to scope and propose a digital transformation project. We used Microsoft Power Apps Canvas Apps to create the app as it gave us the option to create bespoke interfaces. This was incredibly important as the application needed to have a flexible interface to reflect the processes.
There were areas on site where internet access was potentially going to be limited, so we built offline capabilities into the application so that records would not be lost and could be saved to the cloud once connectivity returned.
For data storage, we used Dataverse as it is enterprise-level, performant, and offers the best integration as it is part of Microsoft’s Power Platform. We used Power Automate for background processing tasks, as well as for push notifications to the tablets, which would automatically communicate status updates to users. We also used Power BI for reporting.
As a result of our efforts, Whyte and Mackay were able to realise the following benefits across the business:
- The admin team are now able to schedule, reschedule and plan a year’s worth of delivery.
- Increased communication across teams – the app now triggers notifications to different departments through each part of the process, meaning now everyone is on the same page.
- Increased security – security now has up to date information from the admin team which they can cross reference to ensure all deliveries are accurate and as expected.
We standardised processes resulting in a more consistent solution. - The move from a paper to digital process meant that management has easier access to business insights.
- The team now has all the information in a central database which makes it easier to pull information, for example for auditing purposes everything is readily available.
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