In operation since 1995, Alfaloc is an international express shipping company specialized in urgent delivery services. The company provides a 24-hour service and covers several business areas, from the molds and plastic industry to the automotive and pharmaceutical sectors. Alfaloc currently operates five delegations in Portugal and one in Spain.

Alfaloc had an employee devoted to manually processing data collected by the company every day. For users to have new data to analyze in the morning, this employee had to work extra hours to issue Power BI reports overnight. This process represented a tremendous burden on both the employee and the company and was subject to errors typically associated with manual processing, such as those resulting from user changes, late data updates, and reliability.

Guilherme Ferreira, Strategic Partnership Manager at Alfaloc’s parent company Glaxus, attended one of the Dashboard in a Day workshops our team hosts throughout the year when he learned about PowerBI Robots. Guilherme saw what DevScope’s report automation tool could do and realized that PowerBI Robots’ ability to schedule and send customized Power BI reports could potentially eliminate the need for the company to have someone working long hours issuing and sending internal reports. After some testing, Alfaloc decided to adapt its many Power BI reports to the automation provided by PowerBI Robots.

Automatic shipping and sales reports were Alfaloc’s priorities and PowerBI Robots made these processes much faster: once billing is done, the analytics team only needs to refresh the database and use PowerBI Robots to send the latest report to SharePoint and via email to all recipients who need it.

“Instead of sending individual emails to each user, I only click two buttons: one to update the database, the other to send the reports.”
– Guilherme Ferreira, Strategic Partnership Manager at Glaxus

After dealing with its most pressing needs, the company found other innovative ways to use PowerBI Robots to tackle other problems, such as the automation of their input errors report. When goods are audited, data is entered manually, thus prone to human error. In the past, Alfaloc only detected these errors during billing, which happened only every 15 days, and the company had to send over 200 emails when that happened to find the source of the error. With PowerBI Robots, the auditing team receives an email as soon as errors are detected to correct them, translating to tremendous savings in emails, time, and effort.

Alfaloc is also taking advantage of PowerBI Robots’ audit evidence capabilities in sync with a sales forecast system based on Excel. Whenever data is updated in Excel, it’s also updated in Power BI, and PowerBI Robots saves the report at that point.

With Power BI adapted to most of the company’s areas, PowerBI Robots is accelerating several processes. Power BI is now monitoring the company’s quality department, as well as incidents and complaints to suppliers and customers, and PowerBI Robots is automatically informing the employees in charge. Alfaloc also has the re-dispatching maps for each delegation on Power BI and automatically informs them of their compliance rate through PowerBI Robots.

“We have everything in Power and automatically sent by PowerBI Robots.”
– Guilherme Ferreira, Strategic Partnership Manager at Glaxus

Alfaloc has a BI-driven culture supported by Power BI, and PowerBI Robots is an essential part of it. It’s not enough to have up-to-date data available; you must also get it to the right people on time, and PowerBI Robots ensures it. The company hopes to move on to PowerBI Portal in the near future, giving all users 24/7 access to interactive reports.

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