About the Client
Canusa Wood is a Vancouver-based company that has grown into one of North America’s leading importers of hardwood plywood, and panel products. Its extensive supply chain encompasses dozens of suppliers from around the world, enabling Canusa Wood to offer a vast array of top-quality materials suitable for various applications such as interior, exterior, marine, and industrial applications.
Despite operating with a small team of 25+ staff, Canusa Wood generates an impressive annual revenue of several million per employee.
Project Managed by:
- MSP Corp West
- Vancouver, British Columbia
The Challenge
One of the most significant challenges faced by Canusa Wood is effective inventory management. As a company that buys material from multiple mills across the world and distributes its inventory across Canada and the United States, they encounter a considerable lead time for fulfilling their orders.
To improve its inventory and sales management processes, Canusa Wood adopted a new, specialized ERP software called Agility four years ago. This system is designed for building supply distributors to effectively manage inventory, facilitate purchasing and sales order management.
Over the years, Canusa Wood accumulated vast amounts of valuable data through its ERP system. To leverage this data and gain relevant insights, they wanted to explore the use of business intelligence tools. Their goal was to create sophisticated reports that will allow their sales and buying teams to make informed decisions and enhance the customer journey.
The Solution
Due to the limitations of the Agility ERP software, Canusa Wood required more advanced reporting capabilities. To address this need, they invested in PRO2SQL, a tool that facilitates the data transfer from Agility to an Azure-hosted SQL database. In addition, their adoption of Microsoft 365 made Power BI a perfect choice as their Business Intelligence tool.
As a small company with no IT staff, Canusa Wood turned to MSP Corp West to help them set up their SQL database and convert their raw data into digestible information via Power BI.
The MSP Corp West team built the SQL queries for Power BI and helped Canusa decipher and interpret the data they wanted to see in their Power BI reports.
Moreover, MSP Corp West provided training to the key project stakeholders but also to a co-op student that Canusa hired to accelerate their data utilization.
Results
