New Zealand’s supply chain leader Kotahi unlocks new opportunities with AI
“We can now provide forecasting outputs to our own staff and customers to help them do their job more effectively in minutes, rather than weeks. This simply wouldn’t have been possible without Azure.”
Matthew Wright: General Manager of Digital Technology, Kotahi
Working with over 50 exporters, importers, and industry partners toward a sustainable and efficient supply chain, Kotahi ensures that New Zealand remains competitive on the world stage. Acting on the insight that technology would inevitably disrupt the supply chain sector, the company took a regional leadership position. “We aligned our strategy across the executive team and board. We knew what the big building blocks were that we had to put in place: an ERP, a data lake, and a scalable integrated platform,” says Wright.
When Wright and the Kotahi team went to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, they met with Microsoft experts and had several valuable conversations over a period of just two days. Upon returning to New Zealand, the Kotahi team decided to go beyond demand forecasting, and look at innovative products that the company’s data could enable.
“The meetings got us interested in Databricks. I think we’re the only player in the logistics industry in Oceania with a full publish-subscribe integration model that sits on top of Azure,” says Wright. “It’s super scalable. We can publish core data to our new revenue-generating products and services, as well as create business efficiency by pushing the data through all the systems we use today,” continues Wright. “We have a way to go on our data journey, but we now have a single core data set that we can use across our applications to make sure we reduce operational risk and greatly speed up processes.”
Huge opportunities have been unlocked in how Wright’s team can understand Kotahi’s customers, what they need, and what’s valuable for them. The team processes the data and then creates new products and services for customers by combining the potentials of Azure Data Lake, Power Apps, and Power BI. Kotahi’s new products and services not only help business efficiency, they also reduce commercial risk for its customers.
“Some of our customers export high-value chilled food products. These products cost several hundred thousand dollars per container. If there are any issues outside our control—such as issues at ports around the world—it’s important that our customers are able to view this [data] quickly,” explains Wright. “We have launched a chilled container report, possible with the data lake, Databricks, Power Apps, and Power BI. That enables the customers who receive the report to understand what they have to do to mitigate the operational risk associated with the delivery of the product they’ve got on the water. The service has reduced the time it takes customers to clearly understand what they need to do by around 75 percent,” he notes.
New products don’t happen overnight. Wright and his team use a design-led approach and focus on understanding and addressing customers’ business needs and issues.
