Stretchline enjoys actionable business insights with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Stretchline, a global manufacturer of narrow elastic fabric, wanted to consolidate disparate data points for seven manufacturing plants spread across geographies. The manufacturing plants are at least 25 years old and were comprised of distributed and siloed applications ecosystems, resulting in difficulties in extracting data for reconciliation, analysis, and reporting.

The manual data collection and analysis processes were prone to error due to a lack of standardized validation rules. It  took up to four days per plant to collate data from different systems. This routine consumed a lot of time and led to inconsistencies in reported data. In addition, redundant data entry overtaxed sales and financial teams, hampering productivity.

Stretchline’s management wanted to be able to aggregate and analyze plant data in near real time to customize operations at various locations based on specific market needs. The company sought a secure, scalable solution to consolidate data points across sites, deliver up-to-date access to plant data, and enable intelligent analytics for predictive decision-making.

Stretchline evaluated various solutions that would help the company create an integrated IT ecosystem to consolidate all cross-plant data.

The manufacturer found that various solutions would require the company to use a variety of sub-tools to extract, evaluate, and process different types of data. Stretchline discovered that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Oracle Autonomous Database eliminates complex administration in a single, integrated system that collects, consolidates, and reports global plant data, covering the end-to-end process. The fully automated cloud database was easy to understand and offered better data reconciliation, analysis, and reporting capabilities.

After using OCI and Oracle Autonomous Database for analytics and data warehousing, Stretchline generated reports 5X faster by eliminating the need to log into different systems to gather data manually. In addition, at the group level, the company reduced the workload on its finance team, freeing up staff to focus more on essential tasks such as improving financial processes with analytics.

Further, due to a lack of file upload capabilities, Microsoft Excel reports were previously sent via email,  creating challenges in securing sensitive data. Now, with the data uploaded to OCI, the information is more secure and protected.

Moving to a cloud-based environment enabled management to view plant data from end to end via an intuitive dashboard, which delivered valuable insights within massive amounts of data from across the plants. This depth of data access improved business processes, workflows, and decision-making.

Meanwhile, a daily sales dashboard helped the company streamline global sales reporting and forecasting. As a result, the sales team can  access accurate, current, and evolving sales data and drill down into specific customer and vendor data.

Stretchline also benefited from logistics efficiencies by better optimizing shipping routes and reducing estimated arrival times for delivery to its customers.