Lula's Journey to Customer-facing Analytics with Explo

Data stands as a cornerstone in Lula’s value proposition to its customers. Lula serves an impressive network of 800 convenience store locations, providing them with delivery enablement and aggregation services. Their platform’s reporting functionality is integral, enabling customer end-users to monitor their delivery performance comprehensively across various channels. 

Lula shares vital metrics such as Sales, Operational Fulfillment, Inventory Performance, and Payout Data, offering access on a daily to weekly basis. This frequency ensures their customers can effectively gauge their chain's performance, making data not just important but indispensable to our offering.

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The challenge

Lula’s customers, comprising 800 convenience store locations, had high expectations regarding the accessibility and granularity of analytics. They sought detailed insights into their operations, requiring sophisticated, customizable dashboards that could track performance across multiple dimensions. These expectations pushed Lula to deliver an analytics solution that could offer high flexibility without the extensive development time typically associated with custom-built solutions.

The decision against in-house development was driven by several considerations. First, the anticipated time to market for an in-house solution was prohibitively long, given the urgent need for these capabilities amongst their customer base. Additionally, the resource allocation required for development, testing, and maintenance of such a system was significant. 

“We were acutely aware that diverting our internal resources towards building an analytics platform could detract from our core mission of delivery enablement and aggregation.” - Philip Tribe, Head of Product at Lula

Lula’s exploration led them to consider Retool and Explo, among other analytics solutions. Retool was familiar to their product team, having been used internally, and it was tempting to extend its use to external analytics. However, their pivot to Explo was motivated by its singular focus on embedding analytics, flexible design, and the breadth of features it offered out of the box. Explo’s specialization in embedded analytics aligned closely to their requirements for rapid implementation, ease of maintenance, and overall cost-effectiveness.

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The solution

Adopting Explo as their underlying analytics solution marked a turning point in how Lula managed and presented data to their customers. 

Lula used Explo to deploy a suite of specialized dashboards plus an extensive reporting feature, each designed to address specific areas of our customer's operational needs:

• Overview Dashboard: This dashboard serves as the executive summary, offering a high-level view of overall store performance. Key metrics such as total sales, average delivery times, and customer satisfaction scores are presented in a clear, digestible format, enabling quick assessment and decision-making.
• Operations Dashboard: This dashboard tracks efficiency, delivery performance, and operational bottlenecks. It's instrumental for identifying areas of improvement in logistics and operations.
• Menu Performance Dashboard: Tailored for customers with diverse product offerings, this dashboard provides insights into sales performance at the category and item levels. It helps identify top-selling items and categories, optimizing inventory management and marketing strategies.
• Payouts Dashboard: Focused on the financial transactions, this dashboard tracks payouts, revenue streams, and related financial metrics. It's crucial for financial planning and ensuring timely payments to vendors and partners.
• Reports Section: Beyond the dashboards, the reports section empowers users to create custom reports based on four key datasets. This feature supports scheduled exports, enabling regular, automated delivery of tailored reports.

Leveraging Explo’s Report Builder

The integration of Explo's Report Builder into Lula was a strategic move to enhance customization and self-service. It allows end-users to create reports based on their unique needs, facilitating a more personalized analysis and experience. This addition not only elevated the user experience but also reduced the volume of one-off report requests, streamlining the data sharing process.

“Our experience with the Explo team has been nothing short of exceptional. Their support and deep consultative approach have been crucial in redefining complex dashboard interactions and swiftly resolving any issues, further enhancing our dashboards’ utility and impact.”

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Impact

The introduction of Explo’s white-labeled dashboards and reports has been met with overwhelming positivity from Lula’s customers. The agility afforded by Explo in dashboard and report creation has led to substantial cost savings, conservatively estimated at tens of thousands of dollars. This efficiency has eliminated the need for extensive developer involvement, thereby conserving valuable engineering resources.

Highlights:

• Cost Savings: $20,000.
• Time to Market: Approximately six weeks to launch.
• Dashboard/Report Creation Time: Less than a day for basic boards

“I wholeheartedly recommend Explo. Its ability to facilitate rapid development and iteration based on customer feedback is unparalleled. Explo not only saves development resources but also precious time, making it an invaluable asset for any data-driven organization looking to enhance their analytics capabilities efficiently.”

Lula’s partnership with Explo has been transformative, enabling the company to provide their customers with comprehensive, easy-to-access performance data, solidifying their market position as a leader in delivery enablement and aggregation for convenience stores.