Oct 2025 · powerbi · supply-chain · automation
Inventory Health Dashboard for a LATAM Supply Chain Team
Turning a daily Incorta email into a live traffic-light view of safety stock vs actual stock across LATAM.
No AI, no fancy optimizer. Just wiring up the basics so people stop flying blind on inventory.
What it is. A Power BI dashboard that classifies each material-country pair as green/yellow/red based on on-hand vs safety stock, refreshes automatically, and supports quick slicing by country/material/status.
Why it matters. The original workflow was manual, inconsistent, and reactive: open Excel, scroll, guess what’s scary, then respond. No shared definition of “healthy” vs “risky.”
Payoff. The team moved from screenshotting spreadsheets to speaking a shared language: “reds” and “yellows.” Faster triage, clearer leadership updates, less daily churn.
What this actually is
This is an Inventory Health Dashboard for a regional supply chain team in LATAM.
Every day they get an export from an upstream analytics system (Incorta) with on-hand stock, safety stock, and basic metadata.
Instead of manually filtering Excel and guessing where the problems are, this system turns that daily email into a Power BI dashboard with a traffic-light status per material and country.
- Green: stock comfortably above safety stock
- Yellow: getting close
- Red: below safety stock (attention needed)
Why this needed to exist
The starting point was basic but real: planners were getting a report in their inbox every morning, opening it in Excel, scrolling until they spotted something scary, and reacting.
There was no consistent definition of “healthy” vs “risky” stock, no portfolio-level view by country, and no quick way to explain exposure to leadership.
This dashboard fixes that with the least drama: use the report they already have, automate the boring part, and give a single place to see what matters.
What actually worked
- Traffic-light semantics made conversations simpler (shared language instead of raw-number debates).
- Automation chain removed a daily chore (email → SharePoint → scheduled refresh).
- One-page LATAM view changed the discussion (countries side-by-side, patterns visible).
Where it is still rough
- Tied to a single upstream report: if the Incorta layout changes, things break (no schema control yet).
- Safety stock is treated as truth (doesn’t question calibration).
- No forward-looking overlay yet (no demand/lead time “how fast could green become red”).
- No formal alerting yet (visual is strong, but no “notify me when X becomes red”).
What I would do next
- Add validation so upstream changes fail loudly (not silently wrong).
- Log ingestion history so refresh gaps are obvious.
- Start questioning safety stock with demand history and candidate recalibration.
- Add alerts + subscriptions (daily/weekly summaries, key SKU watches).
Technical details (plumbing)
- Data source: daily Incorta export delivered by email
- Orchestration: Power Automate (email → SharePoint)
- Storage: SharePoint folder as landing zone
- BI layer: Power BI (Power Query clean/select/derive status; scheduled refresh)
- Core measures: StockGap = OnHand − SafetyStock; Status = green/yellow/red based on bands
- My role: status logic + thresholds, automation flow + folder structure, BI model + visuals, iteration based on real usage
I can’t show real data, but the architecture and the decision language are the point.