Case Study - From a 14-Week Assumption to Real Visibility: How Ventagium Helped a Consumer Goods Manufacturer Build a Supply Chain It Could Trust

The Moment of Truth 

When global logistics ground to a halt in 2020, a Consumer Goods Manufacturer faced the same crisis as every company moving goods from Asia. Ships were anchored offshore for weeks. Containers vanished into bottlenecks. Customer orders surged while inbound inventory lagged behind.

For the Operations leader, who had spent more than a decade in operations and logistics, the pressure intensified quickly. Leadership needed a clear answer on where the product was in the pipeline, and the team couldn’t provide it.

It should have been simple. The Manufacturer had relied for years on a clear operating norm: a product ordered in the ERP would show up about 14 weeks later. That rhythm had held long enough to be treated as fact.

But when the Operations leader went looking for answers, the truth was stark. The PO existed in the ERP. The supplier had produced something. The freight forwarder had a container somewhere.

What he didn’t have was the story that connected them.

“We didn’t have good visibility. We were placing POs and banking on a standard lead time. That was really all we had.”

The 14-week assumption wasn’t a forecast. It was a blind spot.

The Hidden Problem: Data That Didn’t Reflect Reality

The Manufacturer wasn’t missing data. They were missing connection.

• ERP data showed what had been ordered but not where it sat in production.

• Supplier data confirmed items were in process, but not how far.

• Logistics data tracked containers, not POs or production batches.

Each system had a partial view. None aligned. And no one inside the operation could confidently answer the most basic operational question: Where is my product right now?

As disruptions mounted, the inventory that should have arrived simply didn’t. The team watched levels fall even though orders placed months earlier should have been replenishing the network.

The supply chain wasn’t broken. The visibility was.

The Turning Point

At the same time the Operations leader was trying to piece together the story, a VP in operations introduced him to someone he trusted — a colleague from MIT’s supply chain program who had met Arturo at Ventagium.

The first call with Ventagium shifted the trajectory. There was no buzzword pitch. No heavy methodology. Just a simple philosophy that matched the urgency of the moment:

Start now. Build what matters. Iterate fast.

The Operations leader could see two things immediately. Ventagium understood how data flowed through real supply chains, and they were fluent in the Microsoft environment that the Manufacturer depended on. Most importantly, they listened.

“I felt like I could trust him immediately. What you see is what you get.”

What began as a visibility project became the foundation of the company’s first true supply chain analytics function.

Building the Architecture for End-to-End Clarity

Ventagium partnered with the Operations leader’s team to connect three disconnected worlds:

1. ERP purchase orders and planned lead times

2. Production data from overseas suppliers

3. Container tracking and logistics milestones from freight forwarders

The work required deep data engineering, not dashboarding. New pipelines. Shared identifiers across systems that had never spoken to each other. Logic that aligned POs, production batches, and container IDs into a single chain of custody.

For the first time, the Manufacturer could see:

• When production actually began

• When goods entered and exited the manufacturing pipeline

• When containers were delayed

• When shipments were sitting offshore

• How long disruptions were lasting

• How each delay would affect customer fulfillment

The company replaced a 14-week assumption with real-time truth. And it changed everything.

Technical Deep Dive: The Predictive ETA

A common challenge in the supply chain industry is the reliance on Estimated Times of Arrival (ETAs) that are based on historic averages. In this engagement, Ventagium encountered this exact issue: ETAs were coming from the ERP, the manufacturer, and the logistics company, but all were disconnected and based on static, historical data.

To solve this, Ventagium created a simple, yet powerful predictive ETA model. This model moved beyond historic averages by taking into account the real processing times at each point in the supply chain. By aggregating these real-time process times, the model provided a far more realistic view of when products would actually arrive.

This capability was critical for strategic planning, as it allowed the Manufacturer to accurately forecast inventory levels at each location weeks into the future, transforming a blind spot into a reliable planning tool.

The Breakthrough: A Supply Chain Built for Resilience

With unified visibility, the operation stopped relying on hope that the next shipment would arrive on time.

They could see risks as they formed. They could escalate sooner. They could plan, not guess.

“If a container is sitting off the coast for three weeks, I’m going to know it now.”

Executives no longer made decisions based on lagging indicators. Forecasts became grounded in current reality, not historical averages. The operation became stronger, faster, and more resilient to the next disruption — because the next disruption is inevitable.

Beyond Visibility: Transforming Final Mile Delivery

As the supply chain analytics capability grew, the Operations leader made another strategic move.

The Manufacturer was relying on a national logistics partner for analytics in its nationwide final-mile network — the operation responsible for delivering mattresses directly to customer homes. The national logistics partner produced reports, graded its own performance, and owned the narrative.

The Operations leader replaced that dependency.

He brought the analytics in-house and embedded a dedicated Ventagium resource directly into the team. Not as an external analyst. As part of the operation.

“Nobody cares about numbers more than the operators themselves.”

This shift delivered measurable, transformative results:

Metric	Before	After	Impact
Net Promoter Score (NPS)	Mid-60s	Mid-80s	A dramatic lift in customer experience
Average Delivery Speed	14 days	11 days	21% faster delivery to consumers

These gains weren’t incremental. They were the result of operators finally having analytics they could trust, built by a partner who understood the rhythms, exceptions, and realities of their world.

The Lasting Impact of Analytics Clarity

The Manufacturer now runs its supply chain with clarity it didn’t have before the crisis. Unified data replaced assumptions.

The team moved from reacting to leading. And analytics shifted from an IT dependency to a strategic engine rooted inside operations.

Ventagium’s role grew alongside the capability. Today, the Operations leader leads a hybrid team — internal analysts supported by embedded Ventagium engineers — that owns critical KPIs across sourcing, planning, logistics, manufacturing, and final mile.

The relationship remains built on the same foundation as the first call: trust, speed, and a shared commitment to building what matters.

Ventagium. Clarity you can build on.