In its quest to be one of South Africa's most innovative food businesses, Foodcorp, the country's third-largest food company, has well positioned itself as a leading manufacturer of great-tasting branded food products.
While distributing most of its products nationally to major retail and wholesale outlets, independent retailers, forecourts and the food services industry, Foodcorp also exports a number of products to Western Europe, the Middle East, Far East and the rest of Africa.
Operating 10 divisions through a decentralised business model, Foodcorp identified an urgent need to consolidate its reporting from all its different divisions, and across the full range of its brands.
As per Foodcorp's initial brief, too much time was being spent on collating data and making sense of complex reports. A dynamic tool was needed to enable the company to accurately determine capacity, and quickly identify trends and analysis of data that would indicate where the business is and isn't performing to its full potential.
Traditionally, there has been a strong reliance on a few key individuals to collate and analyse this data, and this concentration of skills can be problematic in the long run. A key objective was to put the data into a format that is clear to understand and widely accessible to decision-makers on a self-service basis.
BusinessIntelligent was enlisted to provide a solution that would give a holistic view of the entire business from both the customer and the brand's perspective.
After a thorough needs analysis, it was decided that a SQL Data Warehouse and Master Data Management (MDM) application be utilised in order to assist in the extract, transform, load (ETL), consolidation and management of the information.
Data is continuously being extracted from the divisions, and a complex SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) process is in place, in order to map and consolidate the data into the single data warehouse.
QlikView was selected as the reporting solution, as it provides the business with the flexibility, capacity and capability needed in an extremely competitive environment.
QlikView's mobile capability also allows the users access via their smartphones, and the speed of delivery coupled with effective drilldown ability, means users have easy access to their information on demand, and are allowed to analyse their information in real-time.
The BusinessIntelligent solution provides executives with daily divisional sales data in a format which allows for greater analytical competency. One of the major benefits is in shortening the time required to deliver reporting across the entire group, and the improvement in the business's capacity to understand and utilise the information.
Foodcorp CIO Chris Holden says: "There has been a significant increase in productivity through improved efficiency in working with customers, and a marked reduction in time to deliver reporting. Equally important is the improvement in ability of the user to understand the data. This has led to a more comprehensive and insightful analysis, as the user finds new questions to ask from the data."
The BusinessIntelligent solution has enhanced our ability to be more responsive to the sales force and their demands. Our plan is to leverage off of this solution to provide enterprise reporting to all companies within the group. - Foodcorp CIO, Chris Holden.
From inception of this project, Foodcorp found BusinessIntelligent to be acutely responsive to requirements and in developing a customised solution that continues to adapt to an evolving business. Holden added: "Most impressive was BusinessIntelligent's immediate grasp of our business issues. In all our engagements we felt we obtained good value for money and excellent advice. We have established a good partnership with the company, and their individual consultants have been of a very high professional standard.
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