The Cold Chain has joined the growing Red Brick user base by signing with Software Futures for implementation of a data warehouse in its new IT environment. The Cold Chain is one of South Africa`s largest distributors of chilled and frozen products to the retail and catering industry, servicing some 6 000 outlets with over 10 000 products. It is making a complete break with the past, ditching its legacy business systems and installing the Baan suite of ERP solutions, partly to guarantee Year 2000 compliance at its 13 depots around the country. At the same time The Cold Chain is foregoing its home-grown information and sales reporting system in favour of Red Brick. "We will now be able to supply our principals with detailed information on sales, order volumes, and other breakdowns according to region and/or product by retail outlet," says The Cold Chain IT director Bill Kerr. "In effect, we can give them exactly the information they need in the format of their choice." Red Brick, housed on one of 14 IBM RS/6000 servers in use by The Cold Chain, will run as a warehouse repository. The data warehouse will be updated in realtime over the wide-area network, from Baan, running against Informix. The data warehouse will hold up to five years` worth of data. Summarised data will be extracted into the recently implemented EIS system which is accessed by the executive team using Commander Decision. Kerr says accurate sales forecasting on perishable consumer goods is critical for optimising warehouse space management to ensure that the product reaches the consumer long before its shelf life expires. "Overall it cuts spoilage to a minimum as manufacturers can examine ordering patterns and estimate demand based on those patterns," Kerr adds. "When we achieve high levels of accuracy, we are also in a position to ensure high service levels to the retail and catering trade." Kerr expects the new system to reduce report extraction turnaround time from days to hours. "We saw Red Brick in action and were impressed with the fast response times to queries. If we put in an interactive front-end such as Crystal Reports (which we are evaluating), we will have a system which eventually our customers and principals can access themselves. This is our ideal - making information available directly to our customers and principals."
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