Acquisition integration aided by business intelligence's single version of truth
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/1/2005 7:00:00 AM
When San Francisco-based Del Montepurchased the business unit that made brands such as StarKist seafood and Kibbles 'n Bits dog food from H.J. Heinz, Del Monte management had a strategy for making the acquisition succeed.
"The executive team, headed by [Chairman and CEO] Richard Wolford, insisted that we focus on forming one company, with standard processes, and that all decisions about how to make that happen be based on facts," recalls Andy Wojewodka, Del Monte's director of business systems and decision support.
"We had redundant systems and processes everywhere," Wojewodka adds. But the executive team's directive meant that only the best ones—whether they originated on the Del Monte or Heinz side of the corporate fence—would be retained.
The philosophy extended to the IT arena, where Wojewodka says Del Monte's CIO operates on the theory that "less is better." That sentiment sparked a search for a smaller number of IT systems supplied by vendors that could be what Wojewodka describes as "trusted strategic partners."
Cognos became one of those partners, when Del Monte selected Cognos software to support its enterprise business intelligence (BI) strategy. "The enterprise business intelligence model brought certain principles that have been paying off for us," Wojewodka says. The principles are:
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Always have one version of the truth—which means having all data up-to-date and using the same terms to define things across the enterprise.
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Have consistent metrics.
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Apply trending analysis to all metrics.
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Share information needed to keep all metrics moving toward favorable status.
Even before the acquisition, the group that came over from Heinz was on the road to creating a single version of the truth. It had been working with Cognos to create a corporate data warehouse, which was retained when the policy of keeping only the best systems and processes from the two formerly separate companies went into effect.
The warehouse holds all information that flows through Del Monte's business systems—product information, customer data, details on which products are selling—but this data first goes through an extensive transformation process to ensure that it is in a standard format before going to the warehouse. This process, known in IT circles as ETL (extract, transform, and load), ensures that everyone within Del Monte is speaking the same language when they meet to assess the company's performance.
"When someone references a fill rate, everyone from the CEO on down knows exactly what that means," Wojewodka says. "That makes it easier to know what actions need to be taken in regard to that metric."
Del Monte's success with the data warehouse didn't guarantee Cognos would be awarded the contract to support Del Monte's enterprise BI strategy. "We went through a rigorous evaluation process, talking to a lot of vendors with different technology," Wojewodka says. "Ultimately, Cognos came out on top in terms of cost of ownership. We purchased an enterprise solution that we believe is truly the basis for a strategic partnership."
The Cognos enterprise solution is an integrated set of tools for reporting, analysis, and scorecarding. It also comes with dashboards that allow monitoring business processes and overall business performance. The data cleansing and integration features that Del Monte used in creating its data warehouse also are part of this solution set, which is connected by a single architecture.
Wojewodka say the BI suite allows Del Monte to create new processes for improving parts of the business, such as tracking trade-promotion effectiveness.
This process starts at the data warehouse, which receives information from multiple systems: the ERP system provides data about which products are being promoted; a trade management application shows how much funding each retailer receives for each promotion and when those payments are issued; and a quota management system feeds expected sales volumes for each promotion.
Users can look at personalized dashboards to get a broad picture of how promotions are progressing at any given moment. They can then click on items in the dashboard for more details. If, for instance, a promotion isn't producing the expected sales volumes, a manager can click on it to see if all retailers are offering the product at the promotional price, or if the product is simply selling well at some stores and poorly at others.
Either way, Del Monte is adhering to its principles for doing trend analysis, sharing information with people who can take action to boost performance, and always moving metrics toward favorable status.
Wojewodka says the Cognos BI suite has made life easier for Del Monte's business analysts and managers.
"At a minimum, it saves them a ton of time," concludes Wojewodka. "They used to spend hours just trying to figure out what the metrics [from each] department meant. Now they can focus on the task at hand, which is measuring performance and solving problems."
