SOLUTION
Labatt’s Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) program aimed to significantly improve the company’s overall understanding of the business, particularly by providing greater insight to multiple departments within the organization.
Executives, managers and operators in different departments across the company needed full visibility of the key performance indicators (KPIs) for which they were responsible. While much of the data underlying the analysis was the same across the KPIs and function areas, the interpretation of that data was unique to the needs of each function.
Key elements of the Labatt solution were to ensure that there was one source of the truth and that there was consistency between source systems and EBI.
As a result, Labatt needed to incorporate and provide analysis for the different roles and perspectives accessing the information, including sales, marketing, supply chain, finance and the executive team.
New capabilities and new metrics increased the breadth and depth of core data Labatt needed to manage, such as “contribution KPIs” — a form of profitability.
Jonathan Starkey, Enterprise Business Intelligence Technology and Data Manager, Labatt, explains: “We had already standardized processes as far as possible in our various operational systems, from finance and human resources to operations and logistics. The next step was to move our focus to the entities that those systems aim to describe: the consumer, the customer, the employee, the product, the supplier, and so on.
“Of course, there are no ‘customer’ systems or ‘product’ systems; the challenge is to piece together all of the changing perspectives in all of the different enterprise systems into a single, 360-degree view. The best insights you can get into your business exist in the seams between the different functions, in between the systems.
“When you stitch those together, you start to get amazing insights on the data. Given the speed at which our organization changes, it was clear that ‘bolt-on’ business intelligence would not suffice – we needed a new business intelligence architecture based around an adaptive data warehouse – and that choice was Magnitude (Kalido).”
Building a change resilient solution
Distribution for alcoholic beverages in Canada is mostly run by the industry itself or by local government and is privatized in only two provinces. This meant that Labatt needed to maintain subtly different business models in each province of Canada, strengthening the argument for an information “hub” at the center of a variety of operational systems and external data sources.
Labatt identified three distinct paces of change in its organization. The slowest is in business process, reflected in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that change every five to eight years. Change in the business itself – mergers and acquisitions, new products, brand reorganizations or new customer or product segmentation models – is more frequent, on a yearly or a monthly cycle. Fastest of all is the change in demand for analytics, which may be required weekly.
Having chosen to implement Cognos for sales planning, OLAP, performance reporting and line-of-sight dashboarding, Labatt looked for an enterprise data warehouse that would offer sufficient flexibility at the center of a three-tier business intelligence architecture. Says Jonathan Starkey: “The pace of change in the beverages sector is faster than ever before, especially at the global level, and our business is continually recalibrating.”
“We knew that if we selected a bolt-on data warehousing application for our ERP software, we wouldn’t be able to adapt rapidly or cost-effectively enough to change. And it was certainly clear that Labatt was facing significant change, going from a regionally federated business to a national business, and then being involved in the AmBev merger. Not only that, but also we were simultaneously in the middle of an advanced planning system implementation and an ERP implementation.”
Continues Jonathan Starkey: “In data terms, we need to go into deeper granularity all the time. Previously, classic data warehouse or data mart techniques would have sufficed, but they were no longer good enough: everything had become more complex and faster moving. Magnitude is like our corporate vault – it doesn’t matter what ERP we have today or tomorrow, what the fingerprint of the business looks like today or tomorrow: Magnitude never forgets.”
The Magnitude business information model at Labatt includes 16 years of sales history, has 48 dimensions, 93 transaction data sets and draws data from 11 source systems. BearingPoint consultants assisted with the Magnitude implementation and with defining the KPIs for reporting. Jonathan Starkey comments: “BearingPoint played a crucial role in getting us quickly to the right solution for our needs by running workshops for key stakeholders from the executive level right through to the data-entry people.”
New business intelligence capabilities
The first phase of the rollout covered the commercial and finance functions, establishing the foundation for cascading line-of-sight metrics and managing Labatt’s data complexity.
Planning and target setting capabilities were added and its output incorporated into the performance monitoring, reporting and analytics capabilities.
New metrics were added to these original areas by combining data, such as volumes, revenue, cost and spend, from different sources and piecing these together across multiple dimensions to create contribution. These metrics not only provide broader and deeper coverage, but also their calculation is facilitated by the solution rather than impeded as with the previously manual processes.
Executives, key account managers, brand managers and territory managers can now see the same key metrics for their area of responsibility. The solution is presented in a simple way to allow these managers to easily drill into the data to identify and understand relevant business issues and opportunities.
While cost savings and revenue opportunities were the main drivers of the new business intelligence architecture, another advantage is the speed of reporting and analysis. Tasks that previously relied on manual integration work by highly skilled analysts are now practically push-button operations. Lorrie Owen-Turner, Enterprise Business Intelligence Project Director, Labatt, explains: “Some analytical processes that used to take 4 to 5 hours now take us just minutes, thanks to our solution with Magnitude (Kalido). And this performance increase doesn’t just feed into faster decision-making; it also makes us more productive and drives better decision making. Historically, business analysts at Labatt would spend perhaps 70% of their time hunting and gathering and 30% of their time on analysis. With our solution and Magnitude, the split is probably 20% to 80% in favor of analysis.”
