Manufacturing and Distribution

[Doug Heywood]

Logistics Magazine | 2 September 2009 | by Anna Game-Lopata

In the 3PL space, operators that previously ran a given warehouse for one client in a ‘dedicated service’ arrangement are now desperately trying to fill space freed up by lower volumes.

This has led to more warehouses becoming shared-user facilities, however there is clearly excess capacity and operators are under pressure to adapt their existing models.

“Recovering the fixed space costs has become a challenge,” observes Schenker Australia manager- Major Accounts Alain Brard.

“Poor utilisation also impacts on labour with a lower level of activity forcing a reduction in overall work hours and additional difficulties in managing month ends or quarter ends picks from a small the clients’ day to day requirements.”

“There’s a big drive towards setting up direct ship programs with major end customers for products coming from overseas suppliers or overseas manufacturing operations,” Brard says.

“For outsourced logistics operations, businesses are looking at renegotiating minimum space or volume commitments they might have had in place.”

Across all warehouses and DCs, 3PL-managed or otherwise, executives are being squeezed to reduce operational costs as companies seek to weather the downturn as well as ready themselves for the upturn when it comes.

According to Manhattan Associates managing director, Australia and New Zealand Chris Stephenson, integrated flow management will be the next industry ‘watchword’ as executives search for ways to increase the speed at which goods flow across the supply chain.

“The current economic circumstances are driving more people to the web, and consumers are becoming more demanding with higher expectations of service quality,” he explains.

“Warehouses have had become much more agile in terms of how they fulfil orders to effectively serve a multi-channel retail operation.”

“By integrating demand, supply and inventory strategies, companies can ensure that products are delivered to the right place, at the right time— optimising customer service and improving profitability,” he argues.

“Such an integrated approach will also, critically, enable companies to minimise inventory levels to meet a given service level and free up much needed capital.”

Given the importance of inventory velocity, Stephenson says there is a resurgence of regional warehousing.

“Such a strategy gives an organisation the ability to reduce transportation costs, particularly with oil prices edging higher again,” he says.

“Specifically, in the food sector, grocers are looking to make multiple deliveries per day, rather than one, to improve on-shelf availability and clearly a decentralised DC infrastructure facilitates this.”

By contrast, Alain Brard says he’s seen some focus towards greater centralisation of inventory. “Forecasts are down so supporting a decentralised warehousing network with lower volume is not cost effective,” he argues.

“It is also easier to react to continued changes in the market with stock centrally located rather than having to reposition and rebalance between numerous local stock locations.”

Moving forward, Chris Stephenson says companies will need to know where they make money by product, customer group and distribution channel.

“If they don’t already know the answers to these questions, they should make it a priority over the next 18 months to find out,” he says, “since focusing on some products, customer groups or distribution channels without understanding the current profitability or future profit potential of each can lead to huge inefficiency or even failure.”

Stephenson says companies want access to better quality information so they can react to events as they’re happening within the DC or warehouse.

“Firms are increasingly looking to business intelligence (BI) applications so they can get all the necessary intelligence from their supply chain technology to make the best decisions for their business.”

With labour typically accounting for 55 per cent of the total cost of warehouse operations, performance monitoring is an important way to compare activity levels and improve productivity as well as providing a feedback mechanism that rewards efficiency, quality and safety, in turn decreasing employee turnover.

“Defining, reviewing and documenting KPIs and processes including the identification of opportunities to streamline should be an ongoing process,” Stephenson says.

“Someone should be made responsible to continuously look at KPI’s and performance trends. As a minimum, it should be done once a month as well as every time a process is changed. Ideally staff should contribute to the process so executives get buy-in and support from the floor.”

“It’s also imperative for supply chain executives to consider warehouse layout and slotting optimisation methods as a sub-optimised layout will inevitably be very costly to an organisation,” Stephenson adds.

“Companies can adopt a number of other practices to minimise handling, including automation, cross-docking and flow-through techniques; and having WMS technology that has task interleaving functionality.”

While Stephenson maintains Manhattan Associates clients are increasingly deploying techniques like postponement, inventory optimisation, distributed order management (DOM) and total cost to serve analyses to optimise and balance inventory levels, service levels and distribution costs, he says companies will increasingly need to collaborate to compete.

“In today’s trading climate, in which companies are looking to minimise inventory to free up capital while simultaneously striving to maximise customer satisfaction, collaborating with trading partners is simply no longer a choice.”

“Over the last 18 months we’ve really started to see supply chain practitioners starting to put into place the plans, processes and systems that actually facilitate large-scale, supply chain ‘ecosystem- wide’ collaboration.

We expect this trend to accelerate in the next 18 months as companies in every sector start to realise the value of taking such a holistic approach.”

[Jane B]

Cincom Systems Introduces NEW SmartInsight™ for Generating Business User-centric Compliance and Quality Reporting

Debuts at Ausbiotech 2009 Conference, 27-30 October, 2009 Melbourne Exhibition Centre

Sydney, Australia – Sept. 9, 2009 -- Worldwide software provider, Cincom Systems (cincom.com.au), announced today the global availability of the SmartInsight™ Report Writer product. SmartInsight enables business users to quickly gain visibility into all their compliance and quality management data by allowing them to develop, format, and control the content, and publish the reports to the right users. It extends the built-in reporting functionality of Cincom’s SmartSolve® platform by allowing system administrators and business analyst users to easily create professional, custom log reports that they can save and reuse.

SmartInsight is the next key capability in Cincom’s Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management (ECQM) solutions that provide the ability to design, tailor, and use ECQM’s flagship product platform solution, SmartSolve. SmartInsight is a 100-percent webbased tool designed to put reporting flexibility directly into the hands of business users. This new solution eliminates the need for IT to develop simple to complex reports with tools to which typically only IT has access.

SmartInsight allows for reports to be designed easily with no technical or special programming skills required. The solution provides extreme reporting flexibility for creating any type of log reports, including consolidated or summary reports, in one simple drag-and-drop mode, and in a point-and-click style. SmartInsight enables user to create new log reports, with runtime parameters and embedded graphs, and its built-in publishing capabilities make it convenient to share these reports with other users across the enterprise. These reports could be configured to run from the application’s portal page, from any of the transactional screens, within a transactional screen visualizing the required data, and also from the reports repository.

“We talk to our customers and one of their key needs is improved visibility on their operations. Cincom ECQMS recognizes that the power of any system is to allow its customer users to retrieve, report and analyze data,” said Greg Mills, Regional Director, Cincom Systems, ANZ. “SmartInsight is designed from the ground up to allow both users and business analysts to retrieve, report, and analyze data in a snap. This will subsequently enhance communication among departments, leading to better coordinated activities and quicker response to change within the organization.”

SmartInsight’s ultimate reporting flexibility includes a simple-to-use, intuitive report designer that allows users to define report content fields and format elements, including report titles, report and group footers, columns and charts. With more than 100 built-in expression functions, the user can easily tailor the report information to be presented.

“Earlier this year, Cincom introduced another business intelligence tool, SmartPulse™, which allows business users to easily create new analytics and dashboards, and keep a pulse point on their business processes,” Mills said. “Likewise, companies using SmartInsight will reinforce a collaborative work environment with increased reporting visibility to support their decision making, demonstrate why certain decisions were made, and ultimately improve the company’s overall performance driven by fact-based decision making.

“Combining SmartPulse and SmartInsight, we now have fulfilled our Analytics vision, and we look forward to assisting our customers to measure their processes against key industry metrics and benchmarks,” Mills added.

Cincom’s compliance and quality business intelligence software will be featured at booth number 160 during the Australian’s Biotechnology Conference 2009 (Ausbiotech 2009 - Home - Asia Pacific Biotechnology Convention) show at Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre from 27 – 30 October 2009.

Cincom’s other manufacturing software applications featured at the show include:
· ERP for Complex Manufacturing (Cincom CONTROLTM)
· ERP for Small-to-Midsize Enterprise (Cincom PriorityTM)
· Enterprise Sales Portal Software (Cincom AcquireTM)

About Cincom Systems

Cincom Systems of Australia is a wholly-owned subsidiary of US-based Cincom Systems Inc. For 40 years, Cincom's problem-solving software, services, and people have helped thousands of companies all over the world grow and manage their businesses. The Australian subsidiary, established in 1975, services both Australia and New Zealand.

For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom Systems of Australia at 02-8875 1400, send an e-mail to sjaber@cincom.com, or visit the company's website at cincom.com.au.

RELATED LINKS:

Cincom Systems of Australia website: cincom.com.au
Cincom Acquire™ manufacturing website: Product Configurator
Cincom Enterprise manufacturing website: Enterprise Resource Planning

[Steve Bennett]

Cross post on the open source forum:

Peerless Foods Selects Open Source Solutions From Ingres for Mission Critical ERP and Business Intelligence Platforms

[admin]

This article may be a sign of things to come in Australia. We don't have anything like it yet, but ...


U.S. Government, Wal-Mart and You

Information Management Online, November 9, 2009

Robert Farris

Wal-Mart and the U.S. government have announced plans to start tracking the sustainability profile of their suppliers as well as their products and services. As two of the largest buyers in the world, the directives from these companies have the potential to impact many companies in the U.S. and around the globe.

The U.S. government buys more than $500 billion worth of products and services each year from roughly 230,000 different companies, according to USAspending.gov. It is the world’s largest buyer of goods and services. Wal-Mart, as the largest consumer products retailer in the world, buys roughly $300 billion each year in products that it sells in its retail stores from more than 100,000 different companies.

If your company sells products and services to one or both of them, expect that you will soon be required to provide more information about your environmental impact.

The President’s Executive Order

On October 5, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that outlined a series of actions that federal agencies must take to reduce their environmental impact. The environmental goal is to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase energy efficiency, conserve water, reduce waste and use environmentally responsible products and technologies.” This is intended to benefit taxpayers through “substantial energy savings and avoided costs from improved efficiency.”

There are many actions specified by the executive order that affect the way the agencies operate, such as:

• Establishing 2020 targets for the percentage reduction of Scope 1 (direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by you) and Scope 2 (indirect emissions from use of purchased electricity, heat or steam) greenhouse gas emissions, as compared to 2008 baseline emissions.
• Reducing the use of fossil fuels by government agency vehicle fleets.
• Reducing energy consumption of government facilities.
• Improving energy efficiency of data centers.
• Improving water efficiency and management.
• Reducing water consumption.
• Doing more recycling, pollution prevention and waste reduction.
• Integrating a sustainability performance plan into the overall strategic planning and budgeting process.
• Defining metrics and implementing information systems for accounting and reporting to measure and manage progress toward these goals, including preparing and publishing scorecards.
• Appointing a senior sustainability officer to oversee these activities.

There are also actions specified that affect anyone that sells products or services to the federal government, such as asking agencies to look at the feasibility of:

Requiring vendors to report on the greenhouse gas emissions of the products and services they are providing to the government. From the government’s perspective as the buyer of these products and services, these are called Scope 3 emissions (indirect emissions from the products or services purchased).

Using purchasing preferences or other incentives to encourage suppliers to provide products that are manufactured using processes that minimize greenhouse gas emissions.
Wal-Mart Sustainability Index

On July 16, Wal-Mart introduced plans to create a worldwide sustainable product index. The plans are to roll this out in three phases.

Initially, Wal-Mart will ask each of its suppliers to answer 15 questions to evaluate their company’s overall sustainability profile. The questions are divided into four areas:

1. Energy and climate,
2. Natural resources,
3. Material efficiency and
4. People and community.

For example, there are questions asking suppliers to report on their greenhouse gas emissions and reduction targets. Similarly, there are questions about water use by facility and water-reduction targets.

As the second step of this plan, Wal-Mart is providing the initial funding for the creation of a third-party consortium whose goal is to develop a database of information about the environmental footprint of the entire lifecycle of every product sold through Wal-Mart and other retailers. This consortium is being administered by Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas. The fact that this is open to including other retailers is significant, because it is likely to grow to encompass most products sold through any retail channel.

The third step of this plan is even more forward looking. Wal-Mart has asked the sustainability consortium to develop a product rating system that would make it easy for customers to identify the sustainability attributes of products. The stated intention is to develop some kind of labeling system, possibly like the nutritional labels we have grown accustomed to on food products, to provide simple, easy-to-understand information about the environmental impact of the product.

Why Should You Care?

Why should someone who reads Information Management be interested in these developments?

Basically, this is a big information management challenge.

In order to readily provide the information that the U.S. government and Wal-Mart will be expecting, any supplier will need to start tracking much more information about their products, how they are produced and distributed, and how the components of their products are produced and distributed throughout their complete lifecycle.

Additionally, in order for companies to make progress toward the sustainability related targets, they will need to track this information on a regular basis, not just as an occasional event. As with any significant business issue, it’s important to start with a good base of information and track it regularly over time with enough detail to allow managers and company leaders to make effective decisions and actions. Companies will need to consider implementing new business intelligence applications in order to provide the information needed to make decisions about sustainability, such as:

Sustainability scorecards reporting and analytic solutions allow enterprise-wide monitoring of a broad set of key sustainability metrics.

Energy intelligence reporting and analytic solutions allow detailed trending analysis of energy use and related greenhouse gas emissions by facilities and their subsystems. This could be applied to facilities in general and to specific types of facilities like data centers.

Sustainable manufacturing intelligence reporting and analytic solutions allow tracking of detailed sustainability-related information (water used, energy used, chemicals used, waste produced and greenhouse gas emissions) about your manufacturing, processing or assembly activities.
Sustainable sourcing intelligence reporting and analytic solutions allow tracking of detailed sustainability-related information about your vendors and the raw materials and parts they provide an organization or business.

Sustainable logistics intelligence reporting and analytic solutions allow tracking of detailed sustainability-related information about the distribution of products and services, inbound to your operation and outbound to your customers.
Can you see the impact of these U.S. government and Wal-Mart initiatives on your company or customers? If not yet, I suspect you soon will. It’s a good time to start working with the appropriate people within your company to plan your strategic response to these market triggers.

Robert Farris, Hitachi Consulting Vice President for Environmental Sustainability solutions, has more than 22 years of information technology and consulting experience. He has served both in consulting organizations with Andersen Consulting, Navigator Systems and Hitachi Consulting, and in industry organizations with Bankers Trust and American Power Conversion. Farris has specialized in working with his clients to develop and execute the strategy for an enterprise BI program, specifically defining and implementing the team organization, architectures, technologies, methodologies and internal processes. He applies these experiences to help his clients address business issues related to sustainability. Farris is a graduate from Purdue University with a bachelor of science in industrial management and a minor in computer science. He may be contacted at rfarris@hitachiconsulting.com.

[Jo Vincent]

Interesting article in yesterday’s AFR that talks about how Kraft went from an 80 per cent to 98 per cent score for its ability to deliver to its retail customers in full and on time. They did this by consolidating distribution to a single Melbourne warehouse and moving the sales forecasting task into the marketing department. With forecasting accuracy boosted from the low 60 per cent level to the low 80s, the company's 12 factories more efficiently produce what Coles, Woolworths and Aldi want - with benefits cascading through the supply chain.

Here’s the full article:

Australian Financial Review, Edition 1 MON 04 JAN 2010, Page 1
Krafty tactics keep food industry cooking

By: Peter Roberts


Food manufacturers are learning to live with high costs and private-label competition, and are turning to innovation to compete, writes Peter Roberts.
It is an old adage but it has come to ring true for key players in the country's $20 billion food manufacturing industry: the best form of defence is attack.
With rising public concern at food price inflation and intense pressure from retailers to cull brands and slash costs, the major food manufacturers are innovating across their businesses to offset high input costs, the impact of climate change and competition from low-cost imports and private labels.
Kraft Foods sales and marketing director Darren O'Brien admits the group used to achieve a lacklustre 80 per cent score for its ability to deliver to its retail customers in full and on time, which served only to frustrate them.
But by consolidating distribution to a single Melbourne warehouse and moving the sales forecasting task into the marketing department, the company was able to achieve 98 per cent last year. With forecasting accuracy boosted from the low 60 per cent level to the low 80s, the company's 12 factories more efficiently produce what Coles, Woolworths and Aldi want - with benefits cascading through the supply chain.
"At this level, you maximise your ability to sell," says O'Brien. "With these efficiencies you have less inventory and make better use of your working capital. On average, today we are holding about two weeks less stock in inventory than we were before, that's a 15 per cent improvement."
Food manufacturing, often touted as one of Australia's best bets industrially along with minerals and energy, is in fact an underperformer.
Gross value-adding grew at 0.7 per cent a year in the past decade compared with 3.3 per cent economy-wide, even underperforming the laggard manufacturing sector's anaemic 0.9 per cent growth.
"The economics of food manufacturing are generally not great, in truth," says Heinz regional chief executive Peter Widdows. "Australian labour costs are extremely high by comparison with our ASEAN [Association of South-East Asian Nations] and North Asian competitors. It makes it very difficult to compete."
But, despite the challenges, Australian manufacturing remains viable as long as it plays to its strengths.
"The global financial crisis brought into sharp focus the vulnerability of the economy, but it also highlighted the resilience of the food and grocery industry," says Kate Carnell, CEO of the Australian Food and Grocery Council. "The sector is constantly reinvesting in plant and equipment and in R&D [research and development]."
Heinz recently paid $288 million for the Golden Circle business to expand into beverages, a juicy sector that has attracted Japan's Asahi to buy Schweppes, Suntory to buy Frucor, and Kirin to buy National Foods, Dairy Farmers and Lion Nathan.
Their combined outlay of $10.4 billion bought them higher margins and growth opportunities than are available in Japan's stagnant domestic economy.
The Japanese giants join a sector whose competitiveness has been eroding, with capital expenditure in the food, beverage and tobacco sector falling 1.6 per cent over the decade, food manufacturing employment falling 0.9 per cent a year and a balance of trade surplus in food narrowing to $7.5 billion.
Food exports have risen 5.3 per cent a year over the past four years, compared with a 14.3 per cent annual jump for imports.
With weather conditions improving, local input costs are easing and companies are learning to live with home brand products which took 22.9 per cent of the grocery market in the June quarter, according to The Nielsen Company.
The manufacturers see branded products as essential if retailers are to optimise profit from most food categories.
"The two things work together relatively well," says Heinz's Widdows. "Private label has a place, and strong brands have a place. I would view private label as just another competitor."
Kraft's response has been to rationalise its brand offerings to suit the new retail environment.
Five per cent of low-selling products have been eliminated, marketing innovations such as giving away 400,000 Philadelphia cheese cookbooks have boosted sales of individual brands, and the company has launched its Vegemite Cheesybite spread to succeed the short-lived iSnack2.0 name.
"The PR may not have been all positive towards the original name but Vegemite sales have continued to grow," says Kraft's O'Brien. "It has grown $10 million since launch and, unlike a lot of launches, it has been highly incremental growth instead of cannibalising sales elsewhere."
One issue facing manufacturers is the age, geographic spread and relatively small scale of food factories and distribution operations, which makes for inefficiency.
Distribution is being consolidated and factories rationalised, including the recent closure of a Kraft cheese factory, National Foods juice factory and a decision by McCain Foods to close a 60-year-old vegetable processing plant at Smithton in Tasmania.
Efficient manufacturing and distribution are essential if companies such as George Weston Foods, which spends $40 million a year on R&D, are to profit from their innovations. The company's R&D spending is the equivalent of 1.4 per cent of turnover, compared with the food manufacturing sector's suboptimal 0.5 per cent average.
George Weston has aggressively consolidated 34 bakeries in Australia and New Zealand down to 17 in the past four years. Its Don KRC division is closing two old plants and spending $150 million at its factory at Castlemaine in regional Victoria to position itself for market innovation.
"The new plant gives us a far more cost-effective base to work from," says Don KRC chief executive Mel Sutton. "It is also going to open up more opportunities to innovate in manufacturing and packaging."
Following a pattern established in the dairy sector, Capilano Honey is innovating from product to corporate structure, taking the final steps in November to move from a co-operative to listed entity.
Shareholders in the company, listed on the Bendigo exchange, voted to remove preferences in the company constitution for beekeeper shareholders, opening the way to a $6 million plus capital raising, says managing director Roger Masters.
"Most co-operatives have found this is the hardest area to deal with," says Masters. "There is an emotional attachment by people in controlling their company."
Capilano, which will use the capital raising to pay down debt, has been an innovator in packaging, leading the way with upside down PET plastic bottles and squeeze dispensing to excite the market.
"The issue is how do you differentiate one honey from another," says Masters. "We try to produce a consistent flavour profile, but packaging is very important. The number one thing consumers hate about honey is it is sticky and messy."
Australia's largest food manufacturer, Nestle, is innovating in product, including a slow-melting ice cream, and Lean Cuisine varieties that emphasise protein, fibre, wholegrains and calcium. But some of the biggest changes are in reforming workplace culture at its 14 Australian factories. The company has rolled out more than 100 Toyota-style "mini business units" that are empowered to make changes to their workplace or propose investment to cross- functional teams and management.
"Since 2003 10,000 ideas have been generated and we have implemented 40 per cent of them," says Peter Kelly, Nestle's director of corporate and external relations. "One idea at our Broadford [Minties] confectionary plant improved the production capacity of one line by 5 per cent. It cost $5000 to implement and returned $320,000 in savings."
Another idea streamlined the flow of goods through Nestle's Arndell Park distribution centre which, like most new supply chain centres, is located close to major new freeways, in this case Sydney's Westlink M7.
"Over the last 10 years we have been able to reduce our costs across the business by about 10 per cent," says Kelly.
According to the Australian Food and Grocery Council's Carnell, the sector is facing challenges ranging from the cost of carbon and water, the impact of poor regulation and changing requirements for food composition and labelling.
The council has been calling for a federal government agenda for developing the food industry, but the sector has not featured in the industry innovation councils established by Industry Minister Kim Carr or the two CSIRO research flagships that focus on "future manufacturing" and "food futures".
"This is probably the largest manufacturing sector in Australia, yet it doesn't take up as much government time as mining or automotive," says Heinz's Widdows. "I do believe this is an industry that warrants more attention."
The government has been attempting without much success to keep grocery prices in check following food price rises of 41.3 per cent since 2000. With much of the focus on concentration in the retail sector, the major government impact on manufacturing has come from Fair Work Australia, which replaced Work Choices.
"The new legislation is causing a lot of angst," says Widdows. "Every manufacturer in Victoria is going through a lot of strife for seemingly no reason. We are talking about people making ridiculous demands which seem to be testing the legislation, rather than the will of the workers."

[admin2]

The Australian

TUE 05 OCT 2010, Page 031

Quality of the data comes first at Foster's

By: Jennifer Foreshew

WHEN Foster's Group built a major presence in the global wine business and other segments a decade ago, much of its growth came through acquisitions.

The 160-year-old, Melbourne-based beverage company was left with a mix of enterprise resource planning systems and different methods for defining and processing key business data.
It found itself with no consistent approach to delivering information across the enterprise.

A multi-year global initiative was launched to consolidate and simplify its ERP systems, establish a common set of business processes and improve the quality of data throughout the group.
Foster's Group chief information officer Andrew Leyden said the need to ensure data quality was critical to the success of the consolidation project.

``We wanted to make sure that, as we launched this program, the quality of the data that we were using to drive decision making was of a high quality -- that our ability to move integration between the systems with our legacy footprint and the systems we were going to be using in future was well managed,'' he said.

Foster's implemented the Informatica Platform about 18 months ago to profile and cleanse data in the legacy applications and institute data quality plans to maintain data integrity after consolidation.

The company owns a portfolio of more than 200 brands of drinks, including beer, wine, spirits, cider and non-alcoholic beverages.

Foster's has operations on five continents and sells its products in more than 100 countries.

It employs a workforce of 7000 at the company's vineyards, wineries, bottling centres, breweries and distilleries in six countries.

Foster's is now consolidating five ERP and other redundant systems by migrating the platforms and data to a single JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solution from Oracle.

It is also establishing a unified customer management environment and is creating consistent data structures for customers and products that will be shared by every business unit worldwide.

``We have a piece of work at the moment just to migrate all of our ERPs down to a single solution and we are using Informatica to migrate all of the data from those solutions,'' Mr Leyden said.
The Informatica Platform is also playing a central role in helping Foster's consolidate its business intelligence (BI) platform by migrating data from four data warehouses to a single environment running Oracle's BI solution. Informatica will help create a single set of global reports that are both more reliable and less expensive to produce.

The Informatica Platform will also help the company to create a single global standard for defining and handling customer data. It will play a role in integrating a new global CRM system with JD Edwards and in resolving data quality issues.

``The use of Informatica for us is to make sure that the data that we migrate to our solutions forms the basis of our global footprint,'' Mr Leyden said. ``We are going to have one source, and that is irrespective of where the customer resides, which means the attributes or the way we describe a customer looks consistent across the world.''

Mr Leyden said the Informatica Platform had allowed the IT team to not only clean up data, but build credibility with the rest of the organisation because the information was of higher quality and the attributes were consistent.

CASE STUDY

Foster's Group

PROBLEM: A series of acquisitions created the need to consolidate and improve the quality of disparate data, establish consistent business processes and a single source of business information across the enterprise

PROCESS: Implemented the Informatica Platform

RESULT: Consistent product and customer data across business units and increased visibility into global operations

[admin]

The Australian, TUE 22 FEB 2011

By: JENNIFER FORESHEW

NAFDA wanted an IT system that could be delivered quickly

SOFTWARE

FOOD service industry pioneer NAFDA had an appetite to access technology on par with big business.

NAFDA is an integrated service, marketing and buying group operating on behalf of independently owned food service distributors.

A $3 million project was launched in 2006 to replace the company's accounting package and customise the software for the food service group for its distributors. NAFDA selected Microsoft Dynamics NAV and brought all development in-house to create a highly tailored enterprise resource planning package.
The next stage of the project called for a Business Intelligence system that would be robust enough to collect data from the standard ERP system, plus multiple disparate systems for those distributors that chose not to take up the NAFDA ERP.
Sydney-based NAFDA employs about 950 people and has 59 distribution centres in Australia servicing about 33,000 customers. It has 50 distributors and group turnover is in excess of $750m.

About nine months' ago, NAFDA began using Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

``From a head office environment, although we have a huge amount of information and access to that information, it is held in a number of different silos,'' NAFDA chief financial officer Barry Hough said.

``What Zap is now doing is pulling it into one area.''
Mr Hough said bottlenecks also used to occur.

``We relied on one or two people to dump things into spreadsheets that could take weeks and by then, the information was outdated.''

Mr Hough said while NAFDA had internal resources that understood BI, it did not want to set up a complicated system.
``A lot of systems needed technical expertise or resources, but the Zap package allowed me to train myself and be able to deploy it quickly,'' he said.

Mr Hough said there was a need to be able to filter and pick up relevant information and trends for distributors and communicate it through KPIs or scorecards.

``Our suppliers to a degree are blind because they don't really know where their products are actually ending up,'' Mr Hough said. ``We saw a huge opportunity where we could come in and collect that information and provide it as a value-added service to our suppliers and build those relationships.''

The implementation of Zap has delivered accurate, up-to-date information that can be used to show suppliers trends and discuss building communication and their profile with NAFDA.

NAFDA also has a separate arm that has its own products that it imports and manufactures locally for sale exclusively to its distributors.

``It (Zap) has translated to savings in the sense of time and the allocation of resources,'' Mr Hough said. ``Staff that used to be purely charged with churning out information are now proactively driving sales.''

NAFDA has also developed a one-stop, hosted IT solution for distributors that includes infrastructure for ERP (Microsoft Dynamics NAV), Office, Exchange and related services in a commercial data centre.

There are currently 150 users on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV. NAFDA anticipates BI will grow to about 100 users.

It estimates that BI will provide a full return on investment within six to nine months of completing the full deployment to all of its distributors.

``What we have done now with the Zap product is create a package or a template which allows us now to almost be able to roll out BI to a distributor within about a day,'' Mr Hough said.
He said the final stage was to go out and collect information from a whole range of other ERP packages and bring that into the organisation.

``What it will mean to NAFDA is complete visibility of where products are being sold, what are the key prices that the suppliers are supplying the goods for, and how we can actually work with the suppliers and with our distributors to grow the business.''

CASE STUDY

NAFDA

THE PROBLEM: Had standardised their ERP as Microsoft Dynamics NAV and wanted BI to unlock the value of the data for head office and also wholesale members.

THE PROCESS: Adopted Zap business intelligence for Microsoft dynamics NAV.

THE RESULT: Able to better manage relationships with vendors and help members become more efficient.