Canada: Labatt rolls out a business intelligence system to boost performance measurement

Labatt Breweries announced on January 17 it has rolled out a Kalido business intelligence system to cut the time it takes to introduce business performance measures from months to one week.

The firm, which uses an Oracle-based ERP system, needed more detailed information on business performance, said Jonathan Starkey, enterprise business intelligence… "ERP is great for operational reporting, but it does not go down to detailed performance measures," he said.

The Kalido datawarehouse system allowed the company to measure supply chain activities, profitability and efficiency. "These link high-level key performance indicators down to an individual manager level, so we know how individual roles and responsibilities affect overall performance," said Starkey.

"Our ability to react to new business information requirements has greatly improved. Previously any new data model could take six months for IT to deliver. Now managers get a working model in a couple of days and a fine-tuned system in a week."

Labatt chose the Kalido product because of its flexibility and ability to handle change over time, said Starkey.

The system enabled change to be easily handled, without requiring data models to be frozen or reporting to be fixed in advance, he said. It also kept records of previous changes with its "corporate memory" functionality. This helped Labatt to compare like with like, despite any changes that may have occurred over time.

Starkey said, "Everything that could change did during our implementation - the organisational structure, the ownership, processes, KPIs, business sponsors. Not only would it have been impossible to manage these changes with traditional datawarehousing techniques, even if we had been able to we would never be able to keep an accurate record of what came before. With this system, we could build and deploy our datawarehouse without waiting for everything to be stable."

The datawarehouse uses IBM AIX databases and Oracle application servers running on IBM hardware. Data is integrated in from 11 systems.

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