Automated sales and inventory information requires enterprisewide reporting and broad access
Bakers and IT directors have something in common: a shared dread of excess. Too much fresh bread and too much fresh data leads to waste.
At Metz Baking Co., a push to automate the company`s sales, financial, manufacturing, and delivery systems resulted in an abundance of potentially useful data -- if it could be accessed and analyzed in a timely manner.
"If we can`t put the data in an easily accessible form then it`s not of much value," says Larry Hames, senior vice president of MIS at Metz, in Sioux City, Iowa.
The company generates about 500,000 invoices each month delivering fresh bread and baked goods to more than 60,000 stores and restaurants in 16 Midwestern states, according to Hames. Headquartered in Chicago, the privately-held company operates 19 bakeries and employs 5,000 people.
To integrate sales information from delivery invoices with its in-house developed Cobol-based business systems, Metz equipped its route drivers with portable, handheld computers. Data downloaded from these handhelds resulted in 1.3 million rows of potentially valuable sales data each week.
To manage this data, Metz implemented a Red Brick data warehouse front-ended by Brio Enterprise decision support tools in April 1998. Previously, Metz relied on Borland`s PC-based Paradox database, which Hames says lacked the level of query and analysis sought by sales executives and financial accounting staff.
Hames explains that with Paradox, anyone seeking to execute reports against historical records could only access data from one bakery at a time. Thus, each report had to be generated 19 times, then compiled into one report, for enterprise-wide reporting.
This system of constantly slicing and dicing the data enabled Hames and the IT staff to find and then fix any corrupted data, something Hames says they might not have paid as much attention to with a different database system. Having error-free data also proved to be valuable when porting to Red Brick.
"The nice thing was we had the data already cleaned," Hames says. "Every once in a while you get lucky." As a result, getting the new data warehouse and analysis tools running took less than four months.
Metz`s data warehouse resides on a Compaq NT server, which is networked to two central AS/400 servers at the company`s IT facility in Sioux City. Bakeries are equipped with local AS/400 servers which are in-turn networked, in a hub and spoke configuration via frame relay, to the central AS/400.
Hames says that this network design is well-suited for the type of querying and analysis done with the data warehouse. "All processing happens on the server which saves a lot of traffic on the frame relay," Hames says.
Metz launched the Brio front-end tools with 20 basic queries to 200 end-users throughout the company. The basic queries were designed by IT staff for tasks such as measuring route profitability, tracking sales trends, and forecasting demand. In its first two months of use, about 180 more queries, suggested by end-users and certified for not downgrading performance by IT, were added to a central repository for re-use.
According to Hames, this newfound access to enterprisewide data saves two-work days per week when preparing internal audits of any business process -- from tracking inventory to forecasting consumer demand. Reports are consequently more current records and also of a greater analytical value.
Hames adds that he doesn`t foresee Metz replacing its custom-developed business systems with third-party supply chain or enterprise resource planning software, citing the administrative burden posed by a new package from the likes of Oracle or SAP. "Our homegrown solutions work well for us. Everybody`s got to look at their own situation," Hames says.
And as opposed to old data, at least with stale bread, one can make bread crumbs.
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