Kraft Finds Endless Uses for Business Intelligence

Kraft Foods, the global powerhouse in snacks, confectionery and quick meals, recognized a need for enhanced analytics to better understand performance indicators in functions such as supply chain and logistics, planning and production, and expense management. Kraft is in the midst of a multi-year ERP systems implementation and is facing the challenge of consolidating information from SAP ERP, legacy and external systems. Along the way, company executives realized that areas like product freshness and sales and operations planning (S&OP) can benefit from having improved business insight by the right users at the right time. 

During a CGT Web event on Nov. 4, 2010, Richard Knepper, business intelligence manager at Kraft Foods, discussed the company’s voyage to information access and analysis. Here are some highlights from the event:

--Lora Cecere, partner for Altimeter Group, kicked off the event by advising attendees to “free your data to answer the questions that you do not know to ask.” She believes that folks are struggling with questions of how do I improve profitability, how do I improve agility and how do I use data in a more insightful way? “Right now in the industry we have what I call an ERP hangover. Folks have invested a lot of money and a lot of energy, and they really want one set of numbers. They want to have comfortable reporting systems, they want to have a new era of business analytics, and they are struggling with how,” explains Cecere. 

--Rebecca Braverman, Global Market Development director at QlikTech, joined the panel to share real-world insights of how consumer goods organizations are optimizing Business Intelligence. She discussed some factors affecting profitability in a consumer products company and offered helpful tips on how to address these challenges using the right tools. “Today’s BI is not about providing a single capability; it means many different things to many different end users,” she said.

--Knepper rounded out the Web event by revealing how Kraft Foods was able to improve the quality and timeliness of food and product delivery, track shelf-life-remaining (SLR) for products, compare results to specific objectives, and reduce overall costs in the supply chain. He also explained how the company creates multi-dimensional analytics from business unit down to item (SKU) level across sales, production, inventory and customer data and provides “quick hit” solutions with significant ROI. “Our motto at Kraft is to ‘Make Today Delicious’. We want to delight our customers with the best tasting, freshest food possible. The business intelligence group enables this by providing important, timely and relevant information for the business to make better decisions,” Knepper closed.

 To listen to this Web event in its entirety, click here.