Revlon, Reily Foods Put Big Data to Good Use
Humankind created more data in a single day in 2012 than it produced between 4000 BC and the year 2000! By some estimates, that number is around six or seven exabytes. If this does not surprise you, look up how many zeros are in an exabyte.
One way or another, the amount of data being produced is growing exponentially each second of each minute of each hour of each day. It is no wonder that Big Data is a common buzz component in today's information age dialogue.
During a recent web seminar, Big Data advocates from Reily Foods, Revlon and Microsoft convened to answer the question on most consumer goods executives’ minds these days:
“How are consumer goods companies capitalizing on all this data, and better yet, how are they using and communicating it?”
Here’s a recap of what they had to say about leveraging data to improve specific business processes, like product traceability, safety and demand planning.
- Reily Foods Company manufactures consumer brands across a variety of categories, including Luzianne Tea and Blue Plate mayonnaise, as well as private label coffee, tea and mayonnaise for large retailers. John Smith, vice president of Information Technology for Reily Foods, explained how the company is leveraging real-time access to data to support food safety practices, including traceability for product recalls. “When we embarked on our implementation of [Microsoft Dynamics AX], we used it as an opportunity to fundamentally shift the way we discussed traceability and recalls internally,” says Smith. “This helped everyone get on board with this as a good and necessary initiative as opposed to a computer system IT-type of initiative.” A new, automated traceability process replaced a manual paper-based process, and includes recording raw ingredient usage by lot number, recording finished goods lot numbers on all transactions, and tight, near-real-time integration between its warehouse management and ERP systems. This enables full traceability in minutes instead of hours. “We’ve leveraged traceability data up and down the supply chain, and this has allowed us to achieve BRC certification. The certification also puts our food safety culture and capabilities ahead of our peers, and provides us with a competitive advantage in the marketplace,” reports Smith. In his presentation, Smith also explained how Reily Foods leveraged internal and external data to improve the responsiveness of its equipment repair facilities to foodservice.
- Revlon, the $1.3 billion global cosmetics company, is currently in the process of consolidating 18 different instances of ERP across the globe into a single ERP platform using Microsoft Dynamics AX. This undertaking involves using master data to simplify the migration. But when Revlon looked at globalizing point-of-sale (POS) data, especially for demand management, challenges emerged. “It turned out that we needed to invest in an analytical master data model, which not only included our operational data but also needed to include some different hierarchies as well as historical data for reporting and modeling our demand plans,” said Piotr Prussak, vice president of Global Applications for Revlon. “It was more work than we initially planned for, however, we achieved a fairly decent business benefit primarily because our POS data provides us with the largest volume of data and has some unique information about geographies where our items are being sold.” Prussak also explained why he thinks that analyzing social media data, while unique, is much less of a priority.
- Fred Studer, Microsoft’s General Manager for Dynamics Product Marketing, highlighted Big Data trends and challenges and explained how Microsoft Dynamics facilitates the data usage to help impact productivity. “We see all of these trends — people being mobile and social, a need for speed, to lower complexity and, ultimately, this mass explosion of data — and [we’re trying to] simplify that to create connective and collaborative, intuitive, proactive, and really easy and instant access to these systems,” said Studer.
Click here to listen to this web seminar on demand, and gain more insights on impactful Big Data use cases that your company can adopt today.