Centura Foods

With family favourites such as Bisto, Paxo, Sharwood's and Robinson's in its portfolio, Centura Foods enjoys a substantial slice of UK supermarket shelf space. Until now, however, the company found that pulling together the information on it's best selling lines and most profitable customers - essential business intelligence for forward planning - was a time consuming and complex task.Centura Foods has a new warehouse. This one however doesn't comprise bricks and mortar but data. Operational information is being gathered from throughout the business and stored ready for quick-fire analysis to help manage the business' wide range of products.

The Information Warehouse will eventually be used to tackle a range of commercial issues but, as Senior Business Manager (B.I.), Steve Pauline explains, the first project has been to identify Customer and Product Profitability (CAPP).

"Before we began work on the data warehouse we conducted a series of internal workshops to identify which information would be of most value to the business' managers.

"We chose CAPP as the first deliverable because, by combining current and historical Sales figures, Budget and Forecast data - all of which are essential for accurate trend analysis - it gives managers a single source of information to assist with production planning, Customer management and product direction & development. It also provides the back-drop for Management Accounts reporting, via a new Management Briefing Book.

"Much of the information in the warehouse already existed within the business but was held in a variety of business applications on a number of different platforms, adding to the administrative burden of locating and then collating it for business analysis.

"Being able to analyse data by customer and by individual product allows for informed decision-making regarding which products we should continue to make, which we need to make more of and which we may run as loss-leaders or, indeed, cease production of.

Steve Pauline and his team were assisted by leading UK Business Intelligence consultants, Simpson Associates of Manchester in building the Information Warehouse which brings together information from Centura Foods' Geac's System21

and other operational systems such as Forecasting and Promotions, using Cognos and DataMirror software.

"We didn't have the in-house resources to deliver the project so we looked for consultants who had experience of data warehousing and were familiar with the software packages. Their help was invaluable and they continue to provide first-class support and information."

Expansion of warehouse-based reporting is already under way with identified projects including analysis of stock levels and manufacturing costs to assist Centura's Supply Chain Team and reporting of age of product in both internal and external storage.

Ultimately the warehouse will exchange information with both internal and external audiences as EPOS data is fed into it as an extra indicator for manufacturing planning and so that Centura's Suppliers may benefit from increasingly timely and accurate production forecasting.