Business Transition Of Leading Beverage And Confectionary Manufacturer

Company Background

One of the largest international beverage and confectionary companies in the world with a market capitalization of more than $10B and annual sales reaching well over $8B, today offers products all around the globe. In early 2003, our client acquired a leading confectionary. This acquisition allowed the company to offer more products to its customers and to gain access in major new markets.

Inforte's Business Intelligence practice shared its experience from other business intelligence and data warehousing implementations to help migrate the acquired organization successfully to our client's business model with little impact to the business.

Business Issue

The goal of the company was to apply new business processes and systems, many of which mirrored its other divisions, across the acquired company. During this transition, certain key systems were identified by the acquired company as business critical, so the functionality of these systems either needed to be maintained or replaced with systems with comparable or better functionality.

One data warehouse, which supported the sales and marketing department, was determined critical for the business transition. The existing data warehouse did not meet the acquired organization's growing need for a flexible data warehouse solution. Problems such as converting historical data to meet requirements of the new data warehouse and integrating all the new business processes and systems were problems faced with this new solution.

Inforte's Solution

Inforte assisted in the development of a Cognos data warehouse to support the company's sales and marketing needs as well as future plans for integrating the systems with other regions. With the implementation of SAP R/3, Inforte's knowledge of SAP R/3 was integral in the success of the go-live of the new data warehousing solution.

The new data warehouse merged historical sales financial data from the legacy system with current financial data from SAP R/3, allowing increased reporting functionality across their sales force, customers and products. The new data warehouse also supported manufacturing and demand management with the integration of plan and actual data. This implementation helped position the new arm of the company for future business intelligence projects and integration with other SAP and non-SAP systems.

Business Benefits Delivered

Inforte helped the acquired company transition from its predecessor to our client with new systems and processes, and the merged sales and marketing department now has a flexible data warehouse solution, supporting its reporting and analysis needs with accurate and timely information.