Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - September 2008 - (Page 12)

Business Intelligence Solution Gives Welch’s ‘Way More than Reports’ Editorial Director Jean V. Murphy A conversation with Bill Coyne, director of purchasing and logistics at Welch’s, Concord, Mass. Welch’s is the world’s leading marketer of Concord and Niagara-based grape products, ranging from refrigerated juices and sparkling juice cocktails to jams, jellies and a variety of single-serve products. The Welch’s brand is sold throughout the U.S. and in more than 35 countries and territories around the world. Welch’s fills around 50,000 orders annually and spends more than $50m on transportation and distribution. Earlier this year, the company implemented a solution from Oco Inc., Waltham, Mass., to provide needed business intelligence for the supply chain. Bill Coyne headed that effort for Welch’s and Michael DeCerbo was the Oco program manager. DeCerbo also participated in this conversation. they constructed actual reports that showed us what we would be getting. I really think Oco deserves a lot of credit in their approach to this. We are all used to tackling IT projects where you sit down and describe your needs. Then the IT folks, based on their understanding of your needs, develop an original draft of your solution. You look at it and it’s usually not very close to what you were trying to convey or what you really want. So then you go through a process of amending that draft to get it to represent what you meant to ask for and what you really need. Oco came in with a very structured, professional profiling session so that the first time they came back to us with their understanding and grasp of what we had asked for, it was very, very close to what we wanted. And the time frame was fast. In fact, it may have been too fast for us. So we were very, very pleased with the entire delivery process. Q: What were the business intelligence issues that Welch’s was dealing with before it partnered with Oco? Coyne: Last September we implemented a company-wide ERP system from Oracle. Prior to that, we had used a home-grown legacy system and a separate freight pay system. When we wanted to compare last year’s transportation cost information to the current, we had to pull data from two systems. We wanted to combine this data and generate reports that would allow us to better understand and manage our transportation costs. The Oracle system didn’t have a module that met these needs. I don’t know if that is still true today, but it was at that time. We were wrestling with what to do about this when Oco called on us. When we looked at their solution, we knew right away that it would do the job for us. Q:Can you give us an idea of what they showed you? Coyne: The Oco team came in and met with our group and conducted a structured profiling session to understand what our management team expected for reporting and how Oco needed to optimize the user experience. They came back in a very, very short period of time with a proposed solution that came quite close to meeting our total needs. Using our data and working with our folks, Q: How does it work? Coyne: First of all, let me say that I think that Oco under-sells its solutions by calling what you get from it ‘reports.’ They are way more than reports in the traditional sense. Each report is actually a cube or a mini data warehouse that we previously would have viewed as maybe a dozen reports. One report, for example, allows us to go in and understand all of our transportation costs in a host of different ways—either by carrier or by state or by city or by customer or by weight category or by time frame or whatever. Oco calls that a report, but I think it is way more than that. It allows us to get a much sharper look at our cost structure and at our transportation operations with a vast amount of information that is easily accessible to us. The beauty of it is that every night we send over every data element or every field on each freight bill that was paid and on each bill of lading that was shipped and on each customer order that was received that day. All of that information goes into a data warehouse at Oco and then Oco simply says, 12 SEPTEMBER 2008

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Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - August 2008 Contents Editorial GL&SCS Exclusive Fast Forward Up Front Cover Story: Free The Enterprise: Busting Silos in the Supply Chain Business Process Management Merits New Look fromCorporate Strategists Ships and Ports Explore Many Ways to Go Green The Right Information Should Help Avoid Any Kind of Risk Industry Voices

Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - September 2008

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