Manufacturing Executive - September 2008 - (Page 34)

B USINESS INTELLIGENCE m FOOD DISTRIBUTOR Turns Up the Heat on Manufacturers New dashboard business intelligence technology gathers up disparate information to boost Bako UK’s purchasing power. BY MARK HALPER anufacturers beware: Your customers are deploying information technology that will help them take more control in business relationships with you. That’s certainly the case in the United Kingdom’s food processing industry, where distributor Bako UK recently deployed “dashboard” business intelligence technology from British ERP vendor Solarsoft to help keep better track of volume discounts that suppliers such as Coca Cola, Pepsico’s Walker Crisps division, or Wrights Pies might owe the company. “I think they’ll be surprised at how much we suddenly know about our purchasing,” says David Ferguson, IT services manager for Bako, the roughly £120 million, privately held, Preston, England-based company that supplies Britain’s bakeries and sandwich shops with everything from yeast, to frozen foods, to steakand-kidney pies and Christmas pudding. Disparate ERP and database systems across Bako’s six regions have long hampered its purchasing managers’ ability to access up-to-the minute information that would tell them, for instance, how many Cornish pasties, sausage rolls, or Victoria sponge cakes they have purchased over the last year from a particular supplier. Lack of such purchasing knowledge has weakened Bako’s clout in purchasing negotiations and undermined its ability to claim volume discounts that it might have already earned. “We were relying on them to tell us,” Ferguson says. “We’re able to do our own calculations now.” Bako’s March deployment of Chertsey, England-based Solarsoft’s technology — called Dashboard — lets the company collect information from across the regions and puts it all into one common, easy-to-read format. Bako paid £30,000 and is hoping for a oneyear return on the investment. The savings will come not only from claiming discounts, but also, according to Ferguson, from myriad other improvements. For instance, Dashboard will free two employees who have committed full-time to monitoring and reporting on purchasing. Dashboard also helps the company monitor its own buying trends, to see when it buys a particular product and how much it bought, and to keep track of inflation and other factors. It evaluates supplier performance, noting things like on-time or late deliveries. A BI tool from Lund, Sweden-based QlikTech International lives under the hood, allowing efficient retrieval by categor y. The BI software feeds the Dashboard 34 September 2008 Photo: RTimages

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Manufacturing Executive - September 2008

Manufacturing Executive - September 2008 Contents Editor's Letter Opinion By David Humphrey Starters Road Trip Part 1: Innovation or Efficiency? Part 2: The Innovation Gap Opinion By Lisa Bodell Special Report: Great Aspirations Supply Chain: The New Money Machine Product Design: Fruehauf Gets into High Gear with 3D CAD Business Intelligence: Food Distributor Turns Up the Heat on Manufacturers Software: Manufacturers Face SaaS Hurdles Dialogue Opinion By Pierfrancesco Manenti

Manufacturing Executive - September 2008

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