Northern Foods

“Overall improvements have been made to the level and quality of information available across different businesses. The real benefit has been to make better use of data that is already there. We are able to forecast sales more effectively, and to link those forecasts to our production and personnel systems.”
Lesley Heron, Co-ordinator of IBM Cognos software products at Northern Foods

Challenges Faced
  • Business data stored in a variety of databases and platforms.
  • Lack of integration making decision making difficult and slow.
  • High report printing costs.
  • Lack of decision support among users, particularly mobile workers.
  • Data not available to enough users.

The complexity of Northern Foods' business means that the company produces vast amounts of data about sales, human resources (HR) and management and production schedules. But in the past, it was difficult for Northern Foods to retrieve meaningful information from its IT systems, says Lesley Heron, co-ordinator of IBM Cognos software at Northern Foods.

"Like most big companies, we maintain large databases containing hundreds of different figures," Heron says. "What we were missing was a way to get sensible information out of that data."

Northern Foods had introduced a number of technologies to interpret corporate data, including spreadsheets and decision support systems for senior management. However, it needed a toolset to handle a more detailed analysis of sales at site level, as well as a way to standardise information retrieval and reporting across the organisation.

"We began to look for a product that would help us achieve those aims," Heron says. "Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay stood out as the right combination."

Success Strategy
  • Enterprise-wide reporting infrastructure.
  • Construction of a data warehouse to consolidate data prior to analysis.
  • Reports tailored to requirements of each users.
  • Distribution of reports to desktop and mobile users.

Northern Foods therefore began using IBM Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay to answer specific requirements at individual sites. For example, Jacqui Whitworth, project manager at Fox's Biscuits, says that the first application in the division Biscuit's was to improve reporting from its personnel system. "There is a reporting function within our personnel system, but it is not particularly user-friendly," she says. "It meant that IT spent a lot of time writing the reports that the personnel people needed. Now personnel managers can access any information about employees and past employees using Impromptu."

The next application developed by Fox's Biscuits was a sales analysis system for its Marks & Spencer department. Because a high proportion of products are manufactured for export, analysing sales is a complex business. One product may have 12 different codes, according to where it will be sold, for example. Before using IBM Cognos Impromptu, analysing those sales used to take two days, according to Whitworth. Now it takes one person a few hours.

"Developing those small systems made us think about the benefits of analysing sales on a wider basis," Whitworth says. "We found that the business wanted to move from looking at weekly reports to analysing daily sales, and that it wanted to look at sales in conjunction with other information, such as costing and production."

Heron confirms that, although Northern Foods began using IBM Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay to interpret on-line data, as the requirements of users changed, it began to build a data warehouse that could include information from a number of different sources.

"We found that while users wanted to look at different elements of corporate data, what they all wanted was more analysis of trends," says Heron. "They wanted to compare today's sales figures with equivalent data from the same period last week/year together with projections into the future, for example. Users can test their assumptions and put the results into sales and marketing presentations using graphics to put their point across."

The Fox Biscuits division is therefore building the Fox Information System (FIS): effectively, a data warehouse drawing on data held in SAP R/3 and Approach DB/2 databases, running on IBM AS/400s and Compaq servers. By consolidating data from multiple sources in this way, the company can now combine product costs, sales, budgeting and forecasting and use IBM Cognos Impromtu and Powerplay to analyse product costs.

Northern Foods is also currently building a central database of suppliers of raw materials and packaging in order to improve its purchasing decisions. It will use IBM Cognos PowerPlay to analyse supplier data and spot trends in pricing and product specification.

So far, there are 40 users of the FIS using IBM Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay and new users are being added all the time. Northern Foods as a whole has a total of 200 licences for IBM Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay, and Lesley Heron says that the majority of managers use the products to generate pre-defined reports and models.

Heron adds that Northern Foods has made the most out of IBM Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay by investing in the right levels of training for individuals. As well as using training services provided by IBM, Northern Foods has delivered its own training in-house to explain how to get the best out of the new technology. Overall, the training requirements have been simple. Michelle Livesey, systems analyst at Fox's Biscuits and user of IBM Cognos tools says, "One user hadn’t even used Windows but they were running on the system after just half a day."

"What we are doing is giving people access to their own data," Heron explains. "They are not used to working with data in this way, and they need to think and work differently to get the most out of the new systems. However, the investment that you need to make in staff training should not be underestimated."

Business Benefits
  • Clearer and more timely view of the performance of the business.
  • IBM Cognos PowerPlay assists users to spot sales trends.
  • Reduced training requirements.
  • Information available to a wider community of users.
  • Reduced printing costs.

The key benefits of IBM Cognos software tools at Northern Foods have been to open up corporate information to a wider audience, and to provide a more flexible view of that information. Systems used in the past had allowed Northern Foods to report on sales and production activity, but not to ask questions on an ad hoc basis.

"We have found that not all managers want to look at the same information," explains Whitworth. "Some want to use it in the office, others want to take the system out on the road on a laptop. Sales people like the fact that they can look at data in any format and get a view of the business that is always up to date. The print-outs that are still produced as hard copy are easier to look at than before and are tailored for each application."

Now that Northern Foods has standardised on IBM Cognos Impromptu and PowerPlay, it can use the tools to build a number of different systems which will improve access to corporate information. Instead of relying on inflexible reports delivered by the IT department, business unit managers can analyse corporate data when and where they need to.

Another business advantages is that print costs have been reduced significantly, considering that over 70 different print jobs used to be processed every Sunday night.

Next Step

Michelle Livesey, systems analyst at Fox's Biscuits and user of IBM Cognos software tools, admits that the company had expected to build FIS in three months. However, she explains "such has been the level of interest that, a year on, we are still adding applications and functionality. In fact, the company is now proposing to email datacubes to users to satisfy demand. Further applications have been built using IBM Cognos PowerPlay. For instance, building spreadsheets for product accounts used to take two days and this has now been cut to a day, mainly because users are always given no more than exactly the data they need."

On top of that, Northern Foods is investigating the web capabilities of IBM Cognos PowerPlay so that it can provide reporting over the enterprise intranet it is currently developing. The company has also committed to developing new enterprise systems under SAP and will use IBM Cognos PowerPlay as the enterprise analysis tool for data in SAP R/3.