Download PDF
Keeping Information Fresh at Utz Quality Foods
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
Utz Quality Foods, a snack food company, faced the challenge of keeping decision-makers informed of sales and distribution information, obtained daily from a widely dispersed sales force. The company operates on a Direct Store Delivery business model, marketing its products to stores and supermarkets in the mid-Atlantic United States. Utz also distributes snack food products that it buys from companies like ConAgra Foods. The company needed a system that allows managers to quickly gather and analyze current sales and distribution information.
About The Customer
Utz Quality Foods, Inc. is a national player in the consumer packaged goods industry, servicing large retail customers like Sam’s Club and Costco as well as major supermarket chains. The company coordinates sales and production of over 20,000 pounds of potato chips every hour, and manages more than 700 plus delivery routes to 30,000 stores. The Hanover, Pennsylvania-based company operates on a Direct Store Delivery business model, marketing its products to stores and supermarkets in the mid-Atlantic United States. Utz also distributes snack food products that it buys from companies like ConAgra Foods.
The Solution
Utz Quality Foods harnessed the power of BI to create a Web-based system that generates reports based on data gathered from hand-held devices in the field, so managers can quickly access and analyze timely information. The company uses WebFOCUS to coordinate the timing among its production, marketing, sales, and distribution operations. WebFOCUS is at the heart of a system called UtzFOCUS, which allows managers to quickly gather and analyze current sales and distribution information. Authorized users can determine how much of a certain product is selling on any given day, how much was sold into a particular store or chain, at what price, and in response to what promotions.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
The Kellogg Company
Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.
Case Study
HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers
For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.
Case Study
Energy Management System at Sugar Industry
The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.
Case Study
Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study
Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.
Case Study
Temperature Monitoring for Restaurant Food Storage
When it came to implementing a solution, Mr. Nesbitt had an idea of what functionality that he wanted. Although not mandated by Health Canada, Mr. Nesbitt wanted to ensure quality control issues met the highest possible standards as part of his commitment to top-of-class food services. This wish list included an easy-to use temperature-monitoring system that could provide a visible display of the temperatures of all of his refrigerators and freezers, including historical information so that he could review the performance of his equipment. It also had to provide alert notification (but email alerts and SMS text message alerts) to alert key staff in the event that a cooling system was exceeding pre-set warning limits.
Case Study
Coca-Cola Refreshments, U.S.
Coca-Cola Refreshments owns and manages Coca-Cola branded refrigerators in retail establishments. Legacy systems were used to locate equipment information by logging onto multiple servers which took up to 8 hours to update information on 30-40 units. The company had no overall visibility into equipment status or maintenance history.