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Dairy Giant Arla Foods Centralizes Data in Azure for Enhanced Productivity and Flexibility
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Electrical Grids
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Predictive Waste Reduction
- Time Sensitive Networking
Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
Arla Foods, the fifth-largest dairy company in the world, faced significant challenges with its data management. The company had a complex, spaghetti-like structure of data systems, each with unique upkeep and management challenges. The cost of maintaining these systems was growing, and employees were spending more time managing the systems than gaining insights from the data within them. The company had thousands of different applications, but none were transferable, creating a highly inefficient set of siloed solutions. Furthermore, the company was using Microsoft Power BI as a visualization tool, but without proper data architecture, the tool quickly became overloaded and began to fail. The company recognized that its current process was not working and set out to find a solution that would both save it money and move its business forward.
About The Customer
Arla Foods is a Denmark-based dairy company and the fifth-largest in the world. The company has a rich history dating back to the 1800s when the first cooperative dairy was established in Sweden. Arla is farmer-owned, and all earnings go back to the farm owners. The company places a large emphasis on the journey that its milk products take from cows to customers, recording and tracing every step of the way. Arla is committed to high standards of animal welfare, product quality, and safety, combining traditional craftsmanship and technology to ensure products remain as close to nature as possible. The company has over 10,000 employees and operates in the consumer goods industry.
The Solution
Arla Foods decided to centralize its data using Azure. The company used SAP BW on HANA for financial data and analysis, and moved all non-SAP data to the cloud. Azure provided every tool necessary for a complete solution, eliminating the need for any third-party tools. The company developed a data foundation on Azure that created one centralized location for data anywhere in the company to be ingested and consumed. The centralized data could then be used for a variety of business needs, from self-service reporting in Power BI to exploratory analytics and for powering data-driven applications. The company also used Azure Data Factory to extract data from other on-premises sources and stored it raw in Azure Data Lake Store Gen2. The data was then cleansed and transformed into a curated data layer, also stored in Azure Data Lake Store Gen2. For reporting, the curated data layer was loaded into specific data marts built per use case. The new architecture allowed Power BI to be used to its full extent, capacity could be managed, and data models could be significantly simplified to avoid performance issues.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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