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Pyramid’s Decision Intelligence Platform puts Export Packers on a new trajectory for growth
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
- Procurement
Services
- System Integration
- Training
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
An Ontario-based importer, exporter, and distributor of food commodities, Export Packers has been around for over 80 years and is one of Canada’s largest privately held companies. Despite being a market leader with a reputation for quality, customer service, and innovation, the company wanted to take advantage of new technologies and increase efficiencies around business-to-business relationships. When John Stakel joined the company as Head of Information Technology in 2019, his mission was clear: “I was brought in to rehabilitate the technology stack. We had a tendency to be entrepreneurs at every level in the organization, which is great but very execution-oriented; we were absolutely lacking in all sorts of actionable insight.” The company’s ERP system was Microsoft Navision, running on SQL Server with a Citrix publishing tool. For business intelligence (BI), information from Navision was authored into Excel or taken directly into hundreds of Microsoft Access databases, depending on the level of integration. Either way, it was hard to get insights into inventory, sales, procurement, and the profitability of trades. “We created a scheduler because other jobs were kicking the Access databases off the system, but it was just putting a Band-Aid on the problem,” explained Stakel. “As well as investing in a new ERP system, we wanted to change the culture, the way people in the company think about information. We needed to start convincing them that there’s a different way to consume insights than a PDF and Excel spreadsheet.”
About The Customer
Export Packers is an Ontario-based importer, exporter, and distributor of food commodities. With over 80 years of experience, it is one of Canada’s largest privately held companies. The company is known for its quality, customer service, and innovation. Despite its market leadership, Export Packers sought to leverage new technologies to increase efficiencies in its business-to-business relationships. The company’s ERP system was Microsoft Navision, running on SQL Server with a Citrix publishing tool. For business intelligence (BI), information from Navision was authored into Excel or taken directly into hundreds of Microsoft Access databases, depending on the level of integration. This made it challenging to gain insights into inventory, sales, procurement, and the profitability of trades. The company aimed to modernize its technology stack and change its culture to become more data-driven.
The Solution
To identify levels for reporting, the internal IT team had to scope the relationship between dimensions; they had to familiarize themselves with ETL processes, data transformation, and data modeling. Onboarding people to Pyramid was a culture change and a technical challenge, according to Stakel, but what he liked about the platform was the way it could be rolled out incrementally—his point about not putting too much pressure on the organization at the start. “We would work in one area of the business at a time,” he said. “We started with the trading organization.” A first iteration was developed with a data model and dashboards that allowed the sales team to dig down into revenue and profitability. Next came the procurement group. To make a big change workable, they were able to compare their old reports with new ones from Pyramid to understand the transition. “There was a trust-building exercise that took a few months,” explained Stakel. He described it as a journey to “change hearts and minds,” to move away from transactional and operational analytics to deeper-routed intelligence around profitability, looking at margins on a product-by-product basis.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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