E-Malt.com News article: Canada: Labatt Improves Corporate Performance with Kalido

Labatt Breweries of Canada has successfully deployed a corporate-wide Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) program, based on the KALIDO(R) application suite (KALIDO), Kalido, the leading provider of enterprise data warehousing and master data management software, announced on December 20. Labatt selected Kalido's software for its ability to rapidly develop an enterprise-scale data warehouse, to handle complex data and to easily support future changes. As a result of the EBI program, Labatt has achieved faster, more accurate business reporting and analysis, improved business intelligence and enhanced corporate performance management. A full case study of Labatt's KALIDO implementation is available at: http://www.kalido.com/labatt.

Labatt, part of InBev, the world's largest brewer by volume, launched the EBI program to gain consistent, detailed business insights in a very rich data environment with multiple internal and external data sources along with a diverse set of business processes, infrastructures and data standards. Powered by a KALIDO enterprise data warehouse, the EBI program enables department decision makers across Labatt - including finance, marketing, sales, supply chain and the executive team - to answer business-critical questions quickly and effectively throughout organizational change.

Executives and managers can now access detailed, actionable information about customers as well as brand, channel and geographic performance, enabling them to better compare the performance against key performance metrics and financial plans. This enhanced business intelligence has already improved visibility and consistency in metrics, management information and planning across the organization.

Jonathan Starkey, enterprise business intelligence technology and data manager, Labatt Breweries of Canada, explains: "Executive decision-makers at Labatt are aiming to drive costs out of the business and to make processes more efficient. They do not have time to wait for systems to be redesigned to reflect change in the business. KALIDO adapts to change quickly and cost-effectively, and enables us to keep reporting aligned with the business as it changes."

KALIDO enterprise data warehouses enable change to be easily handled without requiring the business data models to be frozen or reporting to be fixed in advance. KALIDO also keeps a record of previous changes with its "corporate memory" functionality - enabling Labatt to accurately compare "like" with "like" - despite any changes that may have happened year over year.

Jonathan Starkey adds: "During our Enterprise Business Intelligence implementation, everything that could change, did - the organizational structure, the ownership, processes, key performance indicators, business sponsors. Not only would it have been impossible to manage these changes with traditional data warehousing techniques, but also, even if we had been able to, we would never have been able to keep an accurate record of what came before. With KALIDO, we could build and deploy our data warehouse without waiting for everything to be stable and, at the same time, we were able to capture business information as it really is both before and after major changes."

Labatt plans to add the master data management component (KALIDO MDM) of the KALIDO application suite. Using KALIDO to align master data will improve cross-functional reporting further, by ensuring that all parts of the business have a common "language" - essentially, shared definitions of business concepts such as profitability and operating margin.

Says Bob Featherstone, director of global data and application architecture at InBev: "Unlike pure technology infrastructure projects, the Labatt Enterprise Business Intelligence program is a business-driven project designed to improve efficiency and provide people with visibility into the key performance indicators throughout the business. We found that KALIDO could adapt to business change and was therefore the only enterprise data warehouse that could support our strategic goals."

Andy Hayler, founder and chief strategist, Kalido, concludes: "The Labatt team has worked wonders with its Enterprise Business Intelligence program - succeeding not just locally in finance or sales, but also with executive decision makers throughout the company. By providing each department with the tools they need to quickly and effectively analyze the data that shapes the business, Labatt has truly achieved enterprise business intelligence success. We're pleased that KALIDO could contribute to such an accomplishment and look forward to helping Labatt further enhance its corporate performance management with effective master data management."

Labatt Breweries founded in London, Ontario in 1847 and the proud brewer of more than 60 quality beer brands, Labatt is the leading brewery in Canada and a proud part of InBev, the world's largest brewer by volume.


21 December, 2005