Labatt Improves Corporate Performance with Kalido-Powered Business Intelligence

Information Management Online, December 22, 2005

Information Management Editorial Staff

Labatt Breweries of Canada has successfully deployed a corporate-wide enterprise business intelligence (EBI) program, based on the Kalido application suite. 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.

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.

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