Food Manufacturers: How To Implement A Successful BI Strategy

By Melissa Lind, contributing writer

The world is diverse.  It is obvious that there are tremendous differences in food preferences between countries, communities, even individuals, and the businesses that serve them.  Knowing what your customer wants requires a Business Intelligence Strategy.

You might think a Business Intelligence Strategy is the same thing as corporate espionage.  It isn’t.  Business Intelligence (BI) is the identification of your customers and their specific needs.  A super-store will have different needs than a small, niche food supplier, which will be different from a supplier focusing on fresh and organic foods.  Knowing what you can do to meet the needs of each of your customers will require Business Intelligence and for that, you need a strategy before implementing a plan to find out.

Business Intelligence involves a greater use of data analysis and metrics to drive performance within a company.  A lot of managers and employees may have difficulty understanding how gathering numbers can help them perform more effectively.  What they may lack is the understanding of how those numbers will be analyzed and used to improve the company’s position in the food supply chain.

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To implement the strategy, you need to get buy-in from those employees.  Educating the people who will be impacted (your employees) on the process and listening to their ideas and concerns will have a big impact on the success of any Business Intelligence Strategy that you implement. You won’t be able to implement all of the ideas or address all of the concerns, but you will come away from planning sessions with a list of priorities that should be done now and a list of things that may be included later.  Ensuring your team members that they have been heard will help you get their cooperation.

Starting small, with the most important and simple things, will help you begin right away.  It will also enable your employees to become accustomed to the process in a less painful way, as their performance direction is impacted by the intelligence data you gather.  Once you get the first set of priorities addressed, a phased-in roll-out will be much easier than if you had jumped in all at once.  Not everyone will join in at the beginning and you need to plan for those events and allow your employees to adjust. 

While the initial changes may take just a few months, converting from numbers on a spreadsheet to an overall metrics based system for the entire food production segment may actually take years.  Just as you need to encourage your employees to be patient, you must be patient yourself.