Nabisco Builds Data Warehouse Quickly with IBM's AS/400

Nabisco, whose brands include Planters Peanuts, Lifesavers, A1 Steak Sauce, Grey Poupon Mustard and Oreo Cookies, has manufacturing operations that are highly decentralized, with each business division operating autonomously. As a result of this autonomy, data for executive decision making cannot be found in one place. Information from each division and manufacturing site is kept separately, is stored in different formats, and is extremely difficult to utilize.

Within the Planters and Lifesaver business divisions, fixed costs and manufacturing performance measurement were becoming key issues. To maximize profitability, executives needed metrics to better understand productivity, equipment utilization, inventory levels and manufacturing costs. Comparison of product line data from all manufacturing sites would ensure effective utilization of all manufacturing resources. With data from each manufacturing site stored in different formats and files, it was impossible to gather, consolidate and distill the data.

To attain the goal of a common reporting structure for internal performance measurement and manufacturing site effectiveness, Nabisco faced some key technical challenges. First, they needed to develop a systems architecture robust enough to handle distributed data from multiple sites on a single processing platform. Second, they needed to cleanse and transform data to eliminate inconsistencies and provide a "single version of the truth" for all the manufacturing executives. Third, vast amounts of historical data needed to be saved to facilitate the development of yearly, quarterly, monthly and weekly manufacturing trends.

Tony DelDuca, senior director of information services states, "The IBM AS/400 is the backbone of today's manufacturing environment. Because of it's processing strengths and price-point value, it was easy to select the AS/400 Advanced Server (53S) as the processing foundation of the data warehousing application. The technical attributes of the AS/400 Advanced Server provided a perfect fit and allowed Nabisco to leverage a common technology for both OLTP and OLAP environments". Dick Ordon, Senior Manager of Application Development says, "We chose the AS/400 53S Advanced Server because it was optimized for this environment- it is extremely fast, compatible with our existing manufacturing environment, is scalable and is very reliable. With the new parallel data base features of DB2/400 we know we can easily expand the system as our business grows."

The AS/400 solution has enabled Nabisco to build a high performance data warehouse environment very rapidly. They have constructed their own customized application suite that provides manufacturing executives with timely data in an "easy to view" format. The ability to query information across all product lines in a summarized or l fashion is no longer a two-day process. Management can view the productivity metrics of each manufacturing facility, keeping them in touch with their business in a real-time fashion. "Gut feelings" and subjective guesses have been replaced with clear, concise information from which effective and timely decisions can now be made. This system allows the local manufacturing site executives as well as the corporate executives to share a common information repository for decision making. Harry Salvaggio, Senior Manager of Operations Finance, stated that "This data warehousing application provides Planters and Life Savers with three benefits. Increased availability of information due to all of the manufacturing data being available in a central repository. Better and easier ways of presenting data due to management being able to view data at the highest division level and drill down capability to the lowest SKU level."

More accurate and consistent reporting occurs because all of the spreadsheets, e-mails and faxes have been replaced with a standard suite of performance reporting tools. The biggest benefit has been information based decision-making. Executives and managers are now able to use their corporate information asset in their day to day decision making. According to Don Valenzano, senior director of finance for Life Savers and project sponsor, "This system will allow us to identify problem areas earlier and thereby enable management to establish action plans that will capitalize on these opportunities. These new data warehouse applications will form the foundation for a new executive decision making process enabling Nabisco management to maximize profitability and take advantage of emerging business opportunities rapidly".

Edited by Pam Ahlberg

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