Lindt Canada, a long-time IBM Cognos customer, recognized that their supply chain team had been underserviced when it came to analytics. While their sales and marketing functions had benefited from modern business intelligence tools, the supply chain team was still relying on legacy reporting tools and massive Excel spreadsheets to gather, merge, and analyze data from various sources.
This siloed, manual approach created significant problems: difficulty sharing and visualizing insights across the organization, minimal integration with other data sources, limited data quality and governance controls, and a lack of automation. The supply chain team had essentially built their own data warehouse in a complex Excel file, filled with manual calculations and lookups.
Lindt saw an opportunity to collaborate with key stakeholders to identify priorities and migrate their solutions from legacy applications to a modern analytics toolset, giving the supply chain team their own dashboards and data sets while leveraging the same BI platform used by the rest of the organization.
Lindt selected Pantera Digital as their preferred partner for this initiative. As their IT Director noted, the company had worked with Pantera Digital for many years as a trusted provider for both resources and solutions, valuing their CPG experience, technical abilities, and strong communication and collaboration skills.
Pantera Digital's approach involved working with Lindt's existing technology stack, including IBM Cognos Analytics, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Server SSIS. While Lindt's existing technology relied heavily on legacy Transformer cubes, the proposed solution leveraged more modern Cognos Analytics 11 functionality, including Data Modules and the Dashboarding Tool.
The team worked closely with Lindt's supply chain stakeholders, interviewing business users to understand the source data and required outcomes. The delivered solution ingests numerous flat file data sources, integrates them with ERP data, and processes several calculated metrics to provide a consolidated view within Cognos. Strict protocols and sophisticated error handling were introduced for data ingestion, along with automation designed to eliminate user error in manually merging and preparing calculations.
The solution deployed by Pantera Digital successfully helped the supply chain team reduce their reliance on Excel for managing and consuming data, while minimizing the time and effort required to work with the data. Key outcomes included:
Building on this success, Lindt continues to work with Pantera Digital to improve their supply chain analytics, with a follow-up project focused on designing a new planning and reporting process leveraging IBM Planning Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics.
"What keeps us going back? It's about trust. It's about doing what you say you're going to do. It's about delivering value and ultimately, getting things done. Consistently."
- John Walter, IT Director, Lindt Canada