Sysco

HBS Case-SYSCO

1. Why does SYSCO need BI?

SYSCO needs Business Intelligence to increase efficiency by organizing information generated by its operations. SYSCO has two different divisions, the broad-line companies and the specialty companies, which have separated profit and loss statements. With the use of BI, people can easily access the statements between these different divisions. There is a lack of consistency between part numbers, customer identifications, order statuses, and other important information which makes it difficult for managers to monitor and compare performance.

2. How can SYSCO take advantage of BI?

Business Intelligence can be advantageous to SYSCO by providing statistical analysis, graphical representations and access to important data. With the use of dashboards, users at every level can easily access summaries of important information. BI software can combine data from separate warehouses and databases to help managers make better business decisions. With all the information centralized, managers save time when accessing other divisions’ databases. BI uses data mining to automatically sort through large pools of data to determine trends and patterns that could have otherwise been overlooked by managers.

3. What are the potential obstacles?

The potential obstacle of Business Intelligence implementation is determining how much software to buy and when to buy it. SYSCO needs to determine the correct balance of software with the current needs of the company. Employee training is required for the new software which requires time and money in addition to the cost of the software. Another obstacle will be ensuring that the current ERP system and BI software from the operating companies would work collaboratively with the new system.

4. Choose one of the scenarios in case and convince Director’s Council why they have to take that scenario.

We chose scenario three because it will be most beneficial scenario for SYSCO’s growing...