Business Intelligence Software at Sysco

Case Analysis

Business Intelligence Software at SYSCO

I. Executive Summary

SYSCO, a Food Services Company, has decided to purchase Business Intelligence Software from Business Objects. This is in line with SYSCO’s continuous initiatives to streamline the issues of data redundancy and data integrity that has arisen due to the decentralised structure of the company. IT initiatives in this regard are:

- ERP

- Data Warehousing

The aim is to develop methodologies to leverage this data to provide superior monitoring and analytical capabilities.

In analyzing the case we have considered the decentralised functionality of the operating companies of SYSCO and a centralised approach that the business intelligence architecture would facilitate. We also took cognizance of change management issues that could crop up as a result of this, which have not been addressed by SYSCO. The value of Business Intelligence increases as the delivery of information is embedded in the processes and systems of the enterprise.

We propose moderate changes in the road ahead. After a critical analysis of SYSCO’s business model we concluded that effective predictive analysis would have to take into consideration the internal and external environment. In the internal environment valuable intelligence can be gained only by performing integrated analytics that cover cross value chain information across the following spectrum:

- Customer analytics

- Relationship management

- Supply chain management

We propose a “data to information on demand” approach that adds the integrated analytics layer to the data platform. To facilitate this and to take into consideration the imminent change management issues as well as to implement predictive analysis in the “customer analytic-relationship management-supply chain” business model (with inputs from the external environment) – we propose a three tier BI implementation:

- Tier 1-Open adaptive investigative-For non recurring business...