Business Intelligence Software at Sysco

Business Intelligence Software at Sysco

Overview

SYSCO is the largest food distributor in North America. Their focus is on obtaining and distributing food and food related products and services to restaurants, health-care and educational facilities, lodging establishments, and other organizations in the US and Canada. Their business structure was highly decentralized and was composed of over 100 separate operating companies. Each operating company ran like an independent business. Because of this, each unit had their own applications, databases, and hardware and none of the businesses were interconnected. In 1993 SYSCO rolled out an ERP system to the broadline companies. This standardized IT to an extent and became an effective transaction platform. In 2000, a data warehouse was built to house all operational and financial data generated by the operating companies. Since each operating company did not necessarily use the ERP system the same way, the information was not consistent across all parts of the corporation. This made it difficult to pull any corporation wide reports and getting enough or the right information to predict the future was nearly impossible. Because of this, SYSCO determined they needed to invest in business intelligence software to help them access the data that was most important to them. Twila Day, Assistant VP of Technology and Applications for SYSCO, and her Technology and Applications Group were tasked with finding business intelligence (BI) software that would help their company make better use of the information generated by its operations and to serve their customers better.

Options

Day and her team were faced with three BI options. The three scenarios were as follows:

1. The “Bare Bones” scenario would provide only the minimum number of licenses and software components. Performance dashboards would be provided to just 10 people at each of the 83 broadline operating companies. Three people at each operating...