Welch Foods Inc. spends more than $50 million annually to ship its juices, jams and jellies to customers throughout the world. The Concord, Mass.-based company, which is the processing and marketing arm of the National Grape Cooperative Association Inc., makes anywhere from 35,000 to 40,000 shipments each year to fulfill approximately 50,000 customer orders.
For Bill Coyne, Welch's director of purchasing and logistics, it's been a challenge to gain detailed, real-time insight into the cost structure of a vast logistics footprint that involves "a lot of moving parts" and "tons and tons of information."
That challenge was compounded in early 2008 when the company went live with a new Oracle ERP system that replaced the company's previous home-grown legacy system. In addition, Welch's used a separate freight-pay system to process its transportation-payment transactions.
With several different IT systems spread across the company in many different departments, Welch's lacked the visibility it needed to effectively analyze its transportation costs, explains William Copacino, president and CEO of Oco Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based business intelligence (BI) systems.
In early 2008, Welch's implemented a SaaS-based BI system provided by Oco. The system includes a reporting tool that enables Welch's to view data from three disparate IT systems in a single Oco mini data warehouse.
The data warehouse gives Welch's the ability to report and produce key performance indicators (KPIs) within its dashboard, and Coyne notes that the tool gives Welch's the flexibility to "slice and dice data across the data warehouse" however the company sees fit. By virtue of the system's Google-like ease of use, as Coyne describes it, that data is accessible to employees at all levels of the company.
The added visibility paid immediate dividends, says Coyne, who estimates that the BI tool paid for itself in the first 30 days of being implemented. For example, by analyzing customer order patterns, Welch's identified opportunities to improve truck-capacity utilization.
"In the transportation world, you may pay $500 for a truck to move your product from Point A to Point B," Coyne says. "And if that truck can hold 42,000 pounds of Welch's product, and you're only putting 38,000 pounds on it, you're still paying the same price. So if you can analyze your order patterns and maximize what's going onto that truck, you're not only cutting your transportation costs, but you're being more environmentally friendly, because you're taking trucks off the highway."
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