Spice World LLC CFO John Ruelle discusses how the company's ambitions for larger scale and efficiency were being hampered by archaic computer systems including IBM AS/400 computers, dot-matrix printers and racks of blue-barred paper datasets.
“There’s probably people that are listening in or watching today that don’t even know what these things are because they’ve never seen a black screen with green font," Ruelle said. “I don’t think I had seen one since the late ’90s.”
Updating systems gave Spice World critical visibility into business functions. Tracking key metrics went from searching through paper files to being able to call up data on digital dashboards. Those improvements came as the food company boosted sales and revenue by 35% in about three years.