Panorama Case Studies

Company: Baltika Breweries

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Company Overview

Baltika Breweries has been in production since 1990 with headquarters in St. Petersburg, Russia. Since then, Baltika has become the leader of the Russian beer market, the second largest brewery in Europe, with revenues of more than 2 billion Euros, and conducting business with more than 60 countries across the globe.

Currently, Baltika Breweries operates 12 breweries, managing over 10,000 employees and covering more than 350,000 points-of-sale throughout its massive logistic network.

Business Challenge

Baltika Breweries was on the rise when it faced data warehousing challenges after merging with three other Russian breweries in 2006. The merger led to a sudden influx of information that presented obstacles in conducting successful data reports to monitor performance. At first, the company integrated Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Performance Point as its business intelligence platform for data warehousing and analysis. Pleased with the benefits of the multidimensional analysis the platform offered, Baltika embarked on an initiative to find and deploy an easy to use yet powerful business intelligence solution on top of the platform to construct a unified BI infrastructure throughout the organization. After evaluating offerings from SAP, Oracle, Cognos and other BI vendors, Baltika selected Panorama BI suites for its advanced analytical functionality yet simple, interactive user interface. With Panorama, Baltika Breweries was able to improve collaboration for its logistics department across the country, as well as successfully track key performance indicators (KPIs), which streamlined the entire company's productivity.

In 2006, the holding re-organization that accompanied Baltika's merger with three other breweries presented a number of data warehousing challenges. Because of IT differences between the multiple breweries that became connected through the merger, Baltika's process took from several hours to several days for analysts to receive relevant data just to create a single report.

As a growing business, Baltika Breweries needed a solution to help manage its information system that consists of nearly 10,000 users and a database of over 200 terabytes of corporate data.

Baltika initially integrated Microsoft business intelligence platform to help operate data warehousing technology through a vast number of users. In addition to the complete BI platform, from the most innovative and flexible OLAP engine (Analysis Services) to Reporting (Reporting Services) and ETL (Integration Services), Baltika also selected the Microsoft solution for its best total cost of ownership (TCO) and integration with Office and SharePoint for data distribution – a familiar environment for the users.

 To provide easy to use, interactive analytical tools to its managers to interact with the data, Baltika was looking for a solution that would seamlessly integrate into its current Microsoft-based environment. The company evaluated solutions from Panorama Software, SAP, Oracle and Cognos.

Solution

Baltika Breweries moved forward with Panorama BI suite for its ease of use and interactive interface for the business users. This combination of new self-service BI capabilities fit Baltika's needs, as it offered a number of advantages, including extended data visualization, light web-based environment, and tight integration with Microsoft's platform.

Baltika quickly integrated these benefits into its top management level and logistics departments to gain a foothold on its diverse data warehousing needs. The company is planning to extend the deployment of Panorama’s BI suite into other departments, such as marketing, manufacturing, sales and the rest of supply-chain department by 2011.

Results

Consistent view on data throughout the organization

Baltika's goal is to use the business intelligence solution to construct a unified infrastructure for its entire organization, with the main objective to enable all departments to use the same setup for BI tools and unified analytics. As the historical development introduced a number of different individual / departmental views on how to manage corporate data, Panorama has provided an essential tool to successfully eliminate these challenges and provide vast self-service capabilities and data visualization.

Panorama’s easy to use Analytics application makes it possible to drill down to a very deep level of the data with excellent performance, and to provide in-depth analysis with in a very short time and in a secure manner.

Self-Service Access to Information & Increased Productivity

With Panoram, Baltika Breweries' executives have improved their collaboration efforts, especially for the logistics department that spans across the continent, and has improved business productivity by more effectively tracking KPIs.

“We started with key performance indicators--like profit and loss, balance sheets, sales volumes--so managers can see where the problems are located and can drill down to the primary document” - said Herman Epstein, CIO of Baltika, in his interview with Forbes. “When our supply chain vice president organizes meetings for all his plant directors, for example, they can sit in front of the same screen, the same reports, and explain what's going on. If there's a red light somewhere, the local manager can open his screen and explain why trends have gone from positive to negative. We can do that on extremely fresh data.”

Overall, Panorama Business Intelligence suite has helped Baltika create unified performance metrics for its entire corporate structure and enabled important business leaders to more easily gain insight to essential corporate data.

Solution Highlights

• Integrated disparate BI infrastructure and applications across the enterprise
• Standardization on the Microsoft platform while getting the power of self-service analytics and reporting
• Rich BI functionality that satisfies the executive’s need for deep and meaningful interaction with data
• Self-service access to data for managers across the company to improve efficiency and agility
• Reporting time takes minutes instead of days
• The timely detailed reports facilitate the flow of information within the company, ensuring consistent communication across all departments.

 

 

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