McCain Foods changing Business Analytics Tools

Five years ago, if a plant manager at French-fry maker McCain Foods Limited wanted to know how they were doing compared to the company’s other 50 production facilities around the globe, they would have had to do what most manufacturing plant managers still do: put in a request to IT and wait.

Today, that same manager simply needs to walk out onto the production floor and look up at a giant LED screen. On that screen they can see exactly how well they are doing based on meters that compare their production lines to every other line worldwide. Outside of actual workstations, the areas in front of these displays are the most heavily trafficked in all of McCain’s plants.

“It’s important to see where we started from,” CIO Roman Coba, told about 3,000 attendees at the MicroStrategy World 2014 conference in Las Vegas on January 29. “We started this journey about five years ago. We were a company that lived on 18,000 physically produced paper reports, we had about 3,000 access databases around the world, and every time someone looked at something, it happened 24 hours ago.

“So you try to figure out how you are going to make decisions if it happened 24 hours ago.”
Today, all that has changed at the $7 billion manufacturer. The company has one database and has standardized its reporting on MicroStrategy’s enterprise business intelligence and analytics platforms. It also has rolled out the company’s new self-service desktop analytics offering and visualization tools so super-users around the global enterprise can begin to make decisions based on quantifiable metrics instead of hunches and gut-feel.

Coba said the privately-held company has seen an evolution in the use of analytics tools: from standard queries that go thought an “IT-rules-the-world-and-you-can’t-do-anything-unless-we-tell-you” mindset, “to an environment now where we’re allowing people to go do their own things.”