Kraft Heinz Finds A New Recipe For Analyzing Its Data

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Kraft Heinz Finds a New Recipe for Analyzing Its Data

When the Kraft Foods Group and Heinz finalized opportunities for improving efficiency, self-service
their merger in July 2015, it was the marriage of two reporting, and real-time analytics.
giants. The new Kraft Heinz Company became the SAP BW Accelerator was not suitable for these
fifth-largest consumer-packaged food and beverage tasks. It could optimize query runtime (the period
organization in the world. The combined company of time when a query program is running) only
has more than 200 global brands, $26.5 billion in for a specific subset of data in the warehouse, and
revenue, and over 40,000 employees. Eight of the was limited to reporting on selected views of the
brands each have annual revenue exceeding $1 data. It could not deal with data load and calcu-
billion: Heinz, Maxwell House, Kraft Lunchables, lation performance and required replication of
Planters, Velveeta, Philadelphia, and Oscar Mayer. Business Warehouse data in a separate accelerator.
Running these companies required huge amounts With mushrooming data on the merged company’s
of data from all of these brands. This is clearly the sales, logistics, and manufacturing, the warehouse
world of big data. was too overtaxed to generate timely reports for
To remain profitable, enterprises in the fast- decision makers. Moreover, Kraft Heinz’s complex
moving consumer goods industry require very lean data model made building new reports very time-
operations. The uncertain global economy has damp- consuming—it could take as much as six months to
ened consumer spending, so companies such as complete. Kraft Heinz needed a solution that would
Kraft Heinz must constantly identify opportunities deliver more detailed reports more quickly without
for improving operational efficiencies to protect their affecting the performance of underlying operational
profit margins. Kraft Heinz decided to deal with this systems.
challenge by focusing on optimizing its supply chain, Kraft Heinz business users had been build-
manufacturing optimal quantities of each of its prod- ing some of their own reports using SAP
ucts, and delivering them to retailers at the best time BusinessObjects Analysis edition for Microsoft
and least cost to capitalize on consumer demand. Office, which integrates with Microsoft Excel and
Managing a supply chain as large as that of Kraft PowerPoint. This tool allows ad hoc multidimen-
Heinz requires timely and accurate data on sales sional analysis. What these users needed was to be
forecasts, manufacturing plans, and logistics, often able to build self-service reports from a single source
from multiple sources. To ensure that Kraft Heinz of data and find an efficient way to collate data from
would be able to use all of its enterprise business multiple sources to obtain an enterprise-wide view
data effectively, management decided to split the of what was going on.
data among two large SAP enterprise resource plan- Kraft Heinz decided to migrate its data warehouse
ning (ERP) systems, one for North American busi- from its legacy database to SAP BW powered by SAP
ness and the other for all other global business. HANA, SAP’s in-memory database platform, which
The combined company also had to rethink its data dramatically improves the efficiency at which data
warehouse. can be loaded and processed, calculations can be
Before the merger, the North America business computed, and queries and reports can be run. The
had maintained nearly 18 terabytes of data in a SAP new data warehouse would be able to integrate with
Business Warehouse and was using SAP Business existing SAP ERP applications driving day-to-day
Warehouse Accelerator to facilitate operational re- business operations. The company worked with IBM
porting. SAP Business Warehouse is SAP’s data ware- Global Services consultants to cleanse and stream-
house software for consolidating organizational data line its existing databases. It archived and purged
and supporting data analytics and reporting. The unwanted or unused data, with the IT department
SAP Business Warehouse (BW) Accelerator is used working closely with business professionals to jointly
to speed up database queries. Kraft Heinz manage- determine what was essential, what was still being
ment wanted decision makers to obtain more fine- used, and what data thought to be unused had been
grained views of the data that would reveal new moved to a different functional area of the company.
Cleansing and streamlining data reduced the data- maintaining enough processing power to handle un-
base size almost 50 percent, to 9 terabytes. expected issues. The company is also able to build
According to Sundar Dittakavi, Kraft Heinz Group new reports much faster and the flexibility of SAP
Leader of Global Business Intelligence, in addition HANA makes it much easier to change the com-
to providing better insights, the new data warehouse pany’s data model. Now Kraft Heinz can produce
environment has achieved a 98 percent improve- new reports for business users in weeks instead of
ment in the production of standard reports. This is months and give decision makers the insights they
due to the 83 percent reduction in load time to exe- need to boost efficiency and lower operating costs.
cution time to make the data available, and reduction
in execution time to complete the analysis. Global
key performance indicators for the Kraft side of the Sources: Ken Murphy, “The Kraft-Heinz Company Unlocks Recipe
for Strategic Business Insight,” SAP Insider Profiles, January 25, 2017;
business are built into SAP HANA.
“The Kraft Heinz Company Migrates SAP Business Warehouse to the
Kraft Heinz can now accommodate exploding Lightning-Fast SAP HANA Database,” IBM Corp. and SAP SE 2016;
volumes of data and database queries easily, while and www.kraftheinzcompany.com, accessed February 15, 2018.
CASE STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Identify the problem in this case study. To 3. How did new technology provide a solution to the
what extent was it a technology problem? problem? How effective was the solution?
Were any management and organizational fac- 4. Identify the management, organizational, and
tors involved? technology factors that had to be addressed in se-
2. How was information technology affecting busi- lecting and implementing Kraft-Heinz’s new data
ness performance at Kraft Heinz? warehouse solution.

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Kraft Heinz Finds a New Recipe for Analyzing Its Data

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS

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