Silver Fern Farms raise the steaks with new ‘plate to pasture’ strategy
The adoption of a new business strategy meant that Silver Fern Farms suddenly required a state-of-the-art BI platform. Leveraging Microsoft SQL Server to build a Data Warehouse solution, Silver Fern Farms found a way to access that crucial new business information...
As New Zealand’s leading procurer, processor and marketer of sheep, lamb, beef and venison, Silver Fern Farms is a co-operative that represents more than 20,000 sheep, cattle and deer farmers throughout New Zealand.
With a history in New Zealand stretching as far back as 1948, the company was originally called Primary Producers Co-operative Society and traded under this name until 2008, when they rebranded due to a change in company strategy from a production-based to market-focused approach.
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This new ‘Plate to Pasture’ strategy was a fundamental philosophy change for Silver Fern Farms and means the company now extensively researches the target market and supplies products that directly reflect customer demand.
Individual systems designed at the transactional level focused on separate areas of the business. However, these failed to provide the ‘big picture’ analysis Silver Fern Farms needed for strategic decision making. Multiple legacy systems had been developed in-house over an extended period to focus on individual lines of business – while these worked well in isolation, they could not communicate directly with each other. Each area of the business had the ability to generate multiple reports to reflect business activity for that specific area of the enterprise. A variety of manpower-intensive manual processes were used to provide consolidated reporting to the management team.
Unfortunately these processes were laborious, inefficient and absorbed hours of staff resources every month.
In order to provide enterprise level reporting, a key factor in the new business strategy of ‘Plate to Pasture’, Silver Fern Farms began the process of creating a Data Warehouse and comprehensive Business Intelligence (BI) solution. The organization worked in conjunction with Montage Business Intelligence, a Microsoft partner with a gold competency in BI. Having worked with Silver Fern Farms for a number of years, Montage had developed a deep understanding of the company, so it was a logical choice to utilize their expertise to develop the new Data Warehouse solution for the enterprise.
“The most important thing about starting a project like this is to have complete buy-in from both sides. Montage understood our business and worked in partnership with us to iron out all the tricky details before we began,” says Peter Jenks, business intelligence architect at Silver Fern Farms.
The purpose of the Data Warehouse is to gain insights and develop strategies based on a complete enterprise picture of the business, as opposed to attempting to deduce business decisions from low-level detail. For Silver Fern Farms there were three main components to the solution. Initially the key data requirements were identified. Next, a plan to integrate and transform the data was defined, while finally a process to deliver the data in the most efficient and straightforward manner was constructed.
Using Microsoft technology, in particular SQL 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010, as the Data Warehouse platform, provided Silver Fern Farms with extensive integration capability and a world-class presentation platform.
There are three layers in the SQL Server 2008 R2 Data Warehouse stack – staging, dimensional and reporting/analytical layers. The third layer is made up of two sections: a series of online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes built using SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS); and a denormalized relational database targeted at the end users.
At Silver Fern Farms, a large amount of data capture is performed remotely at processing plants using SQL Server. These remote sites regularly feed data to a centralized processing point which is then populated through the Data Warehouse using SQL integration services.
Key financial data is extracted from Microsoft Dynamics NAV in a highly incremental manner to provide ‘almost real time’ updates through the Data Warehouse to business users.
“Collaborating data from multiple disparate sources is always a challenge, and we had to be certain that the final result was totally accurate and reliable. The only way to do that is to test it all, section by section. It took a long time, but the end result was worth the effort,” says Peter.
The Data Warehouse was implemented using a phased approach which allowed controlled release with minimal disruption to the business.
“A successful BI program generally evolves from aligning people, processes and technology. Silver Fern Farms’ approach was spot on, they are going at the right pace rather than leading with technology and hoping the people catch up,” says Tony Millar, CEO of Montage Business Intelligence.
The team at Silver Fern Farms can now gain insights from consolidated data automatically without manual intervention. Staff can select specific lines of business or view information from across the entire group.
“The ability to view reports that consolidate data from across the business has changed the way we work," says Stewart Cowan, business intelligence manager for Silver Fern Farms. There has been massive reduction in manual processes to generate data and reports.
“We no longer have to go through the painful process of manually pulling data together every month. The information is accurate, reliable and available whenever we need it, saving us hours every month,” says Stewart.
The new Data Warehouse and Microsoft BI tools allow for easy identification of historical trends and provide valuable insights for strategic decision making.
“By gaining a greater insight into our customers’ historical and future needs, we can align with our ‘Plate to Pasture' strategy and supply the products that we know our customers want,” says Stewart.
The ability to offer self-service BI means staff throughout the business can leverage user friendly reporting tools and extract the information they need on their own terms.
Incorporating SharePoint 2010 with Microsoft Office 2010 has also provided the company with a range of options to present data to key stakeholders in the most effective manner using technology, like Office 2010, that users were already comfortable with.
Microsoft SharePoint allows the company to create multiple sites for teams to collaborate and access information. By connecting to their team website (known internally as ‘paddocks’), the senior executive team at Silver Fern Farms can monitor company information via the digital dashboard. From their ‘paddock’, executives can click on a figure and connect all the way through to the general ledger transactions if desired.
