From its beginnings in 1915, Bolthouse Farms, headquartered in California, has been known for quality and innovation. After more than 90 years of farming and distributing delicious and nutritious fresh produce, it’s added state of the art bottling facilities, producing premium quality beverages and refrigerated dressings.
As both a grower and CPG manufacturer, Bolthouse Farms tracks some unusual financial key performance indicators (KPIs) like Cost of Carrot —more on that later—and has demanding requirements for management reporting and analytics. Over the years, as the business evolved, the monthly reporting process became complex. And the time and effort required by the operational and finance teams to produce the high-quality reporting that management needed and demanded, grew.
This is a story about how Bolthouse Farms didn’t just upgrade its management reporting but invested in a cloud platform that will scale to support its business growth going forward.
Before this project, to generate management reports at the close of each month, six to eight people would spend a solid four hours first running Business Object queries on their operational data store, which was connected to their JD Edwards ERP system. Then they would paste the query results into multiple spreadsheets and pivot tables for manufacturing, financials, and P&L. This is what it took to create the monthly business review (MBR) report. Instead, they were itching to spend those hours on valuable analyses to support business growth and the innovation for which Bolthouse Farms is known. Further, the static MBR reports didn’t lend themselves to the sort of ad-hoc, self-service agile analytics that management needed to flawlessly answer unforeseen questions on the fly. Finally, as always when dealing with spreadsheets, much time was spent manually checking accuracy and consistency.
Bolthouse Farms didn’t want to change the whole process, but rather replace that manual, time-devouring query-and-spreadsheet-wrangling process, with an automated, fast, secure solution. And they didn’t want to spend a lot of time or money or hire any additional in-house resources to do it.
Continue reading Part 1 of the Oracle Analytics Blog to learn just how Peloton Consulting Group worked with Bolthouse Farms to integrate and automate their monthly business review management reporting process to reduced reporting time from 4 hours to 22 minutes leveraging cutting-edge Oracle solutions, including Essbase, Analytics, and Cloud Infrastructure.
