CerealCo enhances data quality and consistency with cloud-native warehousing solution
CerealCo is a nearly three-decade old partnership between the world’s largest food companies. They are the largest manufacturers of cereals and market in 130+ countries. Headquartered in Switzerland, CerealCo promotes a healthy lifestyle with ingredients such as whole wheat and fibre. They cater to all age groups and help people start their day in the best possible way.
Together, they generate a ton of product, market and customer data. They even recruit organizations to research market trends and consumer preferences. This enables them to make data-driven and sound decisions. However, the lack of intelligent data management systems affected their efficiency.
Data Readiness
CerealCo desired to empower its internal analytics team with proactive data. This data would help them visualize market trends, consumer demographics, product preferences, goals achieved, targets met etc. It would enable the top management to support smart business decisions. However, this imported data did not fulfil the prerequisites. It lacked readiness- standardization and consistency. It was meant to reduce resource effort, but it did the opposite.
Meeting custom data requirements
CerealCo’s primary hindrance occurred with implementing analytics on collected data. The data sets they received from market research companies failed to meet their custom requirements. These companies provided them with structured data, but it lacked actionable intelligence. It faced difficulty in recognizing granularities such as market segmentations, market categories (globally, zonal, regional, country-wise, area-wise etc.) The product periodicity & exchange rate also remained hidden. This data required harmonization to eliminate data redundancies. With transformation, this data would enable visualization and provide a unified operational overview.
Time & effort-intensive processes
CerealCo possessed 600 GB of historical data for three consecutive past years. With 11 million rows and columns of data, it was a challenge to harmonize and transform this data manually. Using excel tools, the analytics team attempted to make the data proactive. It required a 4-5-member team working on the desired data sets for 7-9 days at a stretch. Manual efforts demanded time and resources which could not be scaled. This shortcoming directly impacted the accuracy of data collected. For business growth, CerealCo needed to speed up their processes with automation. Only then, they would achieve the flexibility and agility they truly required to sustain operational effectiveness.
Solution: Cloud-native data warehousing for effective data analytics
For CerealCo, it was a time & effort-intensive task to prepare the imported data. This triggered the need for data migration. The process was completed using Microsoft Azure cloud services. They offered the desired speed, agility, flexibility and scalability.
The new data warehousing system eliminated the need to use excel tools. Now, the data normalization process for custom needs is automated. While it took 7-9 days to prepare 600 GB of data, now the same process lasts not more than 2-3 days. The number of people working has reduced from 3-4 members to 1-2. It allows the team at CerealCo to focus their capabilities on opportunities which provide more value and generate more revenue. Due to the significant decrease in resource time, efforts and cost, CerealCo has been speed up its operations. They managed to reach 20 new markets and scale up their growth.
These new markets offer them a better reach to consumers and gather more data. They can now make even better data- driven decisions. This adds up to higher ROI on the existing data and advanced analytics to improve the accuracy of business decisions.
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