230 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure INTERACTIVE SESSION TECHNOLOGY 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.Chapter 6 Foundations of Business Intelligence: Databases and Information Management 231 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 business are built into SAP HANA. for Strategic Business Insight," SAP Insider Profiles, January 25, 2017; Kraft Heinz can now accommodate exploding "The Kraft Heinz Company Migrates SAP Business Warehouse to the 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