When the Kraft Foods Group and Heinz finalized their merger in July 2015, it was the marriage of two giants. The new Kraft Heinz Company became the fifth-largest consumer-packaged food and beverage organization in the world. The combined company has more than 200 global brands, $26.5 billion in revenue, and over 40,000 employees. Eight of the brands each have annual revenue exceeding $1 billion: Heinz, Maxwell House, Kraft Lunchables, Planters, Velveeta, Philadelphia, and Oscar Mayer. Running these companies required huge amounts of data from all of these brands. This is clearly the world of big data. To remain profitable, enterprises in the fastmoving consumer goods industry require very lean operations. The uncertain global economy has dampened consumer spending, so companies such as Kraft Heinz must constantly identify opportunities for improving operational efficiencies to protect their profit margins. Kraft Heinz decided to deal with this challenge by focusing on optimizing its supply chain, manufacturing optimal quantities of each of its products, and delivering them to retailers at the best time and least cost to capitalize on consumer demand. Managing a supply chain as large as that of Kraft Heinz requires timely and accurate data on sales forecasts, manufacturing plans, and logistics, often from multiple sources. To ensure that Kraft Heinz would be able to use all of its enterprise business data effectively, management decided to split the data among two large SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, one for North American business and the other for all other global business. The combined company also had to rethink its data warehouse. Before the merger, the North America business had maintained nearly 18 terabytes of data in an SAP Business Warehouse and was using SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator to facilitate operational reporting. SAP Business Warehouse is SAPs data warehouse software for consolidating organizational data and supporting data analytics and reporting. The SAP Business Warehouse (BW) Accelerator is used to speed up database queries. Kraft Heinz management wanted decision makers to obtain more fine-grained views of the data that would reveal new opportunities for improving efficiency, self-service reporting, and real-time analytics. SAP BW Accelerator was not suitable for these tasks. It could optimize query runtime (the period of time when a query program is running) only for a specific subset of data in the warehouse, and was limited to reporting on selected views of the data. It could not deal with data load and calculation performance and required replication of Business Warehouse data in a separate accelerator. With mushrooming data on the merged companys sales, logistics, and manufacturing, the warehouse was too overtaxed to generate timely reports for decision makers. Moreover, Kraft Heinzs complex data model made building new reports very time consumingit could take as much as six months to complete. Kraft Heinz needed a solution that would deliver more detailed reports more quickly without affecting the performance of underlying operational systems. Kraft Heinz business users had been building some of their own reports using SAP BusinessObjects Analysis edition for Microsoft Office, which integrates with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. This tool allows ad hoc multidimensional analysis. What these users needed was to be able to build self-service reports from a single source of data and find an efficient way to collate data from multiple sources to obtain an enterprise-wide view of what was going on. Kraft Heinz decided to migrate its data warehouse from its legacy database to SAP BW powered by SAP HANA, SAPs in-memory database platform, which dramatically improves the efficiency at which data can be loaded and processed, calculations can be computed, and queries and reports can be run. The new data warehouse would be able to integrate with existing SAP ERP applications driving day-to-day business operations. The company worked with IBM Global Services consultants to cleanse and streamline its existing databases. It archived and purged unwanted or unused data, with the IT department working closely with business professionals to jointly determine what was essential, what was still being used, and what data thought to be unused had been moved to a different functional area of the company.

Cleansing and streamlining data reduced the database size almost 50 percent, to 9 terabytes. According to Sundar Dittakavi, Kraft Heinz Group Leader of Global Business Intelligence, in addition to providing better insights, the new data warehouse environment has achieved a 98 percent improvement in the production of standard reports. This is due to the 83 percent reduction in load time to execution 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 business are built into SAP HANA. Kraft Heinz can now accommodate exploding volumes of data and database queries easily, while maintaining enough processing power to handle unexpected issues. The company is also able to build new reports much faster and the flexibility of SAP HANA makes it much easier to change the companys data model. Now Kraft Heinz can produce new reports for business users in weeks instead of months and give decision makers the insights they need to boost efficiency and lower operating costs.

1. Identify the problem in this case study. To what extent was it a technology problem? Were any management and organizational factors involved?

2. How was information technology affecting business performance at Kraft Heinz?

3. How did new technology provide a solution to the problem? How effective was the solution?

4. Identify the management, organizational, and technology factors that had to be addressed in selecting and implementing Kraft-Heinzs new data warehouse solution