Customers

Organic Valley

Organic Valley"As a midsized company, being able to meet business needs with one vendor leverages our resources and reduces our Internet technology (IT) support and integration requirements. With our Business Objects solution, I feel we got best of breed - all with one vendor."

George Neill
director of IT
Organic Valley Family of Farms

Challenge

Since its founding in 1988, Organic Valley Family of Farms - the largest organic farmer cooperative in the United States - has experienced exceptional growth. Challenged to keep up with rapid growth while competing with billion-dollar companies, Organic Valley needed to access and integrate a variety of data sources, ensure consistent and complete reporting of data, and provide an easy reporting mechanism for end-users.

Organic Valley's business users were accustomed to maintaining a range of homegrown operational and financial systems largely composed of Excel spreadsheets, says George Neill, director of IT at Organic Valley.

One day, Neill's boss came to him and said, "I'm tired of going into board meetings with my financial reports saying one thing, and the sales department reports saying something else." Neill explains that financial reports didn't match sales reports because of incomplete reporting - sales reports ran against sales orders or invoices or inventory data that didn't always incorporate accounting adjustments. "We really needed a data mart for our sales data-to put all our data in one place and standardize reporting," says Neill.

Approach

Organic Valley's transition into business intelligence (BI) began with an implementation of BusinessObjects and BusinessObjects Web Intelligence. The company recently upgraded to BusinessObjects Enterprise XI with the goal of gaining greater visibility into data warehouses and data marts. They also wanted to take advantage of the software's greater ease of use for end-users and the capability to standardize on a single BI platform.

"Many of our power users had direct access to the data tables in our accounting system, and they weren't always pulling the right fields for the right purposes," says Neill. Organic Valley saw the universe concept as a way to enforce standardization and to build a metadata repository of business information that would ensure everyone was using the same data.

Organic Valley called on BusinessObjects Data Integrator to pull its jumble of data sources together. "We had a consultant come in for one week of training with BusinessObjects Data Integrator. Before the week was over, my team had already built the framework for 60% of the integrations. They said they'd just saved six weeks of development time," says Neill.

Results

"A measurable benefit is I don't have my boss coming down and asking me why the data doesn't match," says Neill. And from an IT standpoint, he notes, "BusinessObjects hasn't been a high-maintenance application. We bought it and it works-it does what it's supposed to do." With BusinessObjects, end-users have access to operational, analytical, and profitability reports, while minimizing the different ways and systems users need to access. "Users don't need to know that the data's coming from four different databases," says Neill.

Moving forward, Organic Valley anticipates taking advantage of several of the Business Objects technologies. Neill envisions incorporating real-time data using BusinessObjects Data Federator, part of the Business Objects Enterprise Information Management suite of products. He also anticipates deploying some of the Business Objects Performance Management tools.

"As a midsized company, being able to meet business needs with one vendor leverages our resources and reduces our IT support and integration requirements," says Neill, "and our ability to call one vendor who understands the other tools -or has access to people that understand them-is a definite advantage. With our Business Objects solution, I feel we got best of breed-all with one vendor."

Smaller textLarger textPrint this page, properly formatted for paper

Quick Facts