Challenges
Walter & Wild is a leading food export company headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, supplying traditional baking, dry goods and beverages locally as well as to markets in Europe and Canada.
With a lack of visibility and insight across brands, regions and teams, Walter & Wild was unable to respond quickly and decisively to changes in the typically dynamic markets of food and beverages.
Slow decision-making and reaction time
Upper management needed to react more quickly and decisively to changes in the food and beverage market.
Need for better planning practices
Analysts needed key metrics for improved strategic planning and sales and marketing teams needed up-to-date insight and information to support day-to-day activities.
Legacy systems
The company wasn’t ready to replace its legacy ERP so needed a solution that could be seamlessly implemented and at the same time leverage all of the existing database procedures that were in place.
Solutions
Logility was originally implemented by Walter & Wild to enable upper management to react more quickly and decisively to changes in the food and beverage market. Also, by adding Logility as the access portal to their extensive database resources, Walter & Wild was able to extend the life of their legacy ERP systems and proceed with replacing them at a time to best suit their needs and circumstances. “This meant that we could focus on moving forward on new initiatives rather than having to reinvent what we’d already developed,” says Keith Cheverton, sales and operations planning manager at Walter & Wild.
Data Management
Advanced Analytics
“Our first step was to standardize on Microsoft SQL Server as our data warehouse and Microsoft Dynamics as our ERP platform. That allowed us to bring some order to our backend databases. But we still needed an easy-to-use front end that would give management a daily snapshot of the business for enhanced decision-making, give analysts key metrics for strategic planning and give the production, sales and marketing teams enough information to manage their day-to-day activities.”
Results
“By implementing Logility, we have been able to extend the life of our current legacy systems and continue to leverage all of the database procedures that have been refined over the years,” says Keith Cheverton.
Sales management is now much more efficient with Logility. “Being able to track sales performance by month, year to date, region, category and sales person across our entire organization has been a tremendous benefit for us,” says Thys Van Lingen, sales and marketing manager at Walter & Wild. “With Logility, I can measure performance against quotas and make adjustments as necessary without much help from IT. We can email reports to the sales team and the territory managers use Logility to help them track our sales incentive initiatives.
“Before Logility, we had to use a combination of pivot and OLAP reports that were generated on a monthly or weekly basis. While the information was comprehensive, it was difficult to compare and contrast the numbers. Now we can see the key metrics on one screen in near real time.”
With Logility, Walter & Wild has accelerated response to market trends and enhanced strategic planning and decision-making. It has also enabled self-service reporting and analytics and increased efficiencies through tighter management of sales margins.
