“One important lesson from all of this is that the process Soliant followed was as much a competitive advantage as the system itself: by rolling it out in short, multiple releases, we were able to put the data to work right away and immediately learn what worked and what didn't.”

Soliant's Recipe for Sara Lee Data Saves $10 Million

Tracking individual product costs and profitability through a complex supply chain and national distribution network are difficult tasks for most companies, but Sara Lee had more challenges in store. With over 20 bakery brands, the Fresh Division relies on large central, data silos that are not inherently compatible to provide information about their products at all stages of their lifecycles.

Sara Lee depends on regional suppliers for ingredients, paying different market prices depending on region. Local bakeries produce and package baked goods according to plant type and fresh items are sold and transported to retail and institutional clients across the country. At each stage of this process cost, production and revenue information is collected with historically no way to combine them for analysis.

"I was impressed with Soliant's ability to work with us as true consultants. Dawn really under-stood the strategic problem our company faced and helped us define what we wanted to build rather than just being a tech person taking orders."

Ray Cook

Manager
Fresh Bakery Information Systems

As part of their ongoing efforts to optimize profitability, Sara Lee holds collaborative workshop meetings in each of their 19 U.S. market areas. Key stakeholders, from executives to bakery operators, work together to examine each stage of the product process and improve efficiencies.

Enter the Radical Simplification Project: Soliant Consulting's solution to unite data from diverse sources within the Sara Lee internal systems.

The custom data mash-up application built on Filemaker Pro allows Sara Lee to drill-down into views, compare individual product performance at specific locations and analyze profitability based on which plant produced the bakery item using which suppliers.

A mere 90 days after development began, the team tested the system at one profitable market area. At that workshop, Sara Lee's executives were delighted to discover over $500,000 in potential cost savings by using the new analysis tool.

On the proof of that first successful test, production of the application expanded to bring in more data sets and build additional functionality. This created a new procedural challenge as new data sources needed to be identified and prioritized, then iterated into the application.

Working with Sara Lee and their partners, Soliant Consulting's Technical Project Lead, Dawn Heady, used a rapid application development process to deliver the Radical Simplification Project in short intervals. Rather than having to wait for a massive development effort, the Soliant team delivered elements of the system to Sara Lee in rapid releases that could immediately be put to use. This approach also provided flexibility and allowed Soliant to adapt to changes in priorities as the client discovered additional data combinations to exploit.

The results provided a highly responsive, customizable data analysis tool that is capable of incorporating data from sources that were previously isolated. The vast amount of information exported from different central data systems created five specific views in Filemaker Pro that can then be used to query client profitability, delivery optimization, product profitability, retail and institutional clients, and inter-plant cost benefit analysis.

This powerful application now allows Sara Lee to view vital data from a high level straight through to product segments, and then down to a single product, with ingredients purchased from a regional supplier, produced in a local bakery and sold to a specific customer. Optimizing the process of supply chain-to-production-to-sales, and how the myriad of components interact, has given Sara Lee the flexibility to respond to market fluctuations at the regional level.

One year after implementing the Radical Simplification Project, 16 out of the 19 geographic market areas in the U.S. have put the application through its paces at workshops. With the help of Soliant Consulting, Sara Lee has a powerful competitive advantage throughout its bakery division and has already identified more than $10 million in estimated cost savings.