Case Study

Achieving Operation Excellence at George Weston Foods

How SnapLogic helped maximize operational and financial results

George Weston Foods Backstory

Operating for over 50 years, George Weston Foods prides itself as one of the largest food manufacturers in Australia and New Zealand, and has four brands in its portfolio.

The Challenge

A large part of George Weston Foods’ (GWF) success comes from delivering fresh products to supermarkets each day to delight its customers with the food they love. To continually provide consistent and high quality products like freshly baked bread, GWF requires more streamlined Sales Operations processes.

Multiple teams at GWF worked behind the scenes to analyze hundreds of thousands of data points and understand what they mean to the business. Though these teams used multiple cloud applications to ease their data analysis process, they still struggled to get consistent sets of data and reporting. Even though different teams used the same sets of data and existing tools to perform analysis, the results produced varied outcomes.

GWF used a middleware platform for data orchestration, which while great for EDI and B2B, its strength was not extracting large batches of data, such as those that contained 1GB of customer orders (SKUs).

“We had great systems, but we couldn’t effectively get the data into a centralized application. We needed to get a trusted and validated data representation where users, like sales and marketing, can go in and get the data they needed,” said Stephen Mackay, Solutions Architect at GWF.

The Solution

Working with multiple business representatives across GWF and its businesses, Mr. Mackay started looking for an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to consolidate data from the ERP and other line of business applications into a centralized cloud-based data warehouse. Mr. Mackay required an iPaaS to provide ease of use for the business, and ultimately, improve efficiency in their current business and IT operations.

After evaluating multiple solutions, Mr. Mackay and his team identified SnapLogic as their iPaaS of choice. “We chose SnapLogic primarily for its ease of use both for our lean IT team and citizen integrators. It only took a couple of hours to setup and start building integrations, and we believe that the REST API capability is key to the future of IT and for building a digital platform,” said Mr. Mackay.

Business teams are now able to move data amongst the cloud applications. GWF can export and move data from existing data repositories, SaaS services, and other applications into a cloud-base data warehouse hosted by AWS. People can easily access relevant data sets from Tableau to build reports ranging from sales and finance to operations and supply chain metrics.

Business Outcomes

GWF has dramatically reduced the time needed to build integrations and deliver data to business groups across the company. More than 350 business users can now draw data from a centralized application to confidently make business decisions from accurate data reports. The business teams also enjoy cost and effort reductions associated with integration projects.

In the past, simple integrations, such as connecting on-premises applications to cloud services, took more than three weeks. Now, the time to integrate using the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform was reduced to a few days. Mr. Mackay and his team are able to provide the business with data and records three times faster than what it would previously take.

“Since the introduction of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform the time to process data between applications and databases has been reduced by 40—50%,” said Mr. Mackay. “The support and level of care from SnapLogic team is exceptional. Their promptness has helped us resolve integration issues quickly.”