Dairy co op integrates ERP Oracle and BI to track and protect milk products

Benefits

• Operational excellence: Real-time operational data enables the tracking and safeguarding of dairy products in France and internationally
• Enhanced decision making: The real-time data enables decisions based on factual insights that lead to better outcomes
• Accurate financials: Updated BI data enables the financial teams to verify the data for each month-end close and make any needed corrections
• Improved quality control: Operational data investigations are enabled to verify the safety of the milk products and to alert management of any needed recalls
• Up-to-date analytics: Production tracking data is always current with near-zero latency during critical hours
• Cost savings: Less costly than the Oracle replication tool, SharePlex also enables the use of open source databases as alternatives to expensive Oracle licenses

The Story

A major dairy cooperative with operations across Europe and North America processes billions of litres of milk annually. With thousands of employees and dozens of production sites, the organization collects milk from thousands of farmers and delivers dairy products to retailers and food service providers.

Tracking dairy products for freshness and spoilage

In the dairy industry, freshness is imperative as the fresher the products are, the better they will taste, the more nutritional value they will provide and the safer they will be to consume. Recognized for its dedication to sustainable agriculture and premium dairy products, the dairy cooperative’s mission is to provide nutritious and flavorful food products from farm to table. It also complies with the French and EU regulations for marking dates on their products which, in turn, enables retail customers to manually track their freshness.

Additionally, their mass-market products division also digitally tracks the collection, processing and packaging of milk products from farm to factory within a JD Edwards ERP system. They track the milk from the cows at the member farms to the milk storage tanks, to the trucks that transport it, and in production all the way to the packaging of the milk products at the dairy factory. At each stage of production, the data is input into the ERP system to support their operational and analytical management processes. These efforts not only help to ensure the freshness and safety of their products but also help to manage any needed recalls due to potential health risks or mislabeled products.

The challenges to tracking and analyzing the milk production process

The cooperative’s milk tracking data is recorded and stored in an Oracle database within version 9.2 of their JD Edwards ERP system. However, the data that the ERP system provides to their workers who process the milk products is limited and it is not feasible for information workers to freely access and analyze that data in their production database. The experience for users attempting to access the production database would be complex and cumbersome, and their usage could result in corrupting their master datasets and degrading the performance of the ERP system.

To overcome these challenges, the cooperative needed a way to replicate data from their production Oracle database into a separate database that could feed their BI systems. This would enable their users to track the milk throughout its processing cycle in real time and enable enhanced analytical and reporting capabilities without interacting directly with the master data in the production database.

Advancing the business intelligence capabilities

In their efforts to further develop and evolve their business intelligence capabilities, the cooperative hired a data manager who came in with an extensive record of success in BI initiatives. The data manager created a BI team to send, display and organize all the data for the cooperative’s production and management users and led the BI and IT teams to consider and implement a solution for replicating data in real time from the Oracle production database to a separate Oracle database which would be used to feed their BI systems.

When selecting a data replication solution, the data manager led the teams to the software he had used quite successfully for his prior employers: Quest Software’s SharePlex. SharePlex offered the features and capabilities the cooperative needed without adding another expensive license from Oracle for their replication software.

SharePlex is at the heart of enabling business intelligence

The cooperative’s mass-market products division now replicates data in real time from the production Oracle database in their JD Edwards 9.2 ERP system to a target Oracle 19c database in their on-premises IT environment. The target Oracle database then feeds the data to their Business Objects and Microsoft Power BI business intelligence systems to enable over 800 of their users with real-time data access for tracking production and safeguarding the health and safety of the cooperative’s milk and dairy products.

With SharePlex, the cooperative replicates the specific schemas and tables from the ERP system their users need for tracking and analysis without using excess bandwidth and storage on replicating data that they don’t need. And because they replicate data in real time, the cooperative can store historical data in the target database that sometimes is deleted in the ERP system. This historical data is particularly useful for investigations into production issues, analyzing trends and enhancing decision making.

SharePlex enables the cooperative with timely analysis capabilities. During the key daytime hours when information workers and management count on up-to-the-minute data, 94% of the data transactions in the ERP system are replicated by SharePlex into the target database within 60 seconds. Longer latencies are almost always limited to nights, weekends and month-ends when large batch processes, reboots and monthly financial reconciliations are being run.

SharePlex enables the cooperative to milk their data for all it’s worth

The near real-time replication of ERP data is key to the cooperative’s business intelligence capabilities and is driving new capabilities and value to the business.

SharePlex enables operational insights: Data crucial to timely analysis is no longer locked away and hidden in the ERP system. The cooperative’s factory workers can now review production processes and identify the causes and timing of any production issues thanks to BI reports fed with data replicated by SharePlex. The data manager explains, “Without SharePlex, our users would be working blind. It ensures we can deliver actionable operational and analytical insights across the organization.”

SharePlex improves quality control: Prior to implementing SharePlex, the workers who check the cooperative’s products for quality and safety could not directly access the ERP system for the data they need due not possessing the authority or skills to do so. Now these same workers can quickly identify the cause and first occurrence of any contamination in the milk and dairy products, and better control any needed recalls, both thanks to BI reports generated from data replicated by SharePlex.

SharePlex enables accurate financials: The financial reconciliations performed at the end of each month did not previously allow the finance teams to perform the checks and balances they needed to accurately verify any changes they made in the ERP system. Now, with BI reports populated with data from SharePlex, these teams have what they need to verify the accuracy of their financial information.

SharePlex is enabling the cooperative’s capabilities to evolve

The cooperative has expanded its use of SharePlex over the years. They used it to support the upgrade of their primary database for BI from Oracle 11g to Oracle 19c, which coincided with their upgrade of the ERP system to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2. The data manager also stated that the cooperative has plans to migrate the primary database for BI from Oracle to PostgreSQL to save on Oracle licensing and to better leverage the skills of his team.

Looking ahead, the future looks bright for SharePlex at the cooperative as the data manager sees other possibilities for leveraging SharePlex including the eventual possibility of replicating data from a separate ERP system in one of their other business units.