Lawson Software today announced the availability of Lawson M3 Analytics for Food and Beverage, a new application that helps food companies access meaningful business intelligence to improve decision-making, without having to develop analytics tools in-house. Lawson made the announcement at the InterBev 2008 Conference and Exhibition this week in Las Vegas.
Lawson M3 Analytics for Food and Beverage helps food companies to simplify deployment of a complete package of business intelligence tools. The application includes 70 pre-configured key performance indicators (KPIs) and 50 pre-built scorecard reports commonly used by food companies. Sample KPIs include day sales outstanding, inventory turnover, delivery performance and gross margin percentage. Sample scorecards highlight critical data such as sales vs. budget, supplier performance, production variances and customer debt.
“Analytics for Food and Beverage offered a fast, affordable route to the business intelligence we need to better manage our operations and customer service levels,” said Alan Webster, CIO at Pork Farms Limited, one of the leading bakeries in the United Kingdom and a pilot customer for Lawson M3 Analytics for Food and Beverage. Based in Nottingham, England, Pork Farms’ four UK facilities produce three million hot and cold pies and pastries each week. “Lawson understands the specific challenges for the food industry, which means the KPIs and scorecards that matter to us are already there, ready for managers to use to improve our business,” added Webster.
By packaging a specific set of KPIs and scorecards for food and beverage companies, Lawson gives customers a more complete, measurable view of their operations in a few short weeks. Such a comprehensive approach to business evaluation has essentially been beyond the reach of all but the largest food and beverage companies until now.
“The real value of a benchmark is not in the individual numbers themselves, and it’s not in the comparison of each metric, in isolation, against some industry average. The value lies in the totality of the metrics as a group: how does each metric interrelate with the others, what do the interdependencies tell you about the tradeoffs you’re making, are those tradeoffs consistent with your business strategy, and are there levers you can pull so you don’t have to make those tradeoffs but can still achieve your goals?” wrote Debra Hofman, Jane Barrett and Lora Cecere, AMR Research, in a May 2008 report, “Benchmark Your Supply Chain: Seven Factors for Success.”
Lawson Analytics for Food and Beverage helps food companies benchmark, measure and improve performance in five key areas: sales, finance, procurement, production and the warehouse. It enables tracking of multiple performance metrics by individual product, customer and account manager to help decision-makers identify underperforming operational areas in time to help them take action. The application also helps food companies eliminate unnecessary reports so decision-makers receive the right information at the right time.
“Lawson Analytics for Food and Beverage is business intelligence made easy,” said Rob Wiersma, director of industry strategy, food and beverage, Lawson Software. “By offering our customers quick and easy access to industry-specific business intelligence tools, we can help them manage their business more strategically.”
