Snack Company Crunches Their Data and Comes Out Ahead

The client is a leading snack producer specializing in contract manufacturing and food service.

When a private equity firm acquired a majority of the company’s shares in 2023, the PE partners saw an opportunity for improving the snack company’s use of data. At the time of acquisition, the snack company was maintaining more than 350 reports drawn from multiple streams of data. Despite this great volume of analysis completed on a regular basis, the baseline truth of certain key performance indicators, such as the relationship between the amount of raw materials fed into the production system and the amount of finished product, was unclear.

How could a company have so many reports and so little clarity?

Further inquiry revealed that only 67 reports had usage data, and less than half of those saw 10+ interactions per quarter. The vast majority of the company’s reports were ad hoc, stale, or produced for a single user at a single moment in time, the artifacts of a need for data analytics but no straightforward path to getting that need met. The burden of filling that need fell primarily on two people–the IT team–and consumed their working hours.

“The process of pulling data was very painful. We just didn’t want to have to deal with that.” -Private Equity Firm VP.

Challenges: Manual Processes, Multiple Pathways

A core challenge for the snack company was the many disparate sources of data.Information needed to be pulled from everything from the enterprise resource planning software to the warehousing module to the manufacturing visualization tool—even the HR system. Data gathering required manual retrieval of information from these and other systems.

• Data Fragmentation: With so many data sources and so many reports, different departments often had different answers to straightforward questions, such as the amount of product shipped on a given date.

• Human Error: The manual retrieval and analysis of data allowed for the possibility of errors while noshing lavishly on man hours.

• Limits to Scale: Just two people were responsible for generating hundreds of reports, making it difficult or impossible to keep up with the data demands across the organization. And because so many of the reports served only a single individual or team, organization-wide insights were hard to come by.

In short, the path to getting a clear answer to any given question was long and fraught with peril.

“There was no centralized source of truth; various functional groups would pull data from various sources and rely on them as their version of the truth, which caused confusion.” – Private Equity Firm VP.

Solution:

Tackling the data chaos was priority one for the private equity firm. The firm engaged in exploratory work with a handful of data analytics companies to find the right fit.Both the firm and the company quickly gravitated toward Stratus, drawn to the team’s deep curiosity, business acumen, and technical expertise.

“The questions Stratus asked were so granular and so detailed. They weren’t ‘check the box’ questions. Even the chemistry in those initial sessions between Derek, Rachel, and our team—it was there.” – Private Equity Firm VP.

 

“They could dig in and understand the manufacturing process and know how to put the pieces together and how to report on something like scrap in a way that is meaningful to the business.” – Snack Company IT Representative.

Stratus set out an eight-week timeline to take the snack company step by step from chaos to clarity. The project proceeded in four stages:

1. Current systems deep dive: determine the reports that matter; identify all data sources and understand the logic of the business.
2. Set up tools and systems: create a structured database; build the required automations; create the needed data connections.
3. Build data models: design durable, future-proof data models to clean and analyze incoming data
4. Build KPI dashboards: create the report-replacing, clean views that allow for a reliable understanding of the status of key performance indicators

The Stratus Data team put in the time to understand the company’s existing workflows and create a customized solution that could be easily integrated into users’ day-to-day. A well-built solution that doesn’t get used solves nothing.

Results:

“I’ve seen a lot of rogue developers do a lot of crazy things. The Stratus Data project was very structured, very well put together.” -Snack Company IT Representative.

Stratus Data worked in partnership with the snack company and the private equity firm to create a data warehouse that feeds robust Power BI dashboards. The days of two people manually pulling data, curating hundreds of reports, and responding to one-off requests are a mere memory.

“There was a culture shift. People started to realize that this data is a powerful tool” -Private Equity Firm VP.

The impact of the project continues to reverberate across the company, evidenced by:

• Efficiency Gains: The company saves an estimated 20+ hours per week across its team, translating to over 1,000 hours annually which can be spent on innovating. Further time savings arise as decision makers can get the data they need in seconds, rather than days.

• Elimination of Reporting Bottlenecks: Reports no longer rely on just one or two people, making the company more resilient. Instead, anyone can self-serve the data and analyze it independently.

• A Culture Driven by Data: Power BI adoption spread beyond the snack company, influencing data strategy discussions at the private equity firm and its other portfolio companies. Employees who traditionally relied on manual reporting started proactively requesting Power BI implementations for their workflows.

• Fewer Questions, More Answers: Rather than posing a question that takes a week to resolve, the company’s PE firm partners can log in and have the data they need in just a few clicks. “I don’t know what the ROI is on that, how to measure happiness. But it’s absolutely invaluable,” says the VP.

Stratus Data took the time to train the IT team on best practices for maintaining and further developing the data warehouse, while remaining available as a long-term partner to both the manufacturer and the PE firm. Nearly two years later, the IT team continues to operate and refine the system, writing code and creating new dashboards, proving this foundational data work to be both sustainable and valuable over the long term.