Cloetta

Data challenge

Cloetta held enormous volumes of customer and product data that had to be analysed to drive improvement proposals. But the data was unstructured and the volume vast. Reports were manual, time-consuming, inefficient and error-prone. The company understood that relevant data had to be made easily and unambiguously accessible through a central solution.

Transformation

Cloetta turned to Spotfire Data Virtualization Silver Partner Connected Data Group and concluded that it needed to enrich its existing solution with a data virtualisation tool. Spotfire Data Virtualization was selected to make data from the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) easily available.

The internationally operating IT and BI team brought together global, local, internal and external data from the EDW and other less-structured sources. By combining multiple sources in near real time, Cloetta avoids duplication of integrated data, which significantly improves sales forecasts.

"In our partnership with Connected Data Group, two moments were crucial for the success of our BI environment: the design of our data architecture and the implementation of Spotfire Data Virtualization." Han van Bijnen, Senior IT Manager

The deep insights delivered through Spotfire Data Virtualization strengthen decision-making in sales and distribution. The enterprise-wide BI team unlocks data through the Spotfire Data Virtualization platform, which accelerates supply chain insights and recommendations and gives a clear view of company-wide data.

"Cloetta has been a client for many years and embraced Spotfire Data Virtualization as the core of their data delivery platform. We are proud to be their reseller and implementation partner and to work regularly with the Cloetta team to create real business value." Erik Fransen, co-founder Connected Data Group

Results

The Spotfire Data Virtualization solution adds a new layer to Cloetta's existing BI environment, allowing local and external data to be processed faster.

"We can give our business users BI solutions that without Spotfire Data Virtualization would never have been feasible. We can now work on our BI strategy for the years ahead and make the transition from a traditional to a logical data warehouse." Sofie Nuyens-Honen, Senior IT Manager BI

By helping Cloetta understand the dynamics of the entire supply chain, the platform improves forecast accuracy and optimises campaigns, in-store sales and stock levels. The combined dataset serves more end users, enabling fact-based management and strategic decision-making.

"We can now combine new data we make available through data virtualisation with the data we already had in the enterprise data warehouse. It is a strong combination." Sofie Nuyens-Honen

Spotfire Data Virtualization saves Cloetta time and money. It makes reporting faster and more effective, allowing employees to identify deviations and take corrective action.

"With the data we have effective reports and we can quickly spot deviations between plans and reality, so we can take corrective measures proactively." Han van Bijnen

Looking ahead

"We see many more possibilities with Spotfire Data Virtualization solutions. Our next steps are combining and connecting data instead of relying on standalone solutions. We plan to add warehouse, store and sales data to the Finnish field sales model and to apply the results of earlier projects more broadly." Sofie Nuyens-Honen