Smurfit Kappa

Complex BI-Landscape essentially simplified

How biGENIUS helped harmonize multiple BI solutions, consolidating data management and visualization of all sources in only one solution.

Smurfit Kappa
Customer story

Smurfit Kappa

Smurfit Kappa is Europe's leading supplier of packaging made of corrugated board, corrugated base paper and bag-in-box packaging. The Irish company employs around 46,000 people in 35 countries worldwide.

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Challenge

Inconsistent and complex data situation due to multiple BI systems.

For Smurfit Kappa, the topic of data analysis was basically nothing new. The company had long been using BI solutions in various areas such as sales, production or quality. Depending on the department, however, different systems were used for data analysis. This presented the company with various challenges. On the one hand, the different systems made it impossible to analyze all data in a combined report. On the other hand, the different evaluations produced different results, which made it extremely difficult for the decision-makers to evaluate the data from a strategic perspective and left too much room for interpretation and discussion. Another issue was that the multitude of systems involved an enormous amount of work - both in terms of maintenance and adaptation to the constantly changing business requirements. For these reasons, Smurfit Kappa decided to convert their system and use a harmonized BI solution for all levels of the organization in the future. This was to create "one version of the truth." One entry point to perform all data analyses and a uniform data basis on which all can rely. The project managers were therefore looking for the best possible way to achieve this goal.

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Solution

Harmonized data warehouse solution through implementation by biGENIUS.

In their search for a solution, Smurfit Kappa's managers evaluated various data warehouse automation solutions. They compared them based on all relevant factors such as cost or ease of use. After a pilot test and many positive experiences, they decided in favor of biGENIUS and a collaboration with the Trivadis experts.

Since then, the various data sources have been integrated step by step into the new data warehouse solution with biGENIUS. In the initial phase, the biGENIUS experts took over the setup and development of the solution. In this way, Smurfit Kappa's internal managers did not have to learn the tool at too early a stage and saved resources. In the meantime, the company is driving the implementation independently. However, it is in very close contact with the biGENIUS team and can clarify any questions or problems together with them or access the biGENIUS support portal directly for this purpose.

In the very good cooperation between the two teams, the Smurfit Kappa project team also provided very valuable input for improving biGENIUS.

Regarding the implementation of the data warehouse, the decision was made to use Data Vault modeling. This approach has the advantage that the many different data sources are easier to integrate compared to a dimensional modeling approach. However, the data model becomes far more complex and time-consuming to implement. This is exactly where the advantage of automation with biGENIUS comes in. With biGENIUS, even the complex Data Vault model could be implemented very efficiently. Since biGENIUS now generates the entire code automatically, this problem was reduced to a minimum.

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Key benefits

Consolidated data management and visualization of all sources in only one solution.

With biGENIUS, Smurfit Kappa now has a tool that the team could easily get to know and can now further develop and operate the DWH themselves - while always having the option to fall back on the biGENIUS team and biGENIUS support portal. The combination of biGENIUS® and PowerBI is an enormous benefit for Smurfit Kappa: the entire business logic, loading process and data modeling are generated automatically by biGENIUS. This created the basis for being able to provide a powerful, easy-to-use model in the front end with PowerBI. The goal has been achieved: Smurfit Kappa can now combine data from all its different sources in one report or dashboard, evaluate it uniformly and display it. This laid the foundation for a robust solution that is also future-proof.

Technologies used:

  • biGENIUS
  • PowerBI

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