Who is Four Seasons Produce?
Four Seasons Produce, Inc. is a full-service wholesaler of Organic, Local and Conventional fresh produce supplying Organic Markets, Food Co-Ops, Independent Retailers, Chain Stores, and other produce buyers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Delaware, Washington DC, Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts and beyond.
Challenges
Four Seasons has long understood the value and importance of its data. Using their data assets to drive key reports and insights. They relied on a Data Mart, Power BI, and SSRS.
A few years ago- when Four Seasons implemented a new ERP system, JD Edwards, there were numerous attempts to establish a Data Mart that would include not only ERP information, but data from other operational source systems as well. In addition to the reporting and analytics stack not reflecting some of the company’s most important data from the ERP, it was showing signs of technical debt and needed improvement and modernization. With significant growth underway in the organization, Four Seasons knew that it required an enterprise solution to meet the demands of the business.
Four Seasons Produce had a Data Mart in place that did not include data from the main ERP System (JD Edwards) which was implemented 1-2 years ago. Their current BI environment utilized Microsoft’s Power BI and Microsoft SSRS tools on the current Data Mart environment. Four Seasons Produce has several reports and visuals from SSRS, Power BI reports, and dashboards numbered in the several hundred. Four Seasons Produce had been experiencing significant growth and knew it need to implement a full enterprise data warehouse.
Solutions
At the beginning of the architecture phase of the project, it was decided Four Seasons Produce would benefit from an Enterprise Data Warehouse solution that would merge data from multiple on premises and cloud operational sources systems including the JDE ERP system, a Warehouse Management System (WMS), payroll / timeclock, and a Transportation Management System (TMS). Hammer Dev’s approach was looking to identify how a business can use its data most effectively. By identifying and defining key business information and reporting scenarios, and how current-state, or future-state systems, contribute to the data of those entities, Hammer Dev could create a Data Warehouse based on how the business defines itself and how it can best use its information. This allowed for a scalable, manageable, and user intuitive data structure that could be used without much additional.
With any organization, concerns around pulling data from business-critical sources, such as an ERP system, needs to be architected in way where there can be no adverse effects against that system at any time (such as performance drags, rewriting or deleting data). This required a data integration solution that only pulled needed data, performing as much of the data normalization work outside of the source system as possible, while using query mechanisms that do not disrupt other data saving procedures.
Since Four Seasons Produce desired data in the Enterprise Data Warehouse to be as real-time as possible, Hammer Dev architected an ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) solution that allowed for regular data pulled throughout the day with little to no latency or interruption on the various source systems.
Results
Many benefits were delivered from the Data Warehouse including enhanced business intelligence. By pulling data from various sources, the executives of Four Seasons Produce no longer needed to make decisions based on instinct or limited data. This robust data visualization has allowed greater insight into operations and executives can query the data themselves without any assistance from their IT Department.
To accommodate for current reporting and analytic assets, Hammer created “indexed” views within the new Data Warehouse that mirrored the existing data marts previously used. All new reports utilized the new Data Warehouse schema, but old reports would be compatible without redevelopment. Four Seasons Produce was now able to handle various sources of record with varying data freshness requirements. Though platformed on new hardware and hosted internally, the entire architecture is ready for cloud-enablement and detailed data logging for troubleshooting and monitoring.
With our consistent growth and a new ERP system, we knew that a new, more scalable Data Warehouse architecture was needed. But with an extensive inventory of developed reports, the task was intimidating and estimated to take years. Weidenhammer helped us to achieve a more scalable system which provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities. They were also able to preserve and migrate our library of existing reports using a strategy that only took a few months, a major win.”
Jim Koelsch, Vice President Technology (Four Seasons)
