SPSS - Customers

Johnsonville Sausage

Situation

In an industry where taste counts for everything, Johnsonville Sausage has created its own recipe for success. Founded in 1945 as a butcher shop in Johnsonville, Wisconsin, JohnsonVille Sausage Inc. now operates multiple manufacturing facilities in the United States that produce fresh, smoked and cooked sausage products, breakfast sausage, and snack sausage. The company, now based in Kohler, Wisconsin, distributes its products nationally and internationally. Johnsonville was one of the first in its industry to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbone to consolidate business systems and share critical business information.

Challenge

Using its ERP system, Johnsonville's employees, or "members," had access to the company's data repository. This data provided them with valuable information about company operations. However, to shape that information so that managers could easily understand and analyze it required somewhat different tools than the ERP solution provided. That's where SPSS entered the picture.

Solution

With the help of SPSS business intelligence solutions, Johnsonville Sausage managers were able to analyze critical business information — such as sales and operational information — quickly and accurately.

Johnsonville chose SPSS because its fully integrated suite of products allowed them to construct a data warehouse and give users controlled access to it, so that they could quickly build their own printed reports right from their desktops. johnsonville also liked the solution's flexibility and ease of use.

Today, nearly 80 members company-wide use SPSS solutions to access operational and financial data. They can compare sales by customer, region and brand. With this information, they can develop more accurate sales forecasts for production and manufacturing scheduling. These capabilities directly impact the company's cost of doing business their profibility.

Our users needed customized reports beyond the standardized set of formats available on the iSeries computing platform. Before we implemented the SPSS solution, MIS had to extract and compile this information. It was a very labor-intensive process. Now we have the tools we need to pursue new and better ways to expand the business.
Ron Gilson
MIS Director
Johnsonville Sausage

Results

By using their SPSS solution, Johsonville Sausage:

Increased productivity
Optimzed production and manufacturing processes
More effectively retained and leveraged customers
Freed up MIS resources that had been previously devoted to compiling information

Additional Applications

The human resources department at Johnsonville uses SPSS solutions to track turnover, separations, statistical payroll information and statistics for active members. Johnsonville also uses SPSS tools on the production side to help make planning more efficient.

"Before we implemented our SPSS solution, manufacturing could only access up to 60 days' worth of information on shop orders, which drive production. We wanted to be able to give them a longer period of history and deliver it to them faster so they could schedule future production runs," says Denise Daley, Johnsonville's data warehouse architect. "Now that we can offer them two years worth of information, they can plan much more accurately."

Johnsonville sees unlimited potential for business intelligence solutions within its organization. In the future, the company hopes to use ShowCase solutions to expand its customer-oriented applications. For example, Web-based technology might allow Johnsonville's customers across the country the benefit of timely, accurate information — on customer order status, for example, or regional sales totals — with just the click of a mouse.