News

Skretting: a forerunner
Data Warehouse finds the business critical information – in seconds

Do you spend too much time finding out the reasons for unmet quality of a reclaimed product? Do you have to dig through several separate production and LIMS systems to find the reason? If the answer is yes, building up a Data Warehouse is worth considering, as it collects and classifies data from various systems and enables quick navigation into the origin of the data.

Industrial IT Manager Kurt Fjellanger, from Skretting, the world leading fish feed producer and part of the worldwide Nutreco group, is convinced of the benefits of Data Warehousing in their business.  In the company, where it is of utmost importance to be able to trace the factors of the feed quality long after the product has left the site, it would take far too long for the staff to dig out all the required data separately from the various production systems.

Navigating in the Data Warehouse leaves the operative systems unloaded and untouched. This gives the opportunity to open the Data Warehouse also to external use for customers. This new eService has been taken into use in Skretting Norway.

Based on his experience, Fjellanger’s advice for a successful Data Warehouse construction project is:
     • simplify the scope and targets
     • get business analyst enthusiastic and involved in the project
     • last but not least – know your operative (source) systems well

‘In Skretting, Data Warehouse reporting is based mainly on BusinessObjects reports for management and customers, and Trace Engine for tracking and tracing feed information internally’, describes Fjellanger.

‘With customer-specific login into the Extranet of Skretting Norway, customers have access to reports showing detailed information about their feed deliveries. Also quality analyses of the batches, related to the delivered feed, are available. The data, uploaded from LIMS, include documentation of nutritional and physical quality of the feed as well as important information related to food safety for raw materials and feed’, Fjellanger continues.

Examples of frequently appearing questions that can be answered in seconds, according to Fjellanger, are:
     • Which suppliers have delivered raw material and which raw material lots were used for a specific batch?
     • Which customers have received feed from a specific batch?
     • Which customers have received feed containing a specific raw material lot?

These examples illustrate the usefulness of data warehouse solutions in production environments where quality and production data from different databases need to be combined for finding the required information. It is easy to imagine that once the system is in place, its use will only increase.

Back to table of contents