Synlait

Synlait is an innovative dairy processing company based in the heart of Canterbury, New Zealand. They combine expert farming with state-of-the-art processing to produce a range of nutritional milk products that provide genuine benefits for health and well-being.

The Synlait Milk facility processes more than 500 million litres of milk each year and is capable of processing 3.2 million litres of raw milk per day. Along with their world-class processing facilities, they maintain control over the quality of milk supply, milk processing and market distribution to guarantee their customers absolute food safety, security and traceability.

The key stakeholders at Synlait, particularly within the commercial and production areas were increasingly demanding better quality information in a timely and consistent manner. They needed visibility on milk supply forecasts, budgets, actuals and the variances between these. They also required the ability to analyse milk supply across supplier groups, farms, swaps, time and products.

The process was managed by two separate systems, Madcap (milk supply chain) and Lawson M3 (Enterprise Resource Planning / Financial Management) with information manually entered from spread sheets with only a small percentage of this going into the Lawson M3 system.

“Collating this information and making it available to the key stakeholders was a manual, error prone and time consuming process” said John Stewart Business Intelligence Manager for Synlait. “The disparate nature of the two systems meant there was no control of the data, as with all manual processes you get a real disconnect. We had instances where the Production Team had conflicting data to Finance”.  

The milk supply chain information was being collected but it was difficult to access and there wasn’t a good process for distributing it to the key stakeholders within the organisation. “We needed a process that was automated and easily accessible. We had the data, we just needed a system that could provide the wider team with the information they needed” said David Williams, Synlait Milk Supply Manager.

Synlait had a successful Lawson M3 ERP and a Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse solution for the Finance Team and were keen to provide the same end to end visibility of information to the Milk Supply, Commercial and Production Teams.

Working in partnership with Business Intelligence specialists Montage and Madcap Vendors Contec, Synlait embarked on a project to consolidate information from an object oriented database (Madcap) and relational database (Lawson M3 ERP).

“It was a challenging project as there were some key changes required at a source level. We found that with everyone committed to delivering a successful project and with good co-operation between Contec, Montage and Synlait we soon had a denormalised database and one single version of the truth”, said Mr Stewart.

With information that is now easily accessible, the Milk Supply Team no longer works in isolation. Milk supply information is now automated and refreshed daily, providing reports to all relevant stakeholders, which covers:

• All milk supplied from all farms
• Forecasts, budgets and actuals, and variances between them
• Milk supply composition analysis, down to farm/day/product level, for any period up to present
• Milk supply cost analysis, down to farm/month/product/cost category level

“The whole forecasting process is a lot easier; we’ve got a better way at looking at our information. Our actual results are now automatically updated daily so we’ve got better visibility across the organisation of how we are tracking against budget & forecast. This improved accuracy and access to the milk supply information particularly for the Finance and Business Intelligence teams has certainly made things a lot more transparent. Everyone is working off the same accurate and up to date information” says David Williams.

For John Stewart and the team at Synlait, there has always been a high value placed on the importance of accurate and timely information and having a single, consistent set of information is a key element to any successful Business Intelligence project. Synlait continue to work in partnership with Montage as they look to mature their Business Intelligence capabilities across other areas of the business.