A Brief Note On The Largest Foodservices Provider

Kudler Foods uses shared databases as a means to increase efficiency and to reduce costs. The use of shared databases creates opportunities for the company to view, manage, and analyze information simultaneously thus providing Kudler with the historical data and forecasting options to consider expanding and increasing profits. Tracking technology, groupware, and workflow software allow Kudler the opportunity to track customer tracking purchase behavior patterns to assist in process refining.

After his stint in school, Gregory J. Aziz began to work at his family’s wholesale food business, Affiliated Foods. Placed in the position of a manager, he spearheaded various methods for building up the business and took it from local status to a global entity, within a 16 year timeframe.

The ability to compete on analytics is made possible by certain qualities some companies possess which allows them to collect and use immense amounts of data in a way that differentiates the success and practices of those companies amongst any other businesses. Davenport and Harris (2007) define analytics as “extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions” (p. 7). Therefore, to be able to compete on analytics, a firm must not only use the data to extrapolate and execute strategies and models in order to drive business, but also to use that data better and smarter than their competitors. This requires forward thinking and continual developments of current analyses and practices. With regard to Davenport and Harris’s criteria and concepts on the ability to compete on analytics, Old Navy LLC’s practices will be analyzed to find whether the company is able to compete, is a competitor, and how it competes, if at all.

In today’s companies, the analytics software plays the important role and guides the future activities to a great extent.

America is known for being one of the unhealthiest nations in the world. This true statement is able to be traced all the way back to what is in our foods: corn, sugar, salt, and fat. Each of these ingredients are generally okay to consume small amounts. Unfortunetly, many Americans are consuming extremely high amounts of these products, simply because the ingredients are in nearly every meal you can think of. In order to fix this dilemma, the government must take action for their responsibility by requiring food labels to be clear and accurate, boost incentives for marketing healthier foods, and end subsidies for corn and soy, all while encouraging the population to consume healthier foods.

A fundamental transformation is being observed in the field of healthcare industry as it moved from volume based business to value based business. With increasing demands from consumers for better healthcare quality, plans and increased care, healthcare providers are expected to provide better outcomes. The cost dynamics of health care industry is changing globally, which is driven mainly by longer life expectancy, pervasiveness of chronic illness and infectious disease. New market entrants, new medical approaches have made the things more complicated. All these challenges in the industry open the way for analytics work to expand more. Here in this document, we would like to mainly focus on the following aspects to understand the use of analytics in day to day industry operations.

This essay is broken down in three segments: the importance of analytics

In an uber globalized market of today, companies are faced with challenges in each and every step of their business. Our analytics and research services are geared towards giving those companies that extra edge over the competition. We process and analyze terabytes of data and break down all the fuzz and chatter around it to give our customers meaningful insights about their competition and the market they are engaged in.

Throughout the years, there has been an incredible amount of speculation as to what ingredients are being put into the food we consume. The same food manufactured by major food corporations that can only be approved by the FDA. There are many techniques that these food corporations can use in order to gain consumer loyalty, but the main focus is the way their advertising works. Along with these advertisements, comes a target market as well. The food industry is constantly in speculation because there are always new foods that corporations want approved to sell. Some of these businesses are part of the fast food industry and others are international food companies that sell their products around the world. As adults and parents, we need to

How much do you know about the businesses that you see every day? The deals that they make behind closed doors, the loopholes they find and the people they bribe to let them do anything they want. Given how much we consume their products, we should know what we are getting out of it. They are required to print the nutrition facts on their products, but they use alternate names for ingredients so they average consume does not know fully what they are getting. They also do not undergo the same food quality testing as a government or locally run distributors. Not only do we not know what we are getting from these

Distinctive Capability - ABC has a demonstrated capability to use analytics to create a competitive advantage from an investment management standpoint. Millions of data points must be continuously analyzed to ensure passive stock and bond investments, totaling in the trillions of dollars, are efficiently managed for performance and risk. On the client side the diverse business structures and the prior focus on efficient operations has to date limited ABC’s ability to build out a world class data analytics capability comparable to the one that exists on the investment side of their business.

The second pillar - enterprise-wide analytics - at ARI in my opinion is a work in progress. Analytics is managed by the new product development team; the team is responsible for deploying the new and latest technologies to our customers. Today, the data is centrally located in multiple Oracle databases with multiple universes used for reporting. Power users can develop reports accessing transactional tables instead of the universes. The end result can be getting different results in a report. This is not because the data is different but how users are requesting and interpreting the data. I refer to this pillar as a work in progress because we are currently working on a strategic multi-year project to build a warehouse to support reporting and analytics. One of the success factors of the project is to build a ‘single source of the truth’ for reporting. This new warehouse will have the business rules defined in the data – not an easy task requiring time and resources from the business areas. In my opinion, ARI does not have a formal business intelligence competency center (BICC) (Thomas H. Davenport, 2007, p. 29) but has taken the steps to create one. The warehouse project team includes resources from Information Technology and the different lines of business with key responsibilities to define the business rules for the data and take ownership of the data. A key improvement in this area would be to dedicate Information Technology resources to the project.

Stage 2 - These organizations have implemented localized analytic solutions with some data elements and reporting, but they lack the big picture view of implementing enterprise-wide analytics activities. There are department specific silos of data and reports to meet functional needs.

While Acosta strives to provide a flexible model to support manufacturers of various sizes in variety of tasks, analytics is still not a driving force across the company. Future growth is dependent on Acosta understanding the current model and making the proper adjustments to propel it forward. Analytics will be a large part of that. New non-traditional competitors have entered the market and eaten into the market share Acosta has attained. To continue finding growth in a challenging environment, the opportunity for Acosta is to move from a company that silos analytic capability and moves to build an enterprise wide culture focused on analytics. This would allow Acosta to offer the right product for the right cost as well as continuing to find new service options not being offered. Analytics can take Acosta from a good organization to a

The average American eats about 60,000 pounds of food during the course of their lifetime, but what is it exactly that we call food? And how much of it should we really be getting. The dictionary definition of food in a Merriam-Webster dictionary is “something that nourishes, sustains, or supplies.” Unfortunately almost all of the food Americans consume on a daily basses is treated, infused with or been feed artificial hormones, stimulants and steroids which would not abide by that definition. In a society where one can so easily be judged on the lifestyle choices they make which include what they eat and how much of it, the way the world utilizes and exploits its food supply is severely flawed. In order to improve the way Americans utilize their food supply, its necessary to make aware how food is produced, how excess food is dealt with, and how the misuse of food can have varied devastating results.