Transforming data into operational business success

Data integration combines data from different sources and systems into a unified and consistent format to easily access, analyze, and share. Data integration and a functioning data platform can help your daily operations achieve four key benefits:

1. Know what’s going on: By eliminating data silos, duplicates, and inconsistencies, you know what is happening and what comes next in the field and operations across the value chain. 
2. Share relevant data: By creating a single source of truth of your data, you can enable your teams and external stakeholders, such as partners or regulators, to access and use the operational data they need. 
3. Reduce costs: With a data layer that can be flexibly modified, there is less pressure to change the often rigid and old operational systems, thereby saving costs. 
4. Increase innovation: By connecting and enriching your data, you can uncover new patterns, trends, and opportunities in your operations, leading to unforeseen business innovations and faster development of new offerings. Utilizing advanced technologies like Artificial intelligence also only becomes possible when your data is consistent and unified. 

Compass Group is the world’s leading food and multi-service company, bringing joy and refreshment to the days of schoolchildren, workers, seniors, and event-goers through its hundreds of restaurants. Compass Group Finland’s data-driven journey began from a scattered data landscape, where data generated through countless acquisitions and spread across different repositories made it challenging to get to the quick, facts-based decisions needed in today’s fast-paced market. 

The demand for operational data was multi-faceted: finance produced masses of information, but it did not speak the language of the businesses. The tool for planning the daily menus in the restaurants offered no transparency on whether the plans were followed, which caused inefficiencies in production forecasting and supply chains. The sustainability function, in turn, needed data to respond to regulatory needs and to support the green transformation. Together with the customer, Nortal has identified more than ten business functions where the need for better use of data is imminent. 

With Compass Group, the work started by modeling the data and naming entities according to the language used in the business and operations. We then created a centralized data platform that brought all of Compass Group’s data under one roof. Every piece of data on this platform, from customer information to financials and HR, was neatly organized and easily accessible. By moving to a cloud environment, we not only simplified the architecture but also helped Compass Group cut down on costs. 

The new data platform allows Compass Group to make swift, informed decisions on all levels, from operations to top management. Resource allocation, waste management, and materials ordering have become more efficient, positively impacting the company’s bottom line and environmental burden. Customers also enjoy a more transparent dining experience, with detailed ingredients and sourcing information at their fingertips. 

Data has also found entirely new and unforeseen use cases. The data modeling done in the restaurants’ menu planning yielded unexpected benefits when Compass Group’s suppliers started requesting product demand forecasts. The readily gathered and modeled data made it easy to build and share the needed estimates with the suppliers in real-time.

Nortal’s collaboration with St1, an energy group committed to renewable fuels, has produced a data platform solution that ensures compliance with the EU’s stringent sustainability criteria for biomass used in energy production. We have also developed digital solutions to manage and enable transparency across St1’s value chain. The solutions provide visibility into the inventory of biofuel raw materials, allowing the optimization of sourcing, processing, and distribution. These capabilities, for their part, ensure the scalability of St1’s business operations. 

One of St1’s latest investments, the Gothenburg biorefinery, is an example of the value of the newly built solutions. In Gothenburg, various raw materials will be utilized to produce renewable diesel, jet fuel, and bionaphtha. The novel tools help effectively oversee the refinery’s entire value chain of renewable fuels, sustainability criteria, and the plant’s physical mass balance.

Europe’s largest stainless-steel producer, Outokumpu, has started a transformation program to digitize its entire end-to-end production chain from experience-driven to data-driven. Developed in collaboration with Nortal, the Outokumpu Digital Platform is at the heart of this transformation. As a layer on top of the factory operations, the platform can be agilely changed according to needs without affecting daily operations.  

Outokumpu and Nortal have depicted a vision of data platform development as a tree: On the ground, there are numerous operational systems and solutions. Some of these systems may be dated and stiff, meaning that a layer is needed on top of them to utilize their data cost-efficiently. Integrations are the roots of the tree, sucking out the data from all the operational systems. The tree trunk, in turn, is the managed data and the application interface layer, i.e., how the data is managed and how it is served for the different use cases. The tree branches and leaves are the business capabilities and applications that, in the end, produce operational benefits like innovation, efficiency and quality improvements, or transparency of Outokumpu’s leadership on all levels.

Forward-thinking companies like Compass Group, Outokumpu, and St1 have demonstrated the immense benefits of adopting a data-driven approach. For operational businesses across industries, where data capabilities are often inherited from several mergers and acquisitions and supply chains are scarce, a data platform frequently proves to bear unforeseeable value. 

Becoming data-driven can provide a quick fix to that thorn in your side that slows your daily operations, provide the long-needed transparency to the supply chain, or enable entirely new, unpredictable innovations that would not have occurred to anybody without the latest insights. Ultimately, something starting from a small trial can be transformative for your business. Going forward, the ability to effectively harness and utilize data will be a defining factor in the efficiency and innovativeness of daily operations, and industry leaders are already embracing this change.