The company, a publicly traded distributor of natural and organic foods, hopes that software from global data infrastructure provider Pervasive will enable the firm to differentiate their goods and services, lower overheads and maintain supply chain efficiency.
Certainly, suppliers and manufacturers across the globe are looking at new ways of achieving cost efficiencies to beat high energy and raw material costs. A recent report from market analyst Forrester claims that companies are planning to increase IT spending by an average of 3.9 per cent in 2005, a conclusion that suggests a definite trend towards integrating technology in every aspect of production as a means of beating the squeeze.
According to Forrester, whose surveys are entitled "2005 Enterprise IT Outlook: Business Technographics North America," and "North American IT Spending In 2005," applications are the big winner for budgets in 2005. Some 59 per cent of decision-makers surveyed identified deployment or upgrade of major packaged applications as a priority, replacing security as the top priority from the past year.
The research suggests that suppliers and manufacturers are being won round to the advantages of technology as a cost-effective means of achieving long term efficiencies, a view that United Natural Foods has certainly adopted.
United Natural Foods distributes across the US. Rapid growth through acquisition and expansion has lead to fragmented silos of data. In order to build a centralised data warehouse for analytics purposes, United Natural Foods sought a flexible data integration partner to aggregate disparate company and partner data from their new and existing business units.
Pervasive Data Integrator was chosen to help consolidate older business systems and migrate large volumes of data from legacy sources and different platforms into a single data warehouse. The firm will aggregate, organise and structure company data to support timely and efficient access to information for decision support across business units.
"Pervasive was the best choice for integrating data from old and existing business units, as its broad connectivity and ease of use will empower our team to create any process, perform any type of data transformation and then execute all within a single integration development environment," said Larry Desjardins, director of data warehousing for United Natural Foods.
"A critical component of United Natural Food's enterprise data warehouse infrastructure, Pervasive will become the core data integration platform for everything."
Central to the success of the new infrastructure is the ability to create a metadata-driven environment, emphasising re-use and increasing operational efficiency.
Pervasive Software is a global leader in data infrastructure software and sells its products into more than 150 countries. Leading retailers and manufacturers such as Fry's Electronics, Brinker International (parent company of Chili's Grill & Bar), Kerry Group, West Marine and Kroger have already installed Pervasive technology in order to better integrate or manage customer and inventory data.