Kalido MDM and AB InBev

The Gartner MDM Summit in Las Vegas wraps up today, and this morning I caught a session by Kalido’s President and CEO Bill Hewitt and Jonathan Starkey, the Director of Business Intelligence at AB InBev North America.

AB InBev purchased Anheuser Busch in 2008 to become the largest brewer in the world, with over 116,000 employees worldwide and $39 billion in annual revenue.

AB InBev  sees master data as a foundation element supporting supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). All of that data winds up in a data warehouse and is used for reporting and planning. This shared focus on both reporting and analysis, and planning and forecasting makes up their philosophy on business intelligence.

This integration approach is being to bring together the Canadian and US operations gradually over time, but to integrate the SCM, ERP and CRM pillars of the US and Canadian operations of such a large enterprise realistically is going to take three to five years.

Turning more to the master data side of things, the first way AB InBev is using Kalido is to synchronize and cross-reference product and customer information across SCM and ERP systems. Secondly, they’re using Kalido to look for active exceptions across all of the various domains – between plants and products, between employees in HR and in ERP, between any two systems where master data is not in agreement. Thirdly, they’re using Kalido to kick off requests for new master data – new employees, new products, etc. that then get passed to various systems around the company.

The “real world” benefits from Kalido at AB InBev include procurement savings, strategic inventory optimization, overhead and budget tracking, people and resource movement tracking.

AB InBev went through a rigorous selection process, and selected Kalido in large part because of its ability to change rapidly as their business needs changed. Jonathan Starkey said ”Kalido does a very good job at managing change over time”.

I really enjoyed this session. Both Bill Hewitt and Jonathan Starkey did a great job, and it was enlightening to hear how a large global enterprise has addressed their MDM and business intelligence needs. Hub Designs recently became a Kalido partner, and one of our goals for this Gartner MDM Summit was to learn more about the company and their products, and this session definitely helped us do that.

For more information on Kalido, please visit www.kalido.com.