How we helped UCC Coffee unify its data and reporting

The challenge

UCC Coffee were first founded in Japan 90 years ago. They are now the only global company that develop the entire coffee-related value chain from cultivation, roasting and processing, to sales.

In Europe, they have five factories that roast, package, and deliver coffee to large supermarkets, coffee shops, hotels, restaurants and catering companies. UCC support retail outlets with a complete solution, from providing exceptional coffees and world-class equipment to tailored insight and data-driven training. They also run Templo coffee shops in Spain and Campanini coffee shops in Spain.

UCC have a huge amount of valuable data to manage from their production activities, supply chain and customer service. As the wider UCC Group has grown, much of their data has been stored and managed in different systems. In Spain, the company uses an AS400 ERP that was developed internally over 25 years ago, while the Templo brand uses SAP R/3. To leave these legacy systems behind and ensure a unified approach to data and reporting, the UCC Group decided to move towards Microsoft’s Dynamics 365.

To achieve this, the European part of the business searched for a solution that would enable them to build a data warehouse and integrate data from AS 400 to a new data platform in Dynamics 365. They would then use Power BI analytics tools for reporting.

The approach

UCC approached TimeXtender as their preferred solution, who then gave them access to a test environment where they could discover how much faster it would help them build their data warehouse and integrate with their reporting function. This enabled the internal team to start to build data models, so when the wider Group gave the go-ahead to purchase the solution, they were already ahead.

Ramon Villanueva, responsible for the project says: “We wanted to find a tool that would enable us to build a data warehouse in an easier, more efficient way. We believe TimeXtender is the best tool for this and will also help us build our future data platform. It is very easy to understand and work with.”

When the team were sure TimeXtender was the right solution, Ramon came to Climber to deliver the appropriate licenses. We have been on hand to offer support throughout the onboarding process, alongside TimeXtender’s own Solution Specialists.

To orchestrate the ingestion of data from their source systems, UCC used TimeXtender’s ODX solution with an Azure Data Lake to store the raw data. They were previously using BML coding language to create integration services packages for ETL. Although this was a fairly quick process, it was easily surpassed by the speed and ease of TimeXtender.

Ramon Villanueva, says: “With TimeXtender it is much easier to maintain and make changes than when using integration services. For us it is not complex at all. You do need to understand the philosophy of the build and the data modelling – you need to know the theory – but the tool is very easy to understand and manage.”

To ensure that data and security remained a priority for UCC, they built-in permissions so users can only view the data that they allowed to.

Ramon Villanueva, says: “With TimeXtender it is easy to develop models with security in mind, and as we already had a permissions structure in place because we were transferring data across, it has been very simple.”

The outcome

UCC now have access to their data centrally, and because they were able to build their data integration solution much faster with TimeXtender, they were quickly putting their data to good use and delivering insights to their stakeholders. The speed and agility that TimeXtender has provided has meant the internal teams have been able to focus on achieving their growth ambitions and providing value to their customers.

To find out how TimeXtender can help your business to build data solutions 10x faster, and the license options available, talk to us today.