Predictive analytics build sustainable communities
- 900 Locations
- 1M Square miles of coverage
- CA$353M Returned to members and communities
Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL) does business differently. At its core, FCL is a wholesaling, manufacturing, marketing, and administrative co-operative serving Western Canada.
The co-operative supports other co-operatives in five provinces, spanning Northwest Ontario to Victoria Island in British Columbia and from the U.S. border to the Arctic Circle.
With a coverage area of 1 million square miles—or 29% of Canadian land—FCL has built a diverse portfolio of businesses to encompass the entire value chain. It builds, feeds, and fuels over 250 communities through 160 independently owned co-operatives that operate over 900 locations/stores. These local co-ops own and operate agricultural centers, grocery stores, gas bars/convenience stores, card locks, and home centers, as well as a fully functional refinery for fuel: an ethanol factory endeavoring toward alternative fuel. It’s a complex business that touches many facets of Western Canadian life.
“We start at the farm, and we end up on your shelf, in your kitchen, or in your car,” says Roman Coba, chief information officer and vice president of innovation at FCL.
A co-operative business model is unique. “The interesting part about our business is that we actually sell to people who grow, we buy what they grow, we turn it, we sell the by-product, and we sell them everything else along the way,” Coba explains.
Owning the value chain creates analytics opportunities that increase business value
FCL’s operating model creates a virtuous cycle—ripe for analytics to streamline processes and accelerate growth. For example:
- Oil refinery maintenance to maximize operational efficiencies and production via predictive asset maintenance: “Where can you save money? By reducing maintenance hours and plant downtime to increase plant uptime,” says Coba. “To do that, you need to be able to forecast when something is going to break. We took statistics around lifecycle, breakage, and maximum, optimized hours of operation. We took all the historical data we had for when things broke, when they had to be fixed, all maintenance windows, what we did, and how we did it, and then we started putting in throughput on an ongoing daily basis. And we said, ‘Now, tell us when something's going to break.’ Let’s get ahead of it!”
- Agricultural farming to maximize crop yields: “The key value was the foresight to see which factors are impacting, or will impact, future crop yield,” says Coba. “Agronomists go to the farm, sit down with the farmers in the winter months, and perform analytics to inform farming plans around acreage requirements of crops, when to seed, when to optimally do various steps, and so forth to lay out the next year's plans.”
- Retail store performance, inventory management, and demand forecasting to drive profitability: “We have built analytics around store performance, inventory turns, and profitability,” Coba says. “We made it available to the store manager and operational managers on the floor, and we provide the ability to look at impacts of promotions, stock visibility, category management, and predictive alerting around empty shelves. They use this for demand forecasting to predict what is needed, the rate of sale, and so on.”
Data harmonization and integration support predictive analytics
“Our #1 focus is always the local community,” Coba says. “Our goal is to generate as much profit as we possibly can to return it right back into the communities it comes from.”
These efforts contribute to FCL achieving over 9 billion Canadian dollars in sales and CA$495 million in net income in 2021, representing a year-over-year increase of 14% and 180%, respectively. FCL also returned CA$353 million to its members and communities to fulfill its mission of “building sustainable communities together.”
Siloed data across many systems hindered processes and prevented scaling of insights that accelerate performance. FCL’s siloed data was difficult to access—and for analysts and business users to leverage for simple analytical and reporting needs. As a result, FCL’s technology lacked clear connection and focus on driving business outcomes and capabilities. Coba and his technology team faced a complex data landscape with many legacy systems in place.
Data sources and systems included:
- Mainframe data (master data and supply chain)
- Promotions
- Point of sale (POS)
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Loyalty
- Supply chain contracts
Data domains included:
- Supply chain
- Sales trending
- Freight
- Forecasts
- Food
- Petroleum
- Liquor sales
By modernizing its stack with a flexible and scalable analytics and data platform, Teradata Vantage™ made FCL’s predictive analytics possible.
“The mandate was to bring value with technology,” says Coba. “We all know that data's just data, and the gold is how you turn it into information.” continues Coba.
To do this, Coba and his team replaced a legacy IBM® Netezza®/Db2 data warehouse with Vantage after evaluating others like Snowflake and Microsoft.
“Teams asked, ‘Why Teradata?’” Coba says. “I said, ‘Because they know what they're doing. They focus on what they do best. Teradata has the plan, the products, the capability, and the partners who can bring it to the table.’
Now, Vantage integrates and harmonizes data at scale for FCL’s predictive analytics, business intelligence and reporting, and data management needs across the enterprise. MicroStrategy acts as the visualization layer, allowing business users—like retail store managers and operational managers—to leverage insights from Teradata in easily digestible dashboards and visualizations.
Business users interact with data and insights via business applications. These applications incorporate analytical insights, such as:
- Market basket analysis
- Spend analytics
- Convenience store analytics
- Petroleum analytics
- Food analysis
- Agricultural business analytics
- Unified point of contact
- Supply chain outbound analysis
- Fresh analysis
- Merchandise analysis
By modernizing its analytics and data platform with Teradata, FCL enables self-service capabilities—making FCL’s information technology (IT) team a key driver of business transformation.
Breakthrough decisions drive positive impact
“We’ve built a technology organization that’s now a valued member and partner to the business,” says Coba. “We're suggesting and bringing ideas of how to move forward, how to grow, what to stock, and what to do next. We're a trusted advisor."
By transforming into a data-driven organization, FCL’s business leaders are empowered with real-time data access to improve decision-making. As FCL’s technology team focuses on driving value from technology investments and automation, its impact is felt across business units through:
- Improved demand chain and supply chain management (spend analytics generate $75M in return)
- Improved sales and inventory reporting
- Better transportation performance
- Reduced expenses and increased bottom line
These impacts improve profitability so FCL can invest back into its communities. Coba says this technology transformation has led to a cultural transformation. “The most fun is bringing along your business leaders and having them walk away with big smiles on their faces, saying, ‘Holy cow—it's not technology. It's my insight. It's my future.’”
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