Hershey’s LLC recently deployed the Infosys Information Platform on AWS to analyze retail store data.
The Challenge
Hershey’s wanted to gain valuable, revenue-generating insight faster than a traditional analytics implementation could deliver. For example, the chocolate manufacturer sought to identify items that were out of stock at stores that sold Hershey’s products by the register and gain the means to quickly restock the candy.
According to Phil Lerro, senior director, enterprise information service, infrastructure and workplace solutions at Hershey’s, Hershey's needed to establish its Hadoop landscape and extend its analytics and big data capabilities quickly.
“A lot of Hershey’s revenue is chocolate purchases and it happens on impulse,” said Abdul Razack, senior vice president and head of platforms, Infosys. “If the problem is that a significant amount of revenue is based on impulse purchases, then you have to make sure the item the customer is looking for is available in the store and is in stock at the point of time they are buying.”
The biggest challenge Infosys and Hershey’s encountered was initially identifying the business problem, Razack said.
“Once that problem was identified, it was a relatively smooth implementation which is why we could do this in three weeks,” Razack said. “Since then we have now put together a data lake where all sorts of data can come together so they can do deeper analysis.”
Based on these results Hershey’s is adding a supply chain component where Infosys has built a data foundation and are identifying additional issues.
The Solution
The Infosys Information Platform helps enterprises with data processing, automation, machine learning, explained Razack. It was launched in January 2015 with the goal of solving complex business problems.
“The benefit to the Infosys customer is they don’t have to worry about putting together a technology stack, installing that, and then figuring out the business problem,” Razack said. “Rather, they can identify what the business problem is and very, very quickly enable the technology layer underneath.”
The Result
In a matter of three weeks, Infosys was able to give Hershey’s its first round of data examining how to keep track of the candy stock and keep candy moving from store to store, according to Razack.
“Partnering with Infosys, we had the landscape up and the data lake seeded for our analysts in less than a week,” Lerro said. “Using the Infosys Information Platform on AWS accelerated our deployment by weeks, if not months."
“The beauty of it is that since we have solved a particular problem in one area, we can easily take that foundation to another issue,” Razack said.
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