ZenOptics Case Study

ZenOptics Improves Brown-Forman’s Analytics Usage and Business Efficiency

About Brown-Forman:

  • Industry: Beverage Manufacturing
  • Headquarters: United States
  • Employees: 5,200
  • Countries: 170
  • Brands: Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve
  • NYSE Ticker: BF.A

With ZenOptics: At a Glance:

  • Business users have a single interface to easily find and access their reports and analytics assets.
  • Overall adoption of analytics and business user engagement increased by 25% year over year.
  • Individuals and teams have realized time savings and increased productivity, efficiency, and confidence.

Background and Drivers

For more than 150 years, Brown-Forman Corporation has enriched the experience of life by responsibly building fine quality beverage alcohol brands. Data from all Brown-Forman’s brands and global operations existed in many different sources, including Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects, SAP BW, Google Drive, homegrown “portal pages” and others. This complex reporting environment created three primary challenges for Brown-Forman:

Frustration and inefficiencies.

  • Employees often did not know which tool held the information they needed or if it was available at all.
  • Users were often uncertain about who to contact for help.
  • Requests for new reports commonly resulted in duplicates or slight variations of existing assets.

Lack of consistent reporting for executives.

  • Reports for each North American region were sent in different formats, hindering comprehensive analysis.

Brown-Forman was aware they needed to improve how they facilitate and manage analytics activities. They also understood the need to better leverage tools like Tableau to reduce expenses and address end user pain points.

Survey Findings:

  • Less than 20% of respondents were confident in their awareness of available reporting.
  • Only 30% were satisfied with their experience accessing business information.
  • Greater than 90% were open to changing the business information delivery mechanism.

The survey indicated users were willing to embrace change and desired a single place to access all their analytics assets.

Requirements for the Analytics Hub:

  • One starting place for reporting and analytics
  • Easy to use and aesthetically pleasing
  • Able to integrate with multiple technologies
  • Collaboration and feedback-enabled
  • Timely and accurate information

Brown-Forman evaluated ZenOptics and chose it to be their platform for unified analytics, fulfilling all their requirements.

The Journey to Establish One-Stop-Discovery and Access of Analytics

ZenOptics implementation was driven largely by Brown-Forman's Office of the CIO alongside the ZenOptics product support team. This team was responsible for the software implementation, assessing existing tools, and rationalizing the massive number of reports in the ecosystem.

The cleanup effort helped Brown-Forman launch their analytics hub with curated, clean content that would yield more effective search results and serve as a single source of trusted information.

Outcomes from ZenOptics:

  • Internal branding as “Onestop.”
  • Curated, high-quality, detailed analytics content.
  • Enhanced user experience of analytics with powerful search capabilities.
  • Automated analytical workflows.

Best Practices to Jumpstart Analytics Adoption:

  • Understand the problem through user surveys.
  • Gain commitment from business leadership to support BI strategy evolution.
  • Focus on process improvements for sustained value.

Users, such as Greg Wilson, noted that “with all my favorites and dashboards in Onestop I can get to them very quickly ... and bounce back and forth between them. So, it’s definitely a time saver for me.”

Conclusion

Brown-Forman’s commitment to improving user experience has led to:

  • Access and usage of reports increased by 27% year over year.
  • An increase of 25% in the number of users, showing expanding analytics adoption.
  • An estimated 30% reduction in reports by eliminating duplicates and combining several reports into one.

Brown-Forman continues to amplify the power of its analytics resources and its people through ZenOptics, realizing business efficiencies, time savings, improved productivity, and confident decision making based on trusted analytics.