ACH Food scours out its data pantry

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August 3, 2008 (Computerworld) Data cleansing is a dirty, thankless job. But Donnie Steward, CIO at ACH Food Companies Inc., knew he had to do it in order to bring the Memphis company's IT systems from the 1980s into 2008.

"We had to account for 30 years of sins in terms of not maintaining our data," Steward said.

Founded in the early 1900s, ACH was simply a regional restaurant and wholesale supplier for most of its existence.

"If you've eaten at McDonald's, you've tried our Frymax" oil, Steward said.

Starting in the mid-1980s, ACH embarked on a growth strategy. It bought more than a dozen companies and itself changed owners multiple times.

By 2004, ACH was a billion-dollar subsidiary of British giant Associated British Foods PLC, with well-known consumer brands such as Mazola corn oil, Argo corn starch, Durkee spices, French's mustard and Henri's salad dressing in its "pantry." But it was still relying on a complicated, fragile web of almost 60 legacy IT systems.

For instance, ACH's core order control system was a homegrown one, built in the 1980s using the now-esoteric RPG programming language. It ran on an old IBM AS/400 minicomputer.

"When I joined, I used to tease everybody that the ERP around here was Microsoft Excel. Everybody laughed, but there was a lot of truth to that statement," Steward said. "They had a couple of Microsoft Access database apps, which in reality only allowed them to put in a larger amount of records. And there was no such thing as a business analyst at ACH."

And with siloed and ancient systems, ACH's developers could only "kludge together how to price a consumer order and a commercial order, which took a lot of manual labor and work-arounds," he said. It was all "very painful, much more than management had anticipated."

A former CIO at Del Monte Fresh and Servicemaster Co., Steward was hired as a consultant by ACH to write a strategic plan for integrating and modernizing ACH's systems, which management was finally resolving itself to do. Steward was quickly hired as CIO to carry out the plan.

One of the first steps ACH took under Steward was to create a proper data warehouse. It used Informatica Corp.'s PowerCenter tool to extract, transfer and load the data from the various legacy systems.

This allowed ACH for the first time to get accurate data mining results, Steward said.

"Historically, it was very difficult to get one version of the truth. You'd run a batch routine 10 minutes later and get different numbers," Steward said.

The next step was for ACH to consolidate its various ERP and CRM systems, including J.D. Edwards, PRMS, PKMS and others, for a single ERP system. It chose a SAP AG system a year ago.