How SunOpta Increased Margins And Reduced Inventory Exposure

SunOpta Inc. is a leader in the natural and organic foods and natural health products markets. The Company has three business units: the SunOpta Food Group, which specializes in sourcing, processing and distribution of natural and organic food products Opta Minerals Inc. (TSX:OPM) (66.4 % owned by SunOpta Inc.), a producer, distributor, and recycler of environmentally friendly industrial materials; and SunOpta BioProcess Inc., which engineers and markets proprietary steam explosion technology systems for the bio-fuel, pulp and food processing industries.

Through a combination of internal growth and acquisitions, SunOpta quickly grew to become a leader in sourcing, processing and distributing food products. As each acquired company was assimilated into one of the company’s divisions, the already difficult process of reporting and data analysis became even more challenging.

Not only was SunOpta lacking overall visibility into companywide sales, finance and operations, but the company also could not quickly integrate data from newly acquired – or even existing – business units with differing enterprise software systems for shareholder reporting and strategic planning purposes.

SunOpta discovered QlikView after its acquisition of Tradin Organic Agriculture B.V., which was successfully using QlikView for visibility and analysis of all enterprise data stored in Microsoft Axapta. SunOpta’s IT and executive teams were immediately impressed by QlikView’s ability to quickly consolidate data from multiple sources for easy-to-use visual analysis. SunOpta enlisted the help of QlikTech partner Allegro BI and set forth to solve its reporting challenges with QlikView.