BRANDON BEALS, DIRECTOR OF DATA & ANALYTICS, DOT FOODS

Data in the enterprise is growing faster than ever and more organizations are realizing the value in their data. Digital information has quickly risen to become one of the most valuable commodities in the world. Those who can collect, manage, and extract insights from it faster than peers are at the pinnacle of market disruption and competitive advantage. At Dot Foods, we pride ourselves on the innovative ways we leverage our data to maintain and extend our role as the largest food industry redistributor in North America.

While business cultures continue to adopt a data-driven mindset, new challenges are emerging in reaction. Data silos appear overnight, bringing with them new bridges and barriers to an integrated world view. Quality of data becomes a growing pain-point and consistency slips if not kept in check. Insights are becoming more available than ever but remain difficult to align at the strategic level.

INTERNET OF THINGS

Internets of Things (IoT) devices provide tactical solutions at an enterprise-level—automation meets data collection for physical objects.

 Dot Foods has embraced the IoT ocean in many different areas from warehousing to transportation. 

Our trailers are equipped with GPS and temperature sensors to help optimize our fleet logistics nationwide, ensuring that we are ready to meet the demand of the millions of individuals that rely on us daily. Moving products from point A to point B is not good enough.

We take food safety very seriously, which is why we monitor the temperature integrity of our trailers throughout their journey, giving insights that allow us to deliver only the safest and highest quality goods.

BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT & LOW CODE

Business Process Management (BPM) tools have helped organizations scale complex problems for decades. BPM is quickly fusing with low-code methodology, lifting the cost and time barriers to automation at scale. New processes not only help to unify data silos, but they also generate valuable information of their own. This rapid approach to problem-solving has to be carefully curated and shaped to conform to integration, quality, and security standards. Workflow applications have allowed us to streamline key business processes, ingesting more relevant data for insights along the way.

By coupling low-code solutions with embedded analytics, we’re reinventing the industry with improved inventory risk and shelf life management capabilities, putting actionable insights in front of decision makers when it matters the most. Our mission is to ensure the satisfaction of our customers by delivering products with the highest possible shelf life while at the same time reducing and preventing food waste by intelligently managing inventory.

FINDING VALUE IN A FOREST OF DATA

Embedded Analytics: Left unprocessed, unmanaged, and out of control, data can quickly become the bane of any organization's existence. Growing or wasted capital expenditures and years of failed initiatives are just the tip of the iceberg for bad data strategies. Embedded analytics is the capstone of Enterprise Information Management (EIM), leveraging all of the technologies and methodologies in the space to ensure success. Our embedded applications not only help our teams to make better decisions but also to automate decisions entirely—delivering to increase customer service expectations via inventory stocking decisions, transfers/positioning, and predicting expiration risk. Users can only be empowered to make better decisions by providing them with clean and presentable measurements of a process and its performance.

Dot Foods is transforming the redistribution industry by leveraging new and existing technologies to manage information and to gain analytical insights that drive business value. Our ability to provide innovative solutions and to continuously raise the bar is at the heart of our culture. As the industry continues to realize more value from data, businesses are changing their posture from a focus on collection to a hybrid that emphasizes collection and the deployment of technologies that generate new data streams. With proper management and handling, data can be cleansed and enriched to provide operational systems with the extra knowledge they need to operate more efficiently and more accurately. As day-to-day decisions become more reliant on advanced analytics, organizations are looking for new and improved ways to automate decisions through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.