Hostess, known for its beloved snacks, including the legendary Twinkies, is one of America’s largest bakery chains. However, it also operates a significant supply chain and distribution network to deliver its staple foods to every corner of the country. However, running a sophisticated supply chain creates various challenges. Those include having to manage content and quantity of outgoing orders in real time or making sure orders are ready for pick up at the right time. All while dealing with further obstacles, such as weather delays for trucks or rest times for truck drivers.
To help with this complexity, Hostess is leveraging a data fabric to help manage large amounts of data and provide real-time insights into supply chain processes. By deploying a data fabric, Hostess has been able to significantly streamline its warehouse operations, reducing wait times and error rates. In today’s series, we dive into how Hostess is leveraging a data fabric architecture to deliver real-time actionable data insights to drive decision-making and realize significant cost savings.
Data Fabric for Real-time Insights
Data fabrics play an important part in delivering real-time insights. They do so by enabling organizations to seamlessly integrate and analyze data from various sources in a unified and timely manner. By connecting disparate data sources and eliminating silos via data virtualization, organizations can derive insights from data continuously.
A data fabric offers a consolidated view of data across the organization that helps in supporting real-time analytics. With a unified data fabric, organizations can create a virtual layer that abstracts the complexity of underlying data sources, allowing for efficient and rapid querying, analysis, and reporting on diverse datasets.
Real-time analytics capabilities enable organizations to gain immediate insights into business performance, customer behavior, and operational efficiency – empowering them to make informed decisions with minimal latency. Data fabrics lay the foundation for organizations to harness the power of real-time insights, driving agility and responsiveness in decision-making processes.
Optimizing Warehouse Process in Real Time at Hostess
Despite partially transitioning to cloud-based systems, Hostess still was operating with some on-premise data sources. On top of that, a multitude of data sources made it difficult to see and query data from a single access point. By implementing Promethium’s data fabric, Hostess was able to overcome its data challenges without needing to expand its IT team or using expensive external integration vendors; all while significantly increasing its warehouse efficiency.
Thanks to the new data fabric architecture, Hostess is able to track the movement of all goods from one end of the warehouse to the other, providing a real-time look at how quickly products are being moved and shipped. Sourcing data from various source systems in real-time has been pivotal to enable this step change. The data fabric enables increasing shipment accuracy and decreasing product waste, allowing for closer tracking that the right products are shipped to the customer in the right quantity.
Explore our other use cases to see how a data fabric may help your company gain real-time insights that enable operational efficiencies at scale.
References
– Matthew Gideon, “How a Five-Year-Old Company Helped 100-Year-Old Hostess Revolutionize Its Warehousing and Data Processes,” SupplyChainBrain, August 29, 2023.
– Mason Hooten, “A Good Read: Promethium’s Data Fabric Solution Revolutionizes Hostess Warehousing and Data Management,” Promethium Blog, September 8, 2023.
