Customer Story

PE-Backed Distributor Accelerates Growth and AI with Databricks

What we did

  • Unified four disparate ERP environments into a centralized Databricks data platform.
  • Automated reporting and standardized business metrics to give teams trusted, cross-organizational visibility.
  • Built a scalable foundation for growth and AI, including advanced pricing optimization.

Industry

  • Food & Bev

Tech Stack

  • Azure
  • ·
  • Databricks
  • ·
  • Power BI

Databricks Solution Components

  • Unity Catalog (including Attribute-Based Access Control)
  • Delta Lake/Delta Tables
  • Databricks SQL Warehouses

1,000 hours

of manual reporting eliminated.

15 hours/week saved

on data gathering and reporting.

Enterprise access

to trusted, daily business insights.

The Problem

Formed through the 2024 merger of three Chicago-area entities, Whetstone Distribution, a midsized Midwest meat distribution and processing company, had much to gain by unlocking the plethora of business intelligence generated by its growing market presence. Standing in the way, however, was a formidable obstacle: four disparate instances of the same enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. To counter this, the combined entity needed to integrate data to enable decision makers to conduct detailed cross-organizational analysis necessary to optimize its business operations and unlock growth. 

As a result, Whetstone required a modern data platform to unify its disparate systems to not only drive self-service data analytics but to establish a solid foundation for future Al initiatives.  

The Solution

Since it lacked in-house data analytics expertise, Whetstone turned to Analytics8 for assistance. We put together a data migration, modernization, and implementation strategy to help the company capitalize on its private-equity-financed growth-through-acquisition plan.

What we did: 

  • Designed and implemented a modern Databricks’ data warehouse on Microsoft Azure-hosted environment to meet current data and analytics needs while also establishing a foundation for Al and advanced analytics. 
  • Developed an AI pricing model that autonomously optimizes pricing decisions based on inventory, cost, and market dynamics.  
  • Unified divergent Canopy ERP data into a single semantic model, enabling enterprise-wide Microsoft Power BI reporting. 
  • Built secure ingestion pipelines for payroll, budgets, commodity, and loT data  
  • Introduced a governance framework (Databricks’ Unity Catalog) to ensure trust, standardization, and scalability. 
  • Replaced spreadsheets with automated reporting, providing real-time visibility into sales, operations, and inventory data across entities.  
  • Used the semantic model within PowerBI to democratize data access and provide all decision makers with the ability to conduct daily analyses – something previously only provided to a select group of business leaders. 

Having access to weekly KPIs absolutely transformed our business. It saves us so much time weekly.

Beth LaBossiere, Chief Transformation Officer at Whetstone

The Results

The time savings and outcomes have been game changing.

Previously, Whetstone decision makers spent a combined 15 hours each week locating data across four ERP systems and building custom reports.

The new centralized approach saves Whetstone approximately 1000-man-hours by eliminating the manual labor previously required to create Excel-based reports and by providing a single source of truth through their new Databricks data warehouse. 

“Having access to weekly KPIs absolutely transformed our business,” said Beth LaBossiere, Whetstone’s Chief Transformation Officer. “It saves us so much time weekly.” 

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