Sardinia's main dairy company uses jAPS Entando and Pentaho to help farmers master their businesses
July 20, 2011, Sardinia, Italy — Read this case study in Italian: Pentaho BI e 3A latte Arborea CO-OP: come la BI aiuta a ridurre l'esposizione alla volatilità dei prezzi del latte
Pentaho, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that the Sardinian co-operative 3A Latte Arborea is now live with Pentaho Business Intelligence (BI) combined with the open source portal jAPS Entando, which are helping its farmers be more competitive and less vulnerable to the global milk price volatility that affects farmers worldwide.
The 3A Latte Arborea collects 90 percent of all Sardinian cow milk from its 286 farmers, who produce more than 200 million liters of milk annually. Globalization over the decades has resulted in today's farmers being strongly affected by milk price volatility. This is not likely to change, but with access to BI applications, dairies have the chance to manage better operational processes and costs. 3A Latte Arborea initiated a project together with APA (Association for cattle breeding and genetic improvement) and the University of Sassari to develop one of Italy's first Business Intelligence systems for a dairy chain to effectively support the farmers in mastering their businesses. The co-operative turned to its web agency J-Service to support them in finding an affordable BI solution that was easy enough to use by farmers with very little business, IT and even computer experience.
J-Service involved its partner jAPS Entando, an open source portal and content management system that allows also people with little IT experience to easily access and interact with content. jAPS Entando analyzed many different BI tools before selecting the Pentaho Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition as it is a fully integrated BI platform built on open standards that enabled a true integration with jAPS Entando. Mainly used are the Pentaho Data Integration for Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) capabilities and the Pentaho Reporting for easily accessing, formatting, and distributing information to the portal. J-service designed the integration and customized the portal to meet the special requirements of 3A Latte Arborea´s farmers. The University of Sassari helped to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) for the reporting.
Since August 2010, 88 farmers have been trained and are using the BI system. Each farmer can now access reports via a personalized web portal to discover in real-time how they are performing against KPIs. This is giving the farmers valuable insight on what factors mostly affect production costs across the dairy chain, flagging critical issues such as feeding costs or shortage of soil and improve overall planning capabilities to raise output and lower costs.
The web portal's user interface was kept simple and intuitive, bearing in mind that most of the farmers had little practical computer knowledge. The administrator and business users in the dairy chain can use the Pentaho Report Designer to quickly and easily customize and print reports in pdf.
Francesco Casula, General Manager of 3A Latte Arborea commented: "Getting information from across the whole dairy chain helped 3A Latte Arborea to gather valuable insight on which factors affect production costs the most, identify threats on the horizon such as feeding cost increases or soil shortages, allowing us to to take remedial action before they have a chance to escalate."
Davy Nys, Regional Director EMEA for Pentaho, said: "It is very gratifying to see open source business intelligence and content management lowering the barriers to entry for low-margin industries like dairy farming, which need it very urgently. The Sardinian farmers are now armed with the insight and understanding they need to make more profitable business decisions in an increasingly volatile global economy."
Learn more. Read the full case study.
About 3A Latte Arborea
3A Latte Arborea is Sardinia's leading dairy and food producer. The co-operative collects 90 percent of all Sardinian cow milk from its 286 farmers, who produce more than 200 million liters of milk annually. www.lattearborea.com
About jAPS Entando
Tzente, which maintains the jAPS 2.0 entando project, is a software company founded on the Open Source business model. It was born in "Era 2.0" with the objective of creating a sustainable ecosystem of organizations that collaborate, share and participate in IT projects. Tzente aims to evolve, manage and promote the jAPS 2.0 entando project and provide partners with a certified and supported Open Source software platform (jAPS 2.0 Entando Certified Edition) with consulting and support services for design, development, marketing, business development and sales. http://www.japsportal.com/
About Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company
Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company, is a leading data integration and business analytics company with an enterprise-class, open source-based platform for diverse big data deployments. Pentaho’s unified data integration and analytics platform is comprehensive, completely embeddable and delivers governed data to power any analytics in any environment. Pentaho’s mission is to help organizations across multiple industries harness the value from all their data, including big data and IoT, enabling them to find new revenue streams, operate more efficiently, deliver outstanding service and minimize risk. Pentaho has over 15,000 product deployments and 1,500 commercial customers today including ABN-AMRO Clearing, BT, EMC, NASDAQ and Sears Holdings Corporation. For more information visit www.pentaho.com.
