IFCO Systems: From 1,000+ Excel sheets to automated efforts

Forecasting key financial metrics for the company is just one of the many IFCO’s service-oriented business model across 50 countries requires a great deal of logistics knowledge, as each customer’s supply chain is serviced differently. As such, they needed a solution that could be integrated and serve multiple departments and regions for a consistent data and reporting structure.

IFCO has a worldwide pool of more than 314 million Reusable Plastic Containers (RPCs), which are used annually for over 1.7 billion fresh food deliveries from producers to retailers. Because IFCO was dealing with such large data volumes, data collection in their previous solution was a nightmare. Before Jedox, IFCO handled data collection with a four-digit (!) number of Excel sheets. This process significantly strained the teams’ time, and data quality suffered.

Self-service capabilities were key to the team, as they wanted a way to produce new analyses quickly and easily. Additionally, IFCO needed a solution that wouldn’t require a heavy lift from an external consulting resource to help implement. After evaluating solutions, Jedox was the solution of choice because it enables IFCO to utilize its desired self-service approach to system support. The team started strong with Jedox, implementing the solution in just a few days.

The IFCO team has developed several applications for individual departments and regions integrated with consistent data and reporting structures. The daily updated Transport Freight Report, which supports various detailed analyses, is one of the most important control instruments today. In addition, the consolidation with SAP in Jedox was replicated for the central finance department. By drill-down in Jedox, the origin of the consolidated figures can now be traced down to the individual SAP accounts.

A contract management module was also created with Jedox for around 50 users in the USA in just under five months. The module helps account managers plan upcoming projects, supports contract creation through an integrated release workflow, and provides an overview of the status of all contracts. The visualized reports make the need for action with expiring contracts immediately visible so that key account managers can plan customer meetings more strategically. The system-controlled approval workflow replaces the previous e-mail traffic in contract processing, and new contracts are generated directly from Jedox. The most significant benefit, however, is the initial data collection, which was previously handled with a four-digit number of Excel sheets. Now, account managers enter their upcoming customer projects directly into Jedox via the web, where all data is immediately available centrally and aggregated in a single source of truth. The powerful CPM and BI platform saves considerable costs and time and ensures significantly higher data quality by avoiding transmission errors.