VersaCold Uses iTM1 to Integrate Historical Data

VersaCold is a publicly traded, integrated distribution and warehousing company. It is now the largest cold storage company in Canada with seven hundred and fifty employees working at 30 locations in Canada and the United States. When Gord Cook became Corporate Controller, VersaCold had just acquired a new company. The mainframes systems of the two companies were not integrated and were being replaced and there was an immediate need for more timely and insightful management information. Cook chose iTM1's real-time OLAP technology as the basis for a new system.

"What this [iTM1] does is enable us to suck information off the mainframes, and look at it in a variety of different ways," Cook said. "Previously, this was very difficult. For instance, aggregates of materials a certain way. Sales and volumes of particular products across the entire system as opposed to one facility."

The biggest challenge, according to Group West consultant Jim Stephenson, was making sense of related data from three different sources. One system had customer and commodity data, another had commodity, but no customer information. The general ledger had revenues and expenses, but no commodity or customer detail. There were bits and pieces from each, and no place to do meaningful reporting. Plus they were not set up to do budget versus actual reporting in any detail.

"Once we moved the data into iTM1, we could do more matching," Stephenson said. "They had a situation where they needed to bring historical data from two different companies during the transition, and they needed to maintain an on-going, consistent flow of reports while phasing out the old and bring in the new. It's a case where the ability of iTM1 to integrate data from a variety of sources is being put to the test and making a major contribution."