Alltech is a global agriculture company headquartered in Nicholasville, Kentucky, committed to delivering sustainable nutritional solutions that advance the health and performance of animals and plants. Its diverse portfolio of nutritional products and analytical tools and services help agri-food producers to enhance profitability and lower their impact on the environment. Alltech’s 5,000 team members support more than 40,000 customers in more than 140 countries. To align its business processes with its global sustainability goals, Alltech continually looks for ways to be more efficient.
Over the past ten years, more than 20 companies around the world have joined the Alltech family. These strategic acquisitions resulted in exciting new services and technologies to support the agri-food sector globally. However, these businesses leveraged different systems and data platforms, which challenged the company’s ability to get a comprehensive look at its data.
“Our team travels a lot and our travel spend is significant. The executive team wanted to bring together all the data sources that hold the travel and spend details and asked us to develop a solution that would answer these questions: Which companies, departments, and individuals are traveling? Where are they traveling? What was the purpose of that travel and whether the travel resulted in a sales opportunity?” said Connie Thompson, Global Director of International Technology, Data, Analytics, and Reporting at Alltech.
With multiple systems in place, the company needed a single source of truth to ensure effective decision-making. Alltech needed to consolidate the data in one platform to manage global travel expenditures effectively. Alltech required a solution with cost-efficiency, ease of procurement, and the ability to handle all necessary solutions and integrations.
Finding the right partner
Sonata, a leading modernization engineering company, services multiple industries including the agritech and manufacturing sectors. It brings together industry expertise, platform technology excellence, design innovation, and strategic engagement models to deliver sustained value to its customers. It partners with Fortune 500 clients to help them reimagine their business processes as part of modernization programs.
The company has a track record of 38 years in the IT industry. It drives innovation and empowers enterprises on a global scale. Sonata also has a 30+ year relationship with Microsoft which leverages expertise across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure to drive digital transformation for 400+ global clients.
The engineering company's joint go-to-market execution, catalyst-led sales, and industry solutions underscore its success. As one of the first Microsoft Fabric launch partners, its early adoption of this solution highlights its commitment to evolving customer landscapes. Sonata has also been named Technology Partner of the Year for Business Applications and is the winner of the 2020 Microsoft Eagle Award.
Sonata set out to create a data modernization platform that could analyze data in one place.
Building the right platform
Since Alltech was already harnessing the power of a multicloud approach along with SAP Concur and Dynamics 365 Ecosystem, Sonata partnered with Microsoft. “Typically, the problems that a lot of our customers face are because of not having a well-connected data ecosystem. [And] for this pilot, we took a use case [which had] to do with expense management and expense prioritization. Those expenses were not in one centralized repository for the stakeholders to be able to go review the reasons and prioritize them,” said Mahesh Hegde, Microsoft Fabric Competency Head at Sonata.
The company helped its customer, Alltech, bring all its travel spend data under one umbrella through its data modernization offering. Sonata leveraged Microsoft Fabric to develop its core offerings which encompass cloud modernization, data modernization solutions, and a responsible-first AI platform, Harmoni.AI.
Because Sonata is an early adopter of Microsoft Fabric, its customers get access to new features.
Alltech used these capabilities to further its pilot project that analyzed travel spending.
"In our pilot project, we leveraged Microsoft Fabric by bringing data from multiple ERP systems, our expense management system, and our travel system into a single location,” said Thompson. “Our analysis and visualizations were built using Visual Query and Power BI. The diversity of tools in Microsoft Fabric allows us to choose the right tool for the job. OneLake allows data consolidation from a variety of data sources. Alltech received top-notch technical and best practice support from both Microsoft and Sonata," said Thompson
Microsoft Azure also played a key role in the Alltech pilot program. Alltech quickly discovered that its data was different across the business. So, the company started its master data management journey. “The unified platform enables business user self-service and removes the roadblock of requiring IT development to explore the data and create ad-hoc analytics. Business users who set strategy or make operational decisions are empowered to glean insights from the data to answer business questions,” said Thompson.
Moving with data
Enterprises will have to continuously modernize themselves and leverage AI to continue to harness the power of data.
Alltech, with the help of Sonata and Microsoft, aims to be a leader in data modernization and responsible AI adoption.
“With Alltech's expertise in agriculture and Microsoft's investment in artificial intelligence and other technologies, these two companies are perfectly positioned to help the agri-food industry embrace and implement technologies to achieve the world’s nutrition and sustainability goals,” said Thompson.
“With Alltech's expertise in agriculture and Microsoft's investment in artificial intelligence and other technologies, these two companies are perfectly positioned to help the agri-food industry embrace and implement technologies to achieve the world’s nutrition and sustainability goals.”
Connie Thompson, Global Director of International Technology, Data, Analytics, and Reporting, Alltech
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