Kepak becomes a future-ready organization with Microsoft Fabric

A rich legacy of craft foods across Europe

Kepak Group is a family-owned innovative food company with a rich heritage of over 50 years of meat craft. From the establishment of a butcher shop in Dublin in 1966, Kepak has grown significantly and today the Group has a turnover of €1.75bn and employs over 4,500 people. Kepak operates 13 manufacturing facilities throughout Ireland and the UK with a global sales reach. Kepak Group markets a broad range of fresh value-added meat products serving the foodservice and retail markets with leading brands like Rustlers, Big Al's, Crafty Chef, and John Stone.

Not your average manufacturing process

Any food production company must manage a complex supply chain, with touchpoints ranging from farming and butchering to preparation, retail packing, and shipping. The meat industry, in particular, has even more unique challenges. Unlike typical production or manufacturing lines, the assembly process for meat is a more selective process. “Depending on how you select and process cuts of meat, you can lose money if it's not cut the right way or devalue the remainder of the cut if you portion it in leaner ways,” says Sinead Nolan, Group Data Architect at Kepak. Getting the right cuts of meat to the right customers can be difficult, even with the best analytics tools.

The primary processing division at Kepak had a massive supply chain operation with multiple manufacturing execution systems (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The division cleaned its data using a data warehouse and then loaded that data into spreadsheets, which led to data redundancies and lacked the necessary insights for a multi-billion-pound business.  

Kepak was also in the process of rolling out Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its ERP system and needed an analytics solution that could seamlessly integrate. “Although it worked, our previous solution was limited. We wanted something  sustainable, with integrated analytical capabilities and intuitive capabilities,” says Nolan. Kepak wanted a unified solution that could consolidate its silos, streamline the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process for quicker data access, and provide a single trustworthy source for data validation and governance. A longtime customer of Microsoft, Kepak chose Microsoft Fabric as its new analytics solution to lead the company into the future and work alongside Dynamics 365.

One version of truth

Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that delivers everything from data movement and data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. Fabric connects to multiple data sources within organizations, whether that’s on-premises SQL servers, Azure SQL servers, SharePoint, Excel, Power Apps, or Microsoft Dynamics 365. Kepak worked with its implementation partner, Slalom Consulting, to get Fabric up and running within two months. “Microsoft Fabric offers us greater benefits than ever before. We’re thrilled about its comprehensive analytics capabilities and OneLake for data — all of which will contribute to our agile, future-ready strategy,” says Nolan.

Though Kepak is early in its Fabric implementation, running it mostly in testing environments, the company is already seeing benefits when it comes to integration, cleansing, and standardizing data formats. Prior to using Fabric, Kepak would duplicate and manually clean data, now Fabric does it automatically. Using OneLake, Fabric connects to Dynamics 365 to access, analyze, and clean data while removing redundancies.

“Because the data sources are managed in a unified way and in same format, it makes it easier to consolidate and transform,” says Nolan. A single source of company data in OneLake allows multiple teams to access one version of cleansed data for reusability without the need for duplication. When Kepak fully deploys Dynamics 365, Microsoft Fabric will enable the company to enhance its finance and operations data by integrating it with other business-critical information. This integration will facilitate better analysis of its key performance indicators. “Everyone is singing off of one hymn sheet,” says Nolan. Kepak also anticipates that having a unified data source alongside a unified data governance solution with Microsoft Purview, will create a trustworthy data environment.

Once Kepak fully implements Fabric across company, Nolan expects that business users will use it with Power BI as a central tool for business reporting and insights. Additionally, nearly all its financial information will be on Dynamics 365 and accessible through Fabric.

A future-ready organization

“Kepak has received huge support from Microsoft Ireland and our partners at Slalom,” says Nolan. “The direct contact and collaborative nature of the calls ensured we had a working solution implemented in the short eight-week period.” Alongside the Fabric implementation, Kepak has upskilled its small internal data team to take advantage of the new Fabric opportunities. Nolan adds, “I see us capitalizing on so much more that Fabric has to give to us.” Kepak looks forward to using Fabric to connect its data sources, gain more insights, and operate more efficiently across all touchpoints, so Kepak can continue to provide high-quality food products to people everywhere.

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