Tetra Pak wins inaugural Gartner Business Intelligence Excellence Award for Asia Pacific

Technology research and advisory firm Gartner today announced that food packaging giant Tetra Pak has won the 2009 Gartner Business Intelligence (BI) Excellence Award for Asia Pacific.  

The Gartner BI Excellence Awards attracted submissions from 20 organisations in six countries across the Asia Pacific region, representing industry sectors including financial services, government, education, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, utilities and retail.

Gartner’s BI research analysts evaluated the applicants and selected three finalists, Amcor Australasia, ICICI Bank and Tetra Pak, who presented their case studies to 200 delegates at the Gartner Business Intelligence and Information Management Summit in Sydney on Tuesday. Delegates then voted to select the award winner.

Speaking at Summit, Christopher Rowley, Tetra Pak’s Singapore-based director of customer management and corporate reporting systems, said that ensuring that the business, not the information technology (IT) department, had ownership of business intelligence and took responsibility for the outcomes was essential to success.

“We decided some time ago that there would be no more IT projects, only business projects,” said Mr. Rowley. “The first driver for our BI implementation was quite simply to measure and improve our business process performance. Secondly, like any business, we need the facts about our customers, products and suppliers, a single source of truth, to enable better forecasting.”

Tetra Pak is a global food packaging and processing company with 20,000 employees, 50 factories and sales operations in 150 markets. In 2008, Tetra Pak produced 141 billion packages worldwide.

Currently, 20 percent of its employees are registered users of the BI system, and more than 10 percent of employees are active users.  This figure is expected to reach 15 percent in 2009.

“We have not found any silver bullets,” said Mr. Rowley. “You need to have the right people in place to deliver the project and ensure quality and consistency. You need to ensure that the system has a fast response time and is easy to use so that people adopt it. And you need to ensure that the system will support new business information projects, for example, delivering useful information back to our customers.”

Ian Bertram, Gartner managing vice president and chair of the 2009 Gartner BI Summit, said the quality of the presentations from all three finalists was outstanding and demonstrated global best practices.

“This award program shows that successful BI can be done,” said Mr. Bertram. “Despite the obvious differences in scale, industry and business strategies, the approach of all three finalists was remarkably similar. BI must be driven by the business, not IT; it must present a single version of the truth; and it must be easy for end-users to adopt. The organisation must also be committed to change, often deep cultural change, for real improvements and benefits to be realised.”

For further information about the Gartner BI Excellence Awards for Asia Pacific, please visit: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=721607

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. Gartner serves 10,000 organisations, including chief information officers and other senior IT executives in corporations and government agencies, as well as technology companies and the investment community. The company consists of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 3,900 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 75 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.