Global seafood leader Cooke Aquaculture has a holistic “egg to plate” business model that coordinates all aspects of seafood production, from feeding and breeding to farming, packaging, and logistics.
Now Cooke is applying a similar full-lifecycle framework to unify and streamline its sprawling IT systems and its enterprise data, which for years was undercultivated and underutilized for delivering business value.
“We’re on a voyage to simplify our application portfolio, automate a lot of manual processes, and drive better insights from the data we’re collecting,” says Dr. Scott Underwood, senior manager of data services at Cooke, headquartered in New Brunswick in eastern Canada.
The need was acute. Founded in 1985 with a single marine cage of 5,000 salmon, Cooke has made more than 100 acquisitions over the years to become a multibillion-dollar supplier of salmon, sea bass, shrimp, scallops, and oysters. It’s a complex business selling in 70 countries with a dozen brands, 100 subsidiaries, and 9,400 employees.
Modernizing a Fragmented IT Environment
Those acquisitions fueled growth and market expansion, but also left Cooke with hundreds of disparate applications, as noted in our Cooke customer success story. Some systems were loosely connected with customized point-to-point integrations devised years ago. Others weren’t integrated at all.
“It was an extremely fragmented, complicated, and customized environment,” Underwood says. “We needed an integration platform that was going to allow us to integrate with a really broad range of applications and databases. That’s what led us to Boomi.”
Cooke selected Boomi in 2019 over competing solutions in part because of multiple capabilities in the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, including master data management, API management, and electronic data interchange (EDI).
“A full portfolio under one umbrella was definitely part of the decision to go with Boomi,” Underwood explains. “Having one platform working together was really important to us.”
Cooke has made AtomSphere its de facto integration platform, and is using it to replace a “spaghetti mess” of hundreds of connections devised with various tools and techniques over the year.
To enhance business visibility with analytics, Cooke has aligned the Boomi AtomSphere Platform with the Snowflake Data Cloud, benefiting from a Boomi-Snowflake alliance that helps companies gain real-time data insights.
Streamlining Customer Relationships
Cooke Aquaculture is using the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to improve customer relationships in several ways – with master data management to achieve a 360-degree customer view, with streamlined EDI transactions, and with analytics in its Snowflake data warehouse.
In the past, it was difficult for Cooke to know if the same customer had purchased products from several different Cooke brands because those brands might be using different enterprise resource planning (ERP) and sales order applications. Similarly, customers faced needless complexity in interacting with multiple Cooke brands.
Now, Cooke is rationalizing its applications, and using Boomi Master Data Hub to generate unified, accurate customer information across systems — “golden records” that provide a single source of customer truth.
“A master data management strategy using Boomi is critical for us to be able to drive better value for our customers,” Underwood says. “It’s making it easier for customers to interact and order with us. Instead of ordering from different companies, we’re able to point the customer to fewer points of contact.”
Improving Sales Insights and Results
A 360-degree customer view also gives Cooke sales reps better insights to understand and serve customers, as well as support cross-sell opportunities, Underwood notes.
“We’re already seeing efficiency gains in sales because we’re able to sell to customers more easily,” Underwood says. “We’ve been able to reduce the complexity and number of sales reps interacting with customers to make it easier for all parties.”
In addition, Cooke is using Boomi B2B/EDI Management to streamline transactions for customers.
“We’re just starting on rolling out EDI solutions for our customers with Boomi,” Underwood says. “We’ve got a very complicated EDI partner portfolio, and we’re looking at reducing that and optimizing it all with Boomi.”
Customer and sales analytics are supported by Snowflake’s platform, which replaces a legacy on-premises Microsoft SQL Server system. Cooke is using Boomi’s prebuilt Snowflake connector to move data into Snowflake from sales order and ERP systems, with marketing application and social media sources on the roadmap.
“Our value from Boomi and Snowflake is enhanced because their strong partnership benefits everyone involved — we’re all able to collaborate and drive forward better solutions for our business users and customers,” says Underwood.
Logistics Optimization Reduces Cost and Carbon Footprint
Boomi and Snowflake also support a logistics optimization initiative aimed at more efficient truck routing and reduced truck idle time, fuel consumption, cost, and carbon footprint.
The Boomi AtomSphere Platform is moving data from a BluJay trucking management application and a KeepTruckin GPS tracking system into Snowflake’s Data Cloud, where analysts can slice and dice information. Initially rolled out for New Brunswick and the northeastern U.S., Cooke intends to extend the system across locations in North America, Latin America, and Europe.
“With Boomi and Snowflake, our analysts have the ability to drill into their data, combine it in ways not previously possible, and apply data science so we can optimize logistics and be a better global citizen in carbon footprint reduction,” Underwood says.
At the same time, Cooke is using Boomi to replace custom integrations among applications that drive logistics, including BluJay, KeepTruckin, a NorthScope sales order system, and a Coolearth labeling system.
Standardizing Integration Improves Business Agility
By standardizing integrations in logistics and other areas on the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, Cooke Aquaculture is eliminating reliance on specialized developer skills, reducing its legacy technical debt, and improving business agility.
The IT team can configure, test, and deploy integrations far more quickly with Boomi, compared to a months-long custom coding ordeal. That frees the IT team to focus on innovation and fulfilling business requests to heighten insights and operational efficiency.
“It puts a huge burden on IT resources to maintain integrations built 15 years ago by someone who’s left the company, and there’s no ability to scale or change without fear of something breaking,” Underwood says. “Standardizing integration with Boomi makes it easy to keep resources trained on the same platform and reduces our complexity, our costs, and our stress.”
To learn more about how Cooke Aquaculture transformed its business with Boomi and Snowflake, read the case study!