From logistics to supply chains, marketing, sales operations and application development, data-driven decision-making is imperative for today’s businesses.

Formerly a traditionally run company, Federated Co-operatives Ltd. has embraced data’s transformative power to inform decisions on spending habits and customer trends for improved product recommendations and personalized offers, among others.

“We are investing in technologies to improve all of our processes, that is creating new and new sources of data [which aren’t] centrally located,” said Lennie Colborne (pictured), director of enterprise information management at Federated Co-operatives. “We are really here using the technology to remove silos between processes, make data available and help our business make decisions. We’ll go back to the old term in the nineties: ‘decisions support systems.’ That’s really what we’re using Teradata for today.”

Colborne spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight at Possible 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Federated Co-operatives’ journey from traditional operations to a data-driven approach. (* Disclosure below.)

Teradata’s role in the transformation

Based in Saskatchewan, Federated Co-operatives is a cooperative retail system serving over 2 million members who own portions of 160 local co-ops. It chose Teradata Corp. as its data platform due to a history of trust and success with the company, in addition to the steady slew of improvements that have been integrated into the platform over the years — particularly with ClearScape Analytics, according to Colborne.

“If you’ve worked with the platform for a long time, you have to continually educate yourself on what the new possibility is with the platform,” he explained. “ClearScape Analytics, running your own machine learning models or any of the new features that are coming, you have to start trying them. We’re very pleased that Teradata continues to add new features and ways to solve data problems.”

One of the most significant challenges in this data-driven transformation has been the cultural shift within organizations. Technology alone cannot drive change; there’s also a need for a cultural mindset that encourages decision-makers to use data as thoroughly as possible, Colborne added.

“You can buy the best technology, you can integrate it, you can organize it, you can prepare it, but it’s the people that make the decisions,” he noted. “And that’s one of the things I work hard with my team. We’re not here to collect data, we’re not here to organize data — we’re here to use data to drive action.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Possible 2023:

(* Disclosure: Teradata Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Teradata nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE