Manufacturers beware: Your customers are deploying information technology that will help them take more control in business relationships with you. That’s certainly the case in the United Kingdom’s food processing industry, where distributor Bako UK recently deployed “dashboard” business intelligence technology from British ERP vendor Solarsoft to help it keep better track of volume discounts that suppliers such as Coca Cola, Pepsico’s Walker Crisps division, or Wrights Pies might owe the company.

“I think they’ll be surprised at how much we suddenly know about our purchasing,” says David Ferguson, IT services manager for Bako, the roughly £120 million, privately held, Preston, England-based company that supplies Britain’s bakeries and sandwich shops with everything from yeast, to frozen foods, to steak-and-kidney pies and Christmas pudding.

Disparate ERP and database systems across Bako’s six regions have long hampered its purchasing managers’ ability to access up-to-the minute information that would tell them, for instance, how many Cornish pasties, sausage rolls, or Victoria sponge cakes they have purchased over the last year from a particular supplier. Lack of such purchasing knowledge has weakened Bako’s clout in purchasing negotiations and undermined its ability to claim volume discounts that it might have already earned.

“We were relying on them to tell us,” Ferguson says. “We’re able to do our own calculations now.”

Bako’s March deployment of Chertsey, England-based Solarsoft’s technology — called Dashboard — lets the company collect information from across the regions and puts it all into one common, easy-to-read format.

Bako paid £30,000 and is hoping for a one-year return on the investment. The savings will come not only from claiming discounts, but also, according to Ferguson, from myriad other improvements. For instance, Dashboard will free two employees who have committed full-time to monitoring and reporting on purchasing.

Dashboard also helps the company monitor its own buying trends, to see when it buys a particular product and how much it bought, and to keep track of inflation and other factors. It evaluates supplier performance, noting things like on-time or late deliveries. A BI tool from Lund, Sweden-based QlikTech International lives under the hood, allowing efficient retrieval by category. The BI software feeds the Dashboard user interface.  Dashboard also reaches into sales department records, giving executives a purchase-to-sale view of how individual products and suppliers are performing.

One internal user is Eifion Owen, Bako’s Durham-based purchasing manager for the company’s Northern and Scottish divisions. He recalls that information access was previously so tedious that he rarely bothered to check records other than at contract renewal time or when he was planning the next year’s purchases.

“I used to have to go to a mainframe, look at a particular supplier, and then get the calculator out. I’d use it only if it was urgent,” says Owen, who now regularly checks either purchasing or sales data every day. Dashboard, he says, “has taken a manual system and given us the ability to pull data at the flick of a switch. I can find out what’s been going on in the last few months within seconds.”

Not only can Owen arm himself at negotiation time, but also, by tapping into the sales information, he can tell whether a supplier’s product is selling and then suggest changes to the supplier. Dashboard lets him search quickly by supplier name, product type, or other category.

“Let’s say we contract for currants. In the past, I’d have to work out how many currants we’ve sold. Now I can just put “currants” on it [Dashboard], and it will tell me everything,” Owen says. He can also weigh one currant supplier’s performance against another’s.

Like any new technology, Dashboard didn’t come without teething pains. Bako started trialing it in August 2007, about eight months before turning it live. Adjustments included fine-tuning business practices: The company had to start treating all items as “stock” items. Before, purchasing managers did not enter certain items, such as cake mixes or bread mixes, Owen says.

Ironically, Bako UK, itself, was set up some 14 years ago to establish purchasing power among various regional, unrelated distributors. But independence among the regions has undermined that. “The setup of the computer systems was never a synchronized process,” Ferguson says.  “We all use different supplier codes, different supplier descriptions, different product codes, and different product descriptions,” says Ferguson, who runs IT for Bako’s Northern and Scottish divisions as well as for central operations. “So cross-referencing has been a nightmare.”

Ferguson hopes that Dashboard marks the end of years of frustration in which the company has attempted to solve its information coordination problem several times using more complicated and expensive solutions.

For instance, eight years ago it tried to implement a common ERP system across its six regions, each of which has significant autonomy. Three of the regions cooperated, deploying Solarsoft’s Concerto ERP. The others resisted. “They had already spent a large amount on tailoring their own systems,” Ferguson says. That left Bako with a hodgepodge. Three regions now use the Concerto ERP; one uses an Infor product, and two others use custom-built ERP systems. All use their own custom databases.

The company subsequently tried other remedies. Those included evaluating a Microsoft Access database across the six regions, but Bako determined about four years ago that Access wouldn’t have been able to deliver daily updates. “Because of the time it would take to run a query, it wasn’t an option,” Ferguson recalls. “It wasn’t very dynamic.” The company later considered another dashboard product, called Vector, but concluded it was too costly at roughly £100,000. Bako started looking into Solarsoft’s Dashboard in early 2006, when Solarsoft — then called XKO — suggested it during a regular sales meeting regarding Bako’s ongoing use of Concerto.

Solarsoft Group Product Director Steven Hargreaves says, “ERP systems do a fantastic job of running the business, but the older systems don’t do a good job of improving the business. Dashboard is all about giving executives clarity and transparency to see what’s really going on in the business, to present information in a way that’s flexible and dynamic.”

With distributors sharpening their tools, manufacturers will be under pressure themselves to counter with technology that tracks distributors’ sales and performance. They, too, could turn to Dashboard — an arms dealer to both sides of the value chain battle.