The Problem
The Brown Forman Research and Development group within Global Production had a set of related problems. Repeated statistical requests were being asked that were very similar. Reports were being made at regular intervals that required hours of work to reproduce with traditional tools. Historical research and results were often hard to piece together from the resulting report and disconnected data sources. All of these tasks usually required the cleaning and combination of disparate data sources, which was time consuming work. Groups inside and outside of production facilities needed better and readily available analyses of their data to help guide their work. At the same time in finance, questions were being asked about our brands and competition that only large scale statistical modeling could answer, and attempting to continue this work in Excel just led to crashed computers and version control problems.