By Felicity Ussher, 2 December 1999 00:15
NEWS The Whitbread Beer Company won the prize for Information Management Project of the Year at last night's Information Management 1999 awards. The Whitbread subsidiary beat close contenders Midland Electricity and Shell Services International to the post. Andy Palmer, IT director of the Whitbread Beer Company, said the award reflects positively - not just on the IT function - but on the whole company. He said the winning project - known as Samson - was designed to make sales and marketing information available to employees out in the field. "This is the central core of information that the beer company runs on," he told Silicon.com. "I think the key factor in our success was our ability to be able to resolve complex queries with our field-based operations without actually having to move large quantities of data down telephone lines, which is expensive and generally prone to failure," he said. Second prize went to Midland Electricity, which had spent five years and £30m on a new distribution network. Midland Electricity's asset information manager, Ian Wainwright, said: "It brings together a tremendous number of different technologies and different business processes - and puts them all together around one central network model of the distribution system. This gold commendation is absolutely tremendous for morale within the team and shows us we're on the right track."
In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.
Log in or create your silicon.com account below