From securing a hybrid workforce to building pipelines for ever-increasing data streams and keeping multiple mission-critical systems up and running, the modern IT department faces numerous pressures. As director of IT for the packaged food company Conagra, Amit Khot is optimistic about the ways modern technology solutions and infrastructure can enable businesses to thrive and innovate.

Khot describes the power of advanced data analytics to both improve a company’s understanding of its customers and to optimize its operations. The ability to combine internal company data with data collected from social media and at point of sale will enable savvy companies to recognize new patterns. These advanced analytics, he says, will go beyond answering standard questions about financials and historical performance to provide insight into more complex questions about customers’ thoughts and changing preferences.

Meanwhile, these same data tools can also be used to fine-tune daily business operations, pinpointing issues with order fulfillment, improving long-range supply-and-demand forecasting, and digitizing manufacturing plant processes. Koht explains, “Planning is looking into the future, depending upon your past historical data, as to what your future demand and supply should look like. We have gone through a journey to modernize our planning platforms.”

A modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is also a must for a distributed organization like Conagra. A single connected ERP system can manage and provide visibility into business processes that involve multiple divisions or departments. By doing so, a modern ERP can also ease highly complex processes, such as the technology integration of a newly acquired company.

Says Khot, “having a single view of finance, having a single view of the supply chain as early and as fast as possible, is one of the most important things that can help us get synergies out of the business as fast as possible.”