The $25 Million Reason Georgia-Pacific Rebuilt Its Data Foundation

Georgia-Pacific, with 32,000 employees across 150+ locations, ran decentralized data functions where individual business units kept separate data engineering teams with no shared infrastructure or standards, blocking company-wide insight. VP of Data Matt Robuck built a centralized data capability over three years, creating 'GP Data Pulse' powered by Alation to connect three major business divisions, adding integrated data-quality tools and 'venture summaries' projecting P&L impact before projects launched. The standout result was in spare-parts inventory: enabling procurement managers to trust intercompany inventory data drove about $25 million in intercompany transfers last year, and the platform now supports eleven deployed AI agents with plans to expand into marketing optimization and autonomous decision-making. Robuck said talking to executives about data platforms is a tough discussion, but 'if I talk to them about how we're moving the P&L with data, they listen.'

Alation is a data-catalog and data-intelligence platform that tells a pharma team what data actually exists, who owns it, and whether it is trustworthy enough to support an AI use case.

This sits in the Design & Stress-Test stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the tools pharma teams use to scope, prototype and benchmark an AI use case before committing to build it — data-catalog, sandbox and evaluation platforms.