Keep pace in the consumer goods industry by putting people at the forefront

Exceeding customer expectations is what keeps consumer goods companies relevant and competitive. The omnipresence of consumer brands in our lives reveals what a tightrope act meeting customer expectations can be, though. Businesses must balance current customer commitments while being agile enough to meet the dynamically changing demand of consumers. None of this is possible without a fully connected supply chain that empowers people to make fast, confident decisions.

Today’s supply chains are very complex, with hundreds of product lines spanning multiple regions and a network of production facilities, distribution centers and various co-packers and co-manufacturers.

To achieve success, companies have to adopt planning solutions that align every function around a single source of truth, combining transparency and automation to help companies quickly and easily detect risks and opportunities.  
At the same time, businesses cannot just rely on technology. Empowering supply chain practitioners to identify and prioritize key challenges should be the driving force to determine what challenges need to be solved, which team members need to be involved, and which technology should be used. The human context is what will keep consumer goods companies in the lead.

How Mars gained a competitive edge through supply chain transformation

Mars is ahead of the game. Mars understood the evolving trends and risks within its industry and embraced a digital supply chain transformation to maintain its competitive edge. With the leadership of Will Beery, VP Global Transformations, Mars has leveraged the Mars Digital Engine framework, which puts the Mars Associate at the heart of identifying supply chain problems to truly understand what needs to be solved. By reframing problem solving in this way, Beery’s team applies the right data, artificial intelligence and next generation technology to solve the most critical business problems and better serve customers.

Mars has been working with Kinaxis® to apply its concurrent planning approach to empower Associates to run a digitally interconnected, intelligent supply chain. With Kinaxis RapidResponse®, the concurrent planning approach enables countless scenarios that gives Mars the agility to meet its consumer and customer needs. As Beery puts it, “We’ve got hundreds of scenarios that we’re modelling at the moment and ready to deploy.” To learn more about Mars’s digital transformation, watch our webinar to hear Berry go into more detail.