Brown-Forman Unveils PLM Journey to Innovation

Since 1870, Brown-Forman has produced, manufactured, and distributed legendary brands such as Old Forester, Jack Daniel's, Korbel, Southern Comfort, Chambord, Finlandia, and many more. While the company celebrates its storied history, Brown-Forman continually looks for new technology to help effectively and efficiently manage the modern-day challenges of an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

 

Specifically, Brown-Forman needed to upgrade its current innovation system. Using simple spreadsheets, the company found it nearly impossible to manage the vast amount of information that consumers now expect and demand. Brown-Forman sought to solve these issues with a Product Lifecycle (PLM) software solution.

 

During a CGT web seminar, Brown Forman's Director of Product Development and Innovation, Jimmy Bookstore, discussed how implementing a PLM solution has led to a significant acceleration in New Product Development & Introduction (NPDI). Below are some highlights from the web event:

 

-- Michael Burkett, Research VP, Supply Chain Research from Gartner, Inc, kicked off the event by reviewing some key business drivers. Some of these include speeding innovation to market, insuring compliance to regulatory requirements, meeting the scalable needs of global organizations, and maximizing return on investments and asset utilization. Burkett believes that the consumer products industry needs a new strategy to serve the value-conscious consumer. “Think about how sales and marketing is trying to serve the customer, and then go back and think about how we can use PLM to help solve that problem, and better serve the customer,” said Burkett.

 

-- Bookstore then followed the discussion with a real-world example of implementing a PLM solution within Brown-Forman. The new solution significantly expedited time-to-market with key features and benefits that were not available in spreadsheet functionality. The company was able to capitalize on existing databases and systems, build formulas from verified information preventing duplication of effort and opportunity for errors, streamline and standardize issuing of formulas and the review process, reduce SKUs and significantly improve data management with configurable fields and ability to have vendors enter data, and much more. Bookstore offers some advice for those getting started: “Speak to people in the industry that are using the systems you might be looking at. It is very important to reach out to folks that are using it and ask them how it is working for them,” he explained.

 

To listen to this web event in its entirety, click here.