How Mars' Digital Engine Is Shifting It to a Value-Focused Mindset

Deepak Jose, Mars head of global demand analytics, shared a window into Mars’ Digital Engine, the strategic framework the company has developed for decision making in order to evolve e-commerce capabilities.

The company’s four-pronged strategy is leveraged for any of Mars’ digital transformation initiatives, beginning with user centricity and design thinking to identify the true problem at hand.

“It is more important to find the right problem than to solve the problem right,” Jose noted during a deep dive into the strategy at the Groceryshop trade show in Las Vegas on Monday.

Once the problem has correctly identified, artificial intelligence and machine learning are then leveraged to solve for it, as the process of solving and then automating is how Mars views the maximum reinvestment of its 100,000-plus associates’ time. (In order to make this story compelling for the entire company, Jose said “Digital Engine” at Mars has always meant moving at “100x speed.”)  

[See also: Mars Partners For Supply Chain Optimization & Hyper-Relevant Experiences]

By operating with an agile mindset — “If you want to move from one point to another, you don't need a Ferrari, you just need a skateboard” — Mars’ manufacturing structural framework is helping break down silos to build transversal capabilities for omnichannel.

As part of this, the company is also putting in work to shift toward a value-focused mindset, developing a decision-enablement framework for value expanding.

In offering advice to consumer goods brands’ data and analytics teams, Jose noted the imperative of moving from simply generating insights from data, to driving insights from action. To do this, organizations must invert the traditional organization pyramid structure (see below).

“We need to challenge the status quo and start with value first,” said Jose.