Meet CGT's Nine Business & Technology Award Winners

In the consumer goods community, leaders know that keeping your success a secret can be a detriment to your business. Luckily, many of you are more than open to not only sharing but  celebrating the best practices of others.

 

Case in point: CGT received more than 50 nominations for our annual Business & Technology Leadership Awards. In the end, only nine companies could be selected by our editorial and research advisory boards to be honored at an awards ceremony on October 25^th at the 2011 Consumer Goods Business & Technology Leadership Conference.

 

And if you missed it, don’t fret; here, we again pay homage to the winners and explain why they are deserving of this recognition for excellence in their customer management, supply chain and growth strategies.

 

 

McCormick & Co. leverages smartphone mobile technology to gain field sales productivity, manage channel partner relationships and support customers. It replaced a paper-based system with a single, standardized, and adaptable audit process, enabled by Flowfinity Actions from Flowfinity Wireless. Retail managers in different regions are now able to collaborate on the best ways to streamline and improve operations. As a result, the company has improved sales performance. In the future, McCormick will extend the use of Flowfinity Actions to other departments such as marketing, where they will link pre-determined product placement plans to sales performance.

Outstanding Achievement: Georgia-Pacific.

Georgia Pacific can deliver insights with great speed — a game changer in today’s marketplace. The company uses a solution from Interactive Edge, which can tackle any database, delivering graphics and support elements to create a compelling reason for a retailer to listen and agree. Georgia-Pacific can then generate retailer level analyses where 80 percent of the insight can be done in just minutes. Overall, analysts can now focus on the development of new insights as well as develop other best practices that grow value for retail customers, the consumer and the Georgia-Pacific without increasing headcount.

 

Outstanding Achievement: Nestl

In the United States, Nestl consolidated all Walmart team business units into one ‘Nestle Walmart’ office and leadership team. All Nestl Walmart business units are leveraging Shiloh DSR software and a best practice process to deploy reports and analysis through a central team that serves users. The Nestl Walmart team integrated retailer data, company shipment/order data, planogram data, competitive pricing, and SNAP — previously food stamps — data in Shiloh. Thus, they discovered a major opportunity doing analysis on interactions between SNAP and sales volume data that helps ensure enough product gets to store in these very high volume days.

 

Goya Foods grew from a small storefront business into the largest Hispanic-owned food and No. 1 Latin brand company in the United States. It uses JDA solutions to optimize a range of supply chain planning processes, ensuring it is equipped to continue delivering superior customer service and reduce operational costs while keeping pace with the company's growth. Goya is experiencing real results, like:

*A record 98 percent service level

*99.96% percent fill rates for high volume products, among others

With all of these capabilities in place, the company now offers short shelf-life products to the market, something it was not able to do before.

Sun Products implemented a demand signal repository from Shiloh Technologies in 2010 starting with the largest account that needed improved service levels. The DSR allows Sun to strategically change the way its staffs and services the account, and created a competitive advantage in analytics and reporting. They soon won a new category advisorship from this retailer along with finding more than $20 million in out-of-stock and phantom inventory issues. The retailer also asked Sun to use its out-of-stock/phantom inventory finder across the entire category.

 

Outstanding Achievement: Specialized Bicycle Components.

This global bicycle manufacturer is currently using several cloud-based solutions, including RightNow Social Experience solutions, to foster customer engagement with cycling enthusiasts via 17 social media sites.

It is very common for customers to post messages of thanks and praise in return, and thereby creates social brand advocates. Gathering valuable insight from every customer interaction, Specialized is also able to craft and deliver targeted marketing campaigns. In addition, the company has been able to increase web traffic to featured product pages by 30 percent.

First Place Winner: Kimberly-Clark Corporation.

This year, Kimberly-Clark was 26th on Gartner’s list of top supply chains, compared to 45^th in 2010. The company’s supply chain improvements are the result of shifting from traditional supply chain practices toward a demand-driven consumer value chain. Return on investment includes halving internal cycle times, reducing the number of warehouses by almost 70%, and reducing total supply chain costs, while increasing on-shelf availability. The company has had much success leveraging Terra Technology's multi-enterprise demand-sensing solution, and has used retailer data on a broader scale to better understand short-term demand changes and better align its ability to respond. The company has also made great strides in executing a collaborative S&OP process.

 

Outstanding Achievement: Land O’Lakes.

Historically, Land O' Lakes ran as a holding company with many separate entities, resulting in an overly complex IT environment. In 2005, a strategic decision was made to move toward an operating company model. A well-mapped out business transformation project, called Catalyst, was formed to migrate part of the business from four ERP systems to just one. As of October 2010, the impact of project Catalyst can be seen clearly in Land O’Lakes supply chain. For example, warehouse costs are down 7% and obsolete and distressed inventory are down 20%.

 

Just Born must continually improve the efficiency of the supply chain for its highly seasonal "Peeps" product, as well as other candy brands such as "Mike and Ike" and "Hot Tamales." The company implemented a disciplined and repeatable forecast management process for products that ship to 50 countries supported by an easy-to-use tool from Demand Solutions. It also created a Seasonal Team comprising Supply Chain, Marketing, and Sales which discusses field estimates compared to orders and production runs for each season.

 

For more information about these winners, please read the upcoming December issue of CGT.

 

In September 2011, CGT also honored six more consumer goods firms for with Innovation Awards for excellence in new product development and introduction. Click here for that story.