Data fuels innovation in volatile Consumer Packaged Goods times

Enterprises in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) space have faced volatile supply chain obstacles and rapidly changing consumer expectations.

Everyone talks about the new normal, but I think we should be talking about the never normal.

Customer needs, business disruptions, and windows of opportunity happen constantly. Today’s never normal is not next year’s, next month’s, or even next week’s never normal. The market waits for no one these days. CPG enterprises need to be able to scale solutions in an incredibly short time. Accenture partners with Microsoft to build and deploy enterprise-wide solutions that address the full scope of evolving challenges and opportunities in CPG businesses.

Data rich, information poor

Innovation in CPG is accelerated by digital transformation. Digital transformations need both data and technology. The CPG sector does not have a problem getting data. It has an amazing amount of data that starts in manufacturing and ends with the consumer. It can gather data in all areas of the enterprise. The problem is assembling the data in a central location and then making sense of it — creating a single source of truth.

The sector is data rich but information poor (DRIP).

DRIP is not a new issue. Accenture found that 89% of the CPG executives that they polled view data and artificial intelligence (AI) as an enabler of their strategic priorities, but 74% acknowledge they struggle when it comes to scaling it across the business.

Technology building blocks for all sides of the business

CPG has a “half meat and half fish” challenge. On one side of the business is manufacturing. A company like Nestlé, for example, runs more than 400+ production plants across the globe. On the other side of the business is the challenge of fulfilling incredibly high — thanks to online shopping and expedited delivery — consumer expectations. We have two very different sides of the business with very different technology needs.

To create true data-driven solutions in this half meat half fish world, CPG enterprises do not have the luxury of setting up a greenfield situation to replace all the systems needed to run the business. Nor do they want to. Accenture knows this.

So instead of asking an enterprise to integrate yet another application or another siloed data set, Accenture uses its deep industry knowledge to deploy Microsoft’s standard business building blocks on top of Microsoft’s intelligent data platform. Outcome are solutions based on standard open technology, with the capability to successfully tackle with the complexity of today value chains processes. Great ROI is granted by avoiding the rip and replace approach, i.e., by leveraging the existing -multiple siloed data sets plus multiple applications- typical landscape most enterprises struggle with, forging on these to create the real single source of truth, transforming data variety from being a digital ballast for the business into a true competitive advantage.

Solutions for quickly changing market conditions

A key outcome of this approach of using standard technology building blocks is speed to deployment. Accenture couples industry expertise with the Microsoft ecosystem expertise and the agile development skills of Avanade, a joint development venture between Accenture and Microsoft.

This approach allows solutions development to keep up with the challenging pace of changing CPG market conditions. Think of development as a series of sprints. Depending on the use cases, the specific technology, and desired outcomes, a solution is deployed into a specific business unit in roughly 12 to 16 weeks.

Avanade uses Microsoft’s Power Platform, a low-code toolkit that empowers the “citizen developer” to be part of the development process. The enterprise is not on the outside looking in. Enterprise IT and business users work hand-in-hand with Accenture and Avanade from the start. This is a game changer when it comes to solving the unique real-world obstacles of each CPG business.

What this looks like in real life

Mars is a multinational manufacturer of foods, confections, and pet food. The company wanted to digitize its entire global supply chain — including manufacturing. It wanted to improve manufacturing efficiency and flexibility in over 100 factories. Access to data was one of their biggest challenges. There are old and new plants running a mix of old and new lines. There are incompatible MES systems, automation systems, and machines.

The solution, built on Microsoft Azure, allows Mars to use the different data streams to create that “single source of truth” that feeds into an Azure Digital Twins IoT platform. Creating digital twins of manufacturing sites allows Mars to model changes on the production lines, think through asset allocations, and try different efficiency scenarios without disrupting production. Manufacturing speed and capacity, as well as margins, improved. Plus, waste was reduced across the entire supply chain.

The waste reduction has a wider impact on more than just the company’s bottom line. It also impacts sustainability efforts, which takes us to the incredible challenge food-based CPG businesses face — massive food waste.

Execute better. Waste less.

According to the 2021 World Economic Forum report on food security, around 931 million tons of food goes to waste each year. Over a third of the food produced never makes it to the table. We are talking almost one trillion US dollars per year wasted. Contrast that with the more than 2.3 billion people (or 30 percent of the global population) who lack year-round access to adequate food — the indicator of moderate or severe food insecurity. We have to do better. Data lets us.

Food-based CPG companies looking to impact food sustainability can use data generated on each step of the value chain to find and cut waste. The real-time and granular visibility into the data allows enterprises like Mars to reduce waste across their entire global supply chain.

The data shows that the more you know, the better you plan. The better you execute, the less you waste.

For more information

For more details of Accenture’s current work in Consumer Packaged Goods, or if you are interested to attend our forthcoming webinar on the supply chain challenges and how technology can help you overcome them, reach out to me directly via LinkedIn or visit Business Applications