Consider your latest trip to the grocery store, when you were greeted with row upon row of snacks that all fall under General Mills’s banner, and you can get a sense of the robustness of the snack food giant’s supply chain.
Or you can take it from Dave Jackett, senior director of digital supply chain transformation at General Mills.
“We deal with 20,000 suppliers every single year. They ship raw materials to 250 production locations around the world. We’ve got millions of customer orders every year shipping to over 10,000 customers. So it’s relatively complex,” Jackett said at Gartner’s recent Supply Chain Planning Summit in London, adding that the company’s supply chain unit counts 18,000 employees.
Not shocking, then, that even minor supply chain investments can produce major ROI—and General Mills’s supply chain digitization journey is productive food for thought for CFOs considering the potential payoffs of supply chain investments at their own companies. (That’s yoooou!)
The Walmart lesson. Jackett started his General Mills tenure in 1999, working as a second-shift team leader at one of the company’s largest plants in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, manufacturing snacks like Cheerios and Fruit Roll-Ups.
At the time, “the idea of a digital supply chain was probably the furthest thing from my mind,” as suppliers emailed about late deliveries and his team would analyze things on spreadsheets, he said. “By the time we assessed the impact on Excel and things like that, the situation had changed pretty significantly, and usually we had to start all over.”
The company embarked on a supply chain revamp “right before the pandemic,” Jackett explained—fortuitous timing, since we all know how the supply chain fared in that chaotic time. And with the pandemic’s many disruptions, it quickly became all the more obvious why these investments mattered.
Before the company’s more recent supply chain push, Jackett stresses that “in many ways, even just five years ago, our supply chain was operating in much the same way” as it had when he started in the late ’90s. That changed, however, when CEO Jeff Harmening launched a plan to make the company “the supply chain leader in data and analytics,” Jackett said. “I can tell you, at the time, we were the furthest thing from that, especially in supply [chain]; we were still operating mostly in email and Excel.”
Crucially, in Jackett’s eyes, Harmening “also put his money where his mouth was, and without that level of investment in the top-down buy-in, there’s no way we would have been able to get started.” CFOs, take note.
All systems go. Before the company kicked off its digitization process, it had to get a sense of just how much it’d benefit from it. “We estimated that our operational teams make about 50 million decisions every year,” Jackett said, noting that not all of those decisions necessarily carry the same weight or warrant the same level of required intel.
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“Some decisions are 50 bucks and some are $5 million—that makes sense, but every single one of those is what really drives our $13 billion of [cost of goods sold], it drives our service, it drives our sustainability commitments and all that,” he added. In other words: “It’s that sum total of all those decisions that really matters.”
General Mills’s journey “all started with data,” Jackett said, and that’s likely where other teams should start too, given the interconnectedness of supply chain issues.
“Like a lot of companies, we spent, over the last 20 years, before we started this, investing in really good tools for specific people and jobs,” he noted, but that amounted to “a very narrow view of the supply chain.” “That’s a really good way to get somebody really good at their job. It’s [also] a really terrible way to manage a supply chain that’s completely interconnected.”
The goal moving forward was to build a “connected data foundation,” and that meant migrating thousands of tables in Excel, SAP, and other programs “to the cloud, and we connected them together.”
“At first we just said, we’re just going to move it there, and we knew that we were going to provide value and speed to teams as we did that,” he added, but even then, “we didn’t know every single use case.”
That ended up being a benefit, Jackett said, explaining that companies often undergo similar data transformations piecemeal—moving from use case to new data model, use case to new data model. “The architecture, by putting it all there together at once, was incredibly powerful,” he noted. “I probably can’t stress enough the importance of having that single source of truth.”
Crisis averted. So what does it look like when things go right? He pointed to a recent example: One of General Mills’s plants identified a coming labor shortage around 7am. “They didn’t necessarily know what the impact was going to be to inventory, service, or anything else,” Jackett noted, but “they knew they were going to have a problem, so they escalated it up to the planning team.” Soon after, the planning team could “start to analyze the impact of the disruption.”
By around 1pm, the team “took their proposed scenario in the system back to leadership. Now, in that meeting, they’re able to real time iterate, what happens if this? What if we prioritize Walmart [a customer]? What if we prioritize this item? They can see the impact of that in the meeting.”
Beyond the speed of decision-making afforded by the system, plus the more comprehensive data to pull from, Jackett notes that “another great thing about having an interconnected system like that is when they make that decision, the plant sees the decision, the logistics team sees the decision.”