By Lora Cecere
Over the course of the last six years, I have helped many companies with their demand-driven initiatives. The Kimberly-Clark organization has been my best student. Their transformation took six years. The results are now clearly visible on the balance sheet. In this blog post, I would like to celebrate their story.
The Journey
The first day that I worked with the Kimberly-Clark team, it was a cold, snowy day in Neenah, Wisconsin. It was one of those days where the small heater in the local hotel room could not keep pace with the falling temperatures of the blinding snow storm that happened that evening. As I pulled my blanket tight and tossed on my bed, I questioned why I was doing this work. Would it really make a difference?
As I stomped the snow off of my boots to start the strategy day, I faced a room of disbeliever (s). The group was skeptical. As we discussed the concepts of a Demand-driven Organization, they offered excuses like, “You need to understand that we are different. We run large assets. Our teams make more money keeping them running. We cannot be like these other companies.” The push back was high. The willingness to change was low. However, over time it slowly changed. There were three strong drivers:
1) Fierce Competition. The rise of branded generics and the intense competition between P&G and Kimberly-Clark in the consumer products paper business forced Kimberly-Clark to adapt. They needed to reconsider the position to be more competitive. It was a case of when the going gets tough the tough get going.
2) Bias to Innovate. Six years ago, the Kimberly-Clark team was an innovator in the use of RFID. The Company worked through two implementations of downstream data technology with strong insights for the team. As a member of the mid-western consortia of data sharing between General Mills and SC Johnson, they had the benefit of networking with other supply chain leaders. As a team, they have a strong culture of learning.
3) Goal Driven. When I started Supply Chain Insights, I ran into Scott DeGroot, Director of Customer Supply Chain Team; Rick Sather, Vice President of the Customer Supply Chain Team and Mike Kalinowski, Director of Supply Chain Operations at conferences. The presentations were all hard-hitting. The Kimberly-Clark team is bullish. It is great to see a team so positive about their accomplishments. They set a target to improve top line revenue over the course of five years. The focus was on channel sell through of products. It was their BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). At first they were nervous, they had set an aggressive goal. Now they are bullish, they beat it! They measured out-of-stocks at the shelf and they made improvements. The current focus is on store-by-store productivity and the design of the supply chain from the outside-in.
Why it Matters
In the Supply Chain Metrics that Matter work, we can clearly see that “operating margin” and “Inventory Turns” matter to public financial performance. In figure 1, we share a comparison of three Consumer Products …read more
Source: Supply Chain Shaman
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