**Amit Maini** Head of Digital Services, The Kraft Heinz Company
Amit Maini | Head of Digital Services, The Kraft Heinz Company
Amit has spearheaded several digital process transformation initiatives on both OT and IT fronts in his career that spans over 15 years. He believes that Industry 4.0 or IoT implementation is a natural progression of process innovation involving sensors and automation that monitor and execute repetitive processes. What truly makes IoT impactful is its hybrid combination with analytics.
In this context, Amit remarks - “the visibility, simplicity, standardization, and consolidation opportunities that data analytics offers is the key differentiator of any digitalization program. It is not just adding sensors, it is not just data collection, it is not just data refinement and enrichment, no… deriving actionable insights that improve your processes and thereby your bottom-line growth is the true parameter to gauge the success of your Industry 4.0 or digitalization program!”
In this free-wheeling chat, Amit shared his experience and viewpoint on what drives digital transformation on and off the manufacturing floor, the best practices that ensure the success of such initiatives and the need for viewing digitalization programs as a culture change rather than a transformation project.
Beyond Manufacturing – Digitalization is all-encompassing
What is digitalization? What is IoT? What is Industry 4.0? If you ask me, it is just a set of terms that define everything, that we have been doing for long. Evolution and natural progression of doing tasks with ease is what digitalization and IoT enables. These technologies have ultimately converged to transform conventional manufacturing and industrial practices, ushering in a new industrial revolution, which is widely referred to as Industry 4.0.
A more nuanced analysis will reveal that these programs and initiatives targeted at simplifying businesses processes have always been there. The established thought process for any transformation journey has always involved identifying a process and working on ways and means to streamline and refine it to an extent where there are significant improvements in efficiency and throughput.
At Kraft Heinz, my team handles 450+ such transformation projects under various umbrellas from improving liquidation to bolstering supply chain resilience. The digital services portfolio at Kraft Heinz comprises three components – Automation, Reporting Factory and Analytics.
Automation: We are one of the foremost companies, which have automated 250+ business processes. The phrase ‘work smarter not harder’ truly applies when it comes to increasing operational efficiencies.
Reporting Factory: Our Reporting Factory produces and maintains reports for different functions within the organizations, which are transactional in essence. Runs standard, routine, transitional, reports/processes across all KHC which results in Optimizing & Improving the Customer Experience. A global team that supports different time zones and staffed by BPO functions enabling availability of experienced professionals who can scale according to the demand. The core job of this function is to support business reporting for analytics needs.
The reporting factory has managed to infuse high speed and agility within existing reporting operations and has reduced cost by 30 – 40% through a global delivery model. It has also enabled the resources to focus on their core functions without worrying about reporting and has reduced redundancy while upholding quality and accuracy.
Analytics: The world as we know it will continue to be increasingly driven by data. In its function to deliver critical insights as to whether a business is moving in the right direction, data analytics is fundamentally the key to effective decision making. In my opinion, this is a key necessity for any organization planning their digital journey. The visibility, simplicity, standardization and consolidation opportunities that data analytics offers is the key differentiator of any digitalization initiative.
Getting Started
Prioritization of the processes can go a long way in determining where to begin the digitalization process. Tagging and classifying various parameters of the processes such as business criticality, implementation feasibility, availability of the right partners, timelines, ROI, financial and non-financial benefits and most importantly the cost, helps in planning the pecking order. An analytics division or a consulting partner with the necessary domain expertise of your industry and established credentials in driving digitalization programs is a major advantage to have in such scenarios.
At Kraft Heinz, we believe that the digital quotient is the first metric that forces digital adoption. From 11 process automation initiatives in 2016-17 to 250+ in 2020, we have enhanced our digital quotient rapidly. If I have to trace this entire journey, I would do it in three phases.
The first phase involved defining and aligning our requirements/priorities or picking up the low hanging fruits. We selected two processes in Accounts Payable to begin this journey in North America and focused on getting the basics right. The next phase Digital @Scale was all about rapidly building up on the foundation that we had laid earlier and enhancing the scope of implementation, process reengineering, process aspiration, policy alignment and institutionalizing process automation. The third and final phase involved changing the thought process to Digital First and spreading the scope of transformation across geographies and adoption of process automation with speed and agility.
Overcoming Obstacles
One thing that I have learned during all the business continuity meetings that I have been attending lately is that there is no bigger business pillar than communication. When done rightly, communication can achieve for you the desired results with great success. Most digitalization initiatives are centered on ‘people’ and they are specifically implemented to simplify the jobs of your workforce. It could be either through business process solutions that enhance efficiency and accuracy while eliminating errors or through operational technology solutions, which hugely reduce manual efforts and boost productivity while eliminating hazards.
The rigid approach, the adoption inertia is one of the biggest challenges in digitalization besides the other two obvious challenges – budgets and leadership alignment. The first challenge of onboarding the workforce can be overcome with a well-structured change management and communication strategy that emphasizes on the benefits of the initiatives including the upskilling and cross-skilling opportunities and career advancement counselling for all involved stakeholders.
As far as the budgets are concerned, in my 15 years of professional experience, I have never faced any problem in getting the budgets sanctioned for an idea that is poised to yield tangible outcomes.
The last challenge however is a bit tricky to handle – getting the leadership buy-in for the initiative at the initial stages is easy but sustaining their confidence in the end requires a committed approach that involves demonstrating success-milestones through the journey and a resultant process/solution that actually delivers on the committed value to the organization.
Managing Black Swan Scenarios
I am one of those people who prefers looking at the positive side of things. Challenges in any situation are not always obstacles that stop you from achieving your objective, they provide you an opportunity to pause, ponder, analyze and explore the situation in a more wholesome manner to find a better solution. I will give you a recent example of this in the business context.
At Kraft Heinz, we have more than 85 operational factories/manufacturing plants, which utilize several utilities such as sanitization and fumigation services, water, electricity, gas, ice, garbage disposal, etc. Now each of these utilities bill us on a monthly basis and what it translates to are more than a million invoices per year. Keeping track of all these invoices across 85 different facilities and ensuring timely payments is a cumbersome process.
Embracing automation to sort the mails out on a timely basis without depending on manual labor was a natural choice for us. Therefore, we fast-tracked the entire process and created an OCR based tool that helped us in scanning the mail.
This has streamlined the process to a huge extent and the dependency on the manual process as well as the penalties have been eliminated. Therefore, I believe a black swan event such as the pandemic is the perfect stress test for companies to rise to the occasion and deliver to the best of their abilities.
The Perennial Conundrum – ROI
Return on Investment is an outdated terminology. It limits the vision of an initiative or a program to mere numbers and to benefits that can be perceived visually. We, at Kraft Heinz believe in the principle of ‘Value Encashment’. The crux of this principle is to implement all the initiatives with a focus to leverage current situation and finetune processes and parameters at our disposal to gain clear visibility and edge for future operations.
Of course, over a period, we end up creating well-established processes that help us determine the feasibility of a project. However, we have ensured that the feasibility quotient is derived through scientific analysis rather than gut feeling and instinct. Our automated systems are well equipped to simplify decision making by providing the right insights about the business viability of a project. It takes into consideration all the critical parameters such as the definition of success or acceptance criteria, estimated investment – funded/non-funded, expected value – financial/non-financial, timeline for value encashment – incremental/transformational, etc. It makes a world of difference when one has a reliable system that helps justifying the feasibility aspect of an idea.
Embarking on the digitalization journey is no different. Organizations must perceive digitalization as a necessary enabler, both - in IT and OT domains and then must identify and prioritize the areas based on their business impact. It must be noted that digitalization is not a destination it is a journey and ROI must not be a hindrance in embarking on this journey. It must not be considered as a program or an initiative, it must be looked at as a ‘business mindset’ that will assure sustainability and customer relevance.
Carrier Claim Automation
Context
The North America Transportation Claims team is responsible for in-taking, investigating, filing and collecting potential claims from KHC sites against the carriers. The team needs to do the intake to put all the data together and start the investigation. This step determines if the claim against the carrier is valid or not. If all criteria are met, the team needs to file a formal claim in ERP to credit the site and debit the carrier. The final step is collecting money from open claims.
Challenges
We receive on average around 15 claims and it takes more than 15 minutes to intake each one. The team was using OneNote to keep track of the claims. The overall resolution cycle time associated with this process increased based on the inputs provided at the point of intake. This is a manual process, with various non-value added tasks, that can be simplified, standardized, and automated.
Solution
The GBS Supply Chain team created a reporting factory for the EMEA team and it created around 35+ reports for the SCM hub. Reports from various verticals including Supply Planning, Manufacturing, SCM Finance, Transportation, Logistics, etc. were created and shared with multiple stakeholders daily. The GBS Supply Chain team wanted to move away from traditional way of Excel-based reporting to Digital BI tools to manage all Business Unit KPIs so that they could make decisions and take necessary actions on low performing metrics.
We utilized Tableau based reporting for critical reports by connecting directly to various data sources to generate the metrics and dashboards. We also implanted Quick Process Automation for non-Tableau reports to reduce the turn-around-time and simplify the process.
Results
Business Rapid Fire
Evolution or revolution
At Kraft Heinz, the leadership has always maintained futuristic vision and has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to adapting to the foreseeable future changes. Therefore, for us it has been a journey of evolution.
Strategy or execution
I personally believe in sharpening my axe before hacking. Without a plan, the action is futile. So it is strategy first and then execution.
Biggest takeaway from the New Normal
I have three biggest learnings from the current situation. It is extremely important for an organization to:
One trend of the new normal that you think would continue in the future Remote working and virtual meetings will become a norm and more importantly will be accepted and adopted as a practical alternative over physical presence.
2021 will be the year of Accelerating Digital Transformation. It is no more a choice but a necessity.
