Kellanova Australia – formerly Kellogg’s – is starting a digitisation program that will see it embrace more real-time data analytics, as well as more off-the-shelf over self-built systems.
Kate Collareda.
IT director for A/NZ Kate Collareda told the Salesforce World Tour in Sydney that the cereal and snack food maker is calling 2024 its “year of digital”.
Collareda said that Kellogg’s as a brand had been in Australia for 100 years. The brand continues on food packaging, even if the name of the corporate entity has changed.
Coinciding with the 100-year [anniversary, Collareda said a focus has emerged on “what the next 100 years looks like”.
From a technology perspective, the company will be more digital and run off platforms rather than trying to build everything inhouse.
“We’re at the beginning of our digitisation journey,” Collareda said.
“It’s about how we digitise our business and take it forward into the future over the next 100 years.”
Collareda said that a top-down discussion internally is “challenging the way we do business, [and] our processes.”
Some of this is to identify candidate processes or workflows for digitisation; these include processes that are heavily single-person reliant, where documenting and digitising it would break that single-person dependency.
Part of the move to digital systems will involve adopting platforms, of which Salesforce is one.
“We’re very early on in our Salesforce journey,” Collareda said.
Build vs buy
“Traditionally for our business, we’ve always built our own [systems]. This may have made sense at the time, but as we shift and we want to digitise and move really fast, our only option really is to buy [platforms] and partner with people like Salesforce that have industry experts that can bring in some different thinking.
“So that outside-in thinking for us is really important, as well as the ability to execute really fast.”
Collareda said that aligning to off-the-shelf platforms meant that Kellanova would gain access to a steady stream of enhancements each year that it could then elect to use where it made sense.
“We’re really looking forward to … coming along for the [digitisation] journey versus having to do it all ourselves.”
She also saw a lower total cost of ownership by taking a platform-based approach.
“I think sometimes it makes sense to build your own [systems] because the entry point is maybe a little cheaper, but then when you look at it over the course of time to support and maintain and have to continually enhance, it does get cost limiting,” she said.
Data at the core
In addition to embracing a more platform-led approach, data – and AI – is set to play an increasingly important role for Kellanova in understanding its customers, such as changing consumer dynamics and palates, as well as how changes to ingredient availability or freight arrangements could flow through its supply chain.
While data has always been important, it’s not always been as timely as it could be.
“I think data will underpin everything that we do going forward. It does today, but in a traditional kind of reporting sense [where] by the time we look at it, we’ve lost our opportunity to act on it,” Collareda said.
“It’s very much more of the real-time, forward-looking data that we’re looking to change our way of operating [with].”
Feeding that data into AI models offered a way to stay on top of changes in the fast-moving consumer goods market.
Collareda saw opportunities to overlay current ways of doing business and manufacturing with AI to predict future directions and “generate new ways of [doing] business, so new products are delivered to the consumer really quickly”.
“It’s exciting for us because I think it will really shift the way we’ve always operated,” she said.