2011 Visionaries
Being a visionary in the consumer goods industry is all about seeing the big picture. The job title comes with a long list of requirements, like setting long-term goals and direction, getting buy-in from leadership and employees, and so on.
Each year, CGT honors a small group of industry thought leaders who not only see the big picture, but have executed business and technology initiatives that will help their companies to paint it. For this reason we call them “visionary”.
The 10 executives profiled this year were selected from a pool of more than 50 glowing reader nominations that explained how each challenged the boundaries of their organization — whether it be a Fortune 500 firm or an innovative mid-market company. Here, CGT’s 2011 Visionaries reveal their biggest wins in the past year and the changes they have in store for their respective companies.
First up, a farewell tribute to one of the biggest CG industry visionaries of all time: P&G’s Keith Harrison, who will retire this year.
Keith Harrison
Global Product Supply Officer
Supply chain visionary Keith Harrison will enter retirement at the end of August after a long and very successful 41-year career with The Procter & Gamble Company. As an industry that has been impacted greatly by his many accomplishments, we would be remiss if we let him go without paying proper tribute for leading one of the largest product supply organizations in the world.
In his current role as Global Product Supply Officer, Harrison directs a supply chain organization with more than 70,000 employees worldwide — that’s more than half of the enrollment of the total company.
Throughout his career, he went by many other titles, from Team Manager at a Pennsylvania plant (1970) to Brand Manager (1984) to Vice President-Product Supply for P&G Europe (1991) and so on. In each position, Harrison played an instrumental part in P&G’s long history of supply chain innovation.
He was one of the first to understand the changing nature of the CG industry, including an amplified need to respond to shortened innovation cycles as well as supply chain agility to provide growth in competitive market conditions. In line with that theory, he took P&G’s Integrated Work System design to new heights — leveraging the past but providing an external view and agility that is now the standard in today’s global supply chains.
Harrison continued to build a legacy with the development of an “outside in” focus to the supply chain. This came to be known within P&G as Consumer-Driven Supply Networks and externally as Demand-Driven Supply Networks.
He’s stretched the boundaries of a traditional supply chain organization over the past five years to include collaboration between the Product Supply and Research & Development organizations via a “Seamless Technical Community”. And he applied this same logic to culturally shift the Product Supply organization to be shopper and customer-centric in design and approach. Under his watch, the supply chain organization has delivered high service levels as well as more than $4 billion in cost savings and $1 billion in incremental cash and Net Outside Sales.
His impact goes far beyond process and technology as he is an active champion of diversity, multi-ethnicity leadership development and sustainability.
P&G Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President Bob McDonald says Harrison’s “passion and vision to create an industry leading supply organization has been instrumental in the company achieving its goals for both growth and global expansion. His impact at P&G has been significant and his contributions will continue to serve the business well into the future.”
Here, Harrison shares career highlights, retirement plans and words of wisdom for future visionaries:
CGT: Looking back on your career, what do you consider your biggest accomplishment?
Harrison: Looking back over my 40-plus year career with P&G, I think the results I achieved in my current role are what I feel best about. During my tenure, the size of P&G doubled, our global footprint expanded dramatically, we’ve taken billions out of cost and cash, and we’ve created a supply network that’s world class, offering the company a demonstrable, competitive advantage. I’d like to think that’s my legacy.
CGT: Looking ahead, what will be the biggest CG industry challenge over the next three to five years?
Harrison: Generating growth in a world of flat markets, commodity increases and unpredictability. My advice to business leaders is to create an organization that is agile, resilient (a term we don’t normally use), and driven by principles and vision, which will be increasingly important in the volatile environment we’re likely to face.
CGT: Whom do you admire most in business?
Harrison: If I had to pick just one, it would be A.G. Lafley, the former CEO of P&G. A.G. became CEO when P&G was in a very difficult situation, and he provided focus, clear strategic direction and an energizing, engaging leadership style, all of which were a big part of the terrific results that P&G achieved during his tenure.
CGT: What are you most looking forward to during retirement?
Harrison: I’m looking forward to having time to determine where I want to invest my passion, energy and knowledge as I develop this next phase of my career. I want to stay active in the business world, likely through some board work, but I have a number of hobbies and interests that I want to explore as well.
CGT: Can you share one parting piece of advice?
Harrison: One of P&G’s plant sites in Asia coined the phrase, “Today’s best will not be good enough for tomorrow”. I think this nicely sums up the need for continued improvement across the board.
Ed Billmaier
Senior Director, Relationship & Interactive Marketing
Vision in Action: Ed Billmaier is a tireless champion of evolving the service experience. His well-defined mission for the consumer services department at ScottsMiracle-Gro includes educating consumers, instilling confidence in products, maintaining customer loyalty and supporting corporate marketing. “When I first started working at ScottsMiracle-Gro, the company had not realized the full potential of capturing and harnessing feedback from interactions with consumers,” explains Billmaier. “By creating a roadmap to increase the information captured and how it is leveraged, we executed a new approach that gave insights to improve our products and identify opportunities that directly drove sales in real time.” This change led to additional investment, which in turn, allowed more improvements in the consumer experience and enabling technology, like Astute Solutions’ ePowerCenter.
On the Horizon: ScottsMiracle-Gro is putting a substantial amount of effort into engaging consumers beyond the traditional contact center channels. “We are in the process of implementing a social media monitoring tool that completely integrates with our contact management systems,” reports Billmaier. “This tool will not only enable us to efficiently monitor for and respond to social conversations about our products but will also allow us to proactively engage in conversations regarding the category, measure sentiment, identify influencers and provide a new source for consumer insights.”
Challenges Ahead: “Quickly identifying the new channels of engagement, like Facebook and Twitter, and creating a process to seamlessly integrate those channels and establish one view of the consumer and their needs will require increasing levels of agility and flexibility,” says Billmaier.
Source of Inspiration: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence…Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” – Calvin Coolidge
Constance Howlett
Staff Vice President, Packaging Operations
Estee Lauder Companies
Vision in Action: Constance Howlett is at the forefront of technology and automation solution adoption for the packaging operations group at Estee Lauder. At the top of her long list of achievements is the successful implementation of an electronic artwork solution for routing packaging artwork. “Using a flexible business process management tool, we transformed a manual process into an electronic, trackable process where accountability is clear, artwork can be accessed anywhere the Web is available, and we condensed the product-to-market cycle,” she explains.
Vision in Action: Constance Howlett is at the forefront of technology and automation solution adoption for the packaging operations group at Estee Lauder. At the top of her long list of achievements is the successful implementation of an electronic artwork solution for routing packaging artwork. “Using a flexible business process management tool, we transformed a manual process into an electronic, trackable process where accountability is clear, artwork can be accessed anywhere the Web is available, and we condensed the product-to-market cycle,” she explains.
On the Horizon: Currently, Howlett and her teams are working on two elements to transform the process and experience for producing packaging artwork. The first element is creating efficiencies in production time needs. “A standard challenge in project management is typically any slack built into a timeline is used up by the end, and packaging artwork is at the end of the PLM timeline,” says Howlett. “We are working on a process to reduce the cycle time for the creation of packaging artwork.” The second element is vetting automated solutions to reduce the chance of human error.
Challenges Ahead: “In my opinion, the rapid pace of communication and technological change may be one of the biggest challenges the CG industry faces,” says Howlett. “This creates a multitude of challenges ranging from the constant bombardment of branded messages to how quickly products and services become commoditized. We are addressing these challenges by careful investments in technology and people.”
Leadership Philosophy: “Every individual on my teams is driven to do their best, and it’s my job to cultivate, guide and develop those capacities. This develops strong leaders and therefore strong results in execution that filter down to the company’s bottom line. I also believe that because we spend a significant portion of our time at work it has to be, as much as possible, rewarding and fun!”
Kevin Kroymann
National Trade Marketing
Vision in Action: In late 2009, Kevin Kroymann played a large role in making Hormel Foods the first consumer packaged goods company in the world to combine the predictive analytics of Oracle’s Demantra with the trade promotion management capabilities of Siebel. “This allowed us to align our Consumer Products Sales organization with business units in one planning system linked to our Oracle Business Intelligence warehouse for the annual operating plan, sales plans and quarterly forecasts,” explains Kroymann. As a result, forecast error at the account level was reduced by more than 50 percent. “More importantly, we now have a platform for scenario planning, which allows us to address performance gaps in a timelier manner,” says Kroymann.
On the Horizon: In line with the company’s culture of continuous improvement, Kroymann is leveraging insights gained from the Demantra/Siebel integration to further improve trade promotion effectiveness for Hormel Foods and its retail partners. “For example, we are working to test new promotion strategies developed through a comprehensive effort on our key brands,” he says. “These and other initiatives should help us to maximize top- and bottom-line growth.”
Challenges Ahead: Many of Hormel Foods’ retail partners are shifting focus away from features and off-shelf displays toward everyday low retail prices. “We will address this shift with innovation, insights and shopper solutions.”
Take this Advice: “I grew up on a farm in eastern Iowa. I also worked in a beef slaughter facility to pay for my education. My father and several great supervisors along the way taught me the importance of hard work, taking ownership, treating people with respect and focusing on solutions. You can accomplish just about anything with a smile and a willingness to work with people.”
Jim Murphy
Vice President Sales
Vision in Action: An engaged sales organization is vital to any company’s overall success. Mars tracks all of its sales associates’ engagement annually to ensure each line manager is role modeling “best-in-class” leadership. “Mars realizes that engagement is more than any singular initiative; it is a strategic foundation for the way we do business,” says Murphy. “An engaged sales organization helps raise our overall effectiveness in market and with our customer partners.” For two years now, the Mars Chocolate North America Sales Team was the highest engaged sales organization in key metrics.
On the Horizon: Mars recently deployed new sales planning capabilities to enable customer teams and brokers make better trade spend decisions through real-time ROI metrics. At the same time, they are improving the connectivity between sales inputs and internal teams for a more proactive approach to planning the business. “We have a five-year plan to gain a greater understanding of our trade spend through optimization software; improve accuracy through incorporating point-of-sale data into our modeling and analysis; and better utilize resources through the integration of business processes, like S&OP,” reports Murphy.
Challenges Ahead: With issues ranging from climate change to water scarcity and poverty, sustainability is one of the most pressing concerns for the CG industry as a whole. “Our commitment to sustainability is driven by innovation and is tightly interwoven with our core business strategy,” says Murphy. “We are committed to responsibly sourcing raw materials, making our site operations completely sustainable in a generation, using our brands as catalysts for change and encouraging consumer participation in sustainability.”
Take this Advice: “Conflict is good. Resolution can often lead to a breakthrough, creating a supportive environment where everyone feels they have a license to speak and can openly challenge status quo and drive results!”
Dani Reiss
President & Chief Executive Officer
Vision in Action: When Dani Reiss took the reins at Canada Goose Inc., the company was a private label maker of down-filled jackets for labels such as Eddie Bauer, LL Bean and others. Acting on a hunch, Reiss decided to stop private label manufacturing all together and put his family company on the line by focusing exclusively on a small in-house label called Canada Goose. That was 13 years ago. Today, Canada Goose products — which are only made in Canada — are sold in more than 40 countries around the world. Sales last year grew more than 85 percent and this year will surpass another 50 percent. But the company's wins don’t stop there. The recent acquisition of a manufacturing facility in Winnipeg, Canada led to higher margins. “Furthermore, it reaffirms our leadership role in the reemergence of onshore production; a movement that we predicted over a decade ago and we believe will continue to accelerate for the foreseeable future,” says Reiss.
On the Horizon: Aside from new product creation and development, Reiss’ biggest project is leading the company’s ongoing strategic planning initiative. “This is of particular importance as our team manages its way through exponential growth,” says Reiss.
Challenges Ahead: “The apparel industry is full of challenges such as commodity price increases, relations with retailers, margin erosion, etc. — all of which we have built our business model around avoiding,” says Reiss. “For us, our biggest challenge is continuing to meet our brand promise, which means we must continue to develop and build manufacturing capacity in Canada.”
Take this Advice: “Most brands today are contrived, and have therefore lost their value to the consumer. That’s one reason we insisted on staying made in Canada over a decade ago, and we’ll die before we reverse that decision. Authenticity is everything,” affirms Reiss.
John Replogle
President & Chief Executive Officer
Vision in Action: John Replogle joined Seventh Generation as President and CEO in March 2011. Prior to that, he served five years as President and CEO of Burt’s Bees and three years at Unilever. “At Burt’s Bees, I believe our greatest achievement started with fulfilling a goal of 100-percent employee engagement,” says Replogle. “We created the right set of incentives, tools and opportunities for employees to be engaged with and ‘own’ our mission. Our business model of ‘The Greater Good’ truly came to life when we embraced standards for industry leadership in natural products, striving toward environmental goals and supporting community partners with our time, treasure and talent. As a result, Burt’s Bees was recognized by consumers as the No. 1 green brand in America and as one of the most sustainable CG companies in the United States.”
On the Horizon: Replogle believes that business is one of the most powerful instruments for meaningful change on our planet. “I believe we’ve only just begun to explore the possibilities inherent in our products, our mission and ourselves, and it will be a privilege to build on Seventh Generation’s 23-year legacy and commitment to the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy: In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."
Challenges Ahead: “Educating consumers, and making sustainable choices easier and more affordable will be essential,” says Replogle. “To achieve this end, we must continue to innovate and improvise new ways to meet consumer needs while guiding them toward more conscious choices.”
Leadership Philosophy: “Leaders must have the courage to dream big dreams, set big hairy audacious goals and inspire others to achieve more than they thought possible. Leadership is also a gift born out of service to others. By serving others and helping them to grow, a leader cultivates great followership and earns the privilege to lead.”
Brian Rice
Chief Information Officer
Vision in Action: Brian Rice and his team are in the midst of executing a five-year strategy that positions Kellogg Company’s global IT function as a strategic enabler in achieving business objectives. “Rapidly-evolving technologies are enabling us to deliver new capabilities, which differentiate Kellogg in the marketplace, improve internal decision making, and allow us to provide our employees with a progressive work environment,” says Rice.
On the Horizon: Forces in play are rapidly changing competition dynamics for Kellogg, including the ability to connect with consumers. “The Internet, social media, mobile devices, video games and other technologies are driving a shift in our marketing focus from traditional media outlets to the digital space,” says Rice. To address these forces, Rice recently initiated the delivery of an integrated technology platform that leverages cloud computing to produce a unified consumer database. The latter will provide the ability to segment consumers according to value and interests and deliver a personalized consumer experience.
Challenges Ahead: “Information is becoming the largest driver of competitive advantage for consumer packaged goods companies. We are developing an enterprise data and analytics strategy to better enable knowledge workers across Kellogg,” explains Rice. The strategy will define an information platform with standard analytic tools to mine insights and support decision-making across multiple business functions.
Source of Inspiration: “Whatever success I have had in business has been a result of my good fortune in selecting employees who could do their jobs better than I could have done them myself.” – W. K. Kellogg, Founder, Kellogg Company
Andrea Simone
Director, Enterprise Architecture and Going Digital Program, Global Business Services
Vision in Action: Andrea Simone currently spearheads P&G’s efforts to digitize the company from end to end. His vision to create technology that enables team members across the globe to collaborate more effectively led to the creation of Decision Cockpits — a data analysis tool providing a one stop shop for real-time information to more than 40,000 information workers. “In addition, I feel very proud of the creation of a very successful enterprise architecture (EA) practice. In particular, we have influenced the company to add digitization to the corporate strategy. This is a first for our IT function and a major breakthrough for EA at P&G,” says Simone.
On the Horizon: P&G’s CEO Bob McDonald made it a company-wide initiative “to be the first company that digitizes from end to end.” Thus, P&G’s Global Business Services are working to deliver on that vision by standardizing systems, processes and information; automating to eliminate non-value added touches; and accelerating decision-making to create an environment that is real time. “This will enable us touch and improve the lives of our customers, consumers, shareholders, partners and employees faster, better and more completely.”
Challenges Ahead: “I believe that P&G and our industry need to demonstrate that 'bigger is better', or in other words, create sustainable competitive advantage from scale,” says Simone. “For this purpose, P&G’s ability to digitally enable our employees and core processes, as well as extend beyond the boundaries of our enterprise — from suppliers to customers and consumers — will be critical. It’s a major challenge and one that we are fully embracing.”
Source of Inspiration: In the world of shared accountabilities and matrix organizations, Harry S. Truman’s quote resonates with Simone: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
Gordon Steele
Chief Information Officer
Vision in Action: Over the past few years, Newell Rubbermaid has completely reorganized and centralized information technology (IT) into a truly global organization. This included refocusing IT as a business-driven function that is both a leader and strong participant in the company’s business transformation plan. “Our work on standardizing our business technology platforms, and in particular the success we’ve had rolling out SAP to all of our business units and regions, has been a key enabler to the success of the overall business transformation,” says Steele.
On the Horizon: With Steele at the helm in IT, Newell Rubbermaid continues to pursue a common platform globally. “We are completing our international implementations of SAP, as well as launching significant programs in customer and consumer relationship management and product and innovation management,” he explains. This includes migrating hundreds of brand Web sites to a standard technology platform. Vision Chain will also be implemented to manage multiple demand data sources and execute predictive analytics across brands, across retail customers, across the globe.
Challenges Ahead: “Coming up with new strategies on how to take full advantage of emerging opportunities, such as cloud technologies and the social media phenomena, will always make working in IT an interesting profession,” says Steele. Newell Rubbermaid plans to selectively adopt emerging technologies as they make sense for its business.
Leadership Philosophy: “Hire the best people you can get, and then create a leadership environment that allows those individuals to come together as a highly functioning team that can deliver against any, and all, relevant business objectives,” says Steele.
Retail Stars: Influential Executives Driving Change in the Retail Industry
Ryan Boone
SVP & CIO
Dollar General
The Dollar General chain must handle 45 terabytes with 70 billion rows of data and accommodate growth from opening 600 stores a year. To meet complex data needs, Ryan Boone deployed a cloud-based solution, which allows decision making based on absolutes and not averages. “When you get all the data in one source to help make decisions in a timely manner it will make a difference in your company’s business performance,” says Boone.
Charlie Chanaratsopon
CEO
Charming Charlie
Charlie Chanaratsopon spearheaded the growth of Charming Charlie from one store to 96 stores in 14 states. He and his team developed a unique retail concept, which is a combination of upscale boutique, value-oriented price points, a broad selection of products, and a merchandising scheme based on color rather than category. Charming Charlie positions itself to be a complement to other retailers; a good fit in most shopping centers and malls.
John DAnna
VP of IT Planning and Strategy
The Brookshire Grocery Company
In 2003, the Brookshire Grocery Company started to pursue a broad-based transformation project in a series of bite-sized chunks. The project is largely complete today thanks to a team approach that included business process groups and super users, headed by John D’Anna. He presided over the IT department’s transformation as well, where the creation of business value and innovation was previously hampered by an approach that produced workloads of 80 percent maintenance.
Scott Gladstone
COO
Anna’s Linens
Starting in 2009, Anna’s Linens saw an opportunity for expansion within its existing markets. This required a more sophisticated business intelligence (BI) approach. Thus, Scott Gladstone implemented a solution that brought together a range of data types, such as average value of customer transactions and conversion rates within existing stores, which could then be used to make smarter decisions.
Pete Hogan
VP of E-Commerce
Brown Shoe
Brown Shoe operates Famous Footwear and Naturalizer stores, distributing to more than 2,000 stores, and operating a host of Web sites including shoes.com. Pete Hogan launched a successful multi-phased project last year that took three of Brown Shoe’s Web sites mobile. In the first phase, the brands effectively leveraged e-commerce storefronts in a mobile browser. Later, they created mobile apps for the Apple iPod and Google Android platforms.
Ron Offir
President of Jones Direct Group
The Jones Group
Ron Offir led The Jones Group to launch new e-commerce platforms across all of its brands, including Nine West, Anne Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt and many others. Offir took this project a step further by fully integrating the e-commerce platforms with the company’s brick-and-mortar stores. Today, this system supports 800 stores with Web-based technology.
Steve Smith
SVP & CIO
TBC Corp.
TBC Corp. is a big wheel tire distribution and retailing under the Big O and Tire Kingdom banners, among others. Steve Smith is bringing a new IT concept to TBC Corp. stores that includes a non-traditional approach to the point of sale. He is exploring leading-edge technologies like thin-client, software-as-a-service and mobile checkout to reduce capital expenditures, improve customer satisfaction and reinvent store service.
Cheryl Williams
VP Marketing
Wakefern Food Corp.
Wakefern Food Corp. is a member-owned wholesale distribution cooperative that supplies groceries to 200 ShopRite stores in five states. Cheryl Williams was a driving force behind the company’s effort to focus on shopper insights. One of the primary goals was to leapfrog the competition through a private label initiative that included data integration, vendor-partner reporting, marketing analytics and reporting, and campaign management.
For more information about these retail stars, read the “2011 Influentials” article published in the March issue of RIS News (www.risnews.com).