Hershey Taps Katya Hall to Bridge the Gap Between Enterprise Tech, Market Growth
The Hershey Co. has hired Katya Hall as its head of commercial IT in the U.S.
The leadership move is a direct extension of the company's strategy to build a future-proof enterprise. This will be enabled by unified data and analytics, as well as technology that drives faster and improved decision-making, according to a company spokesperson.
Hall will be responsible for translating enterprise tech investments into actionable growth strategies across sales, marketing and commerce.
Her main areas of focus will include modernizing demand planning, optimizing consumer-facing digital experiences through marketing and media investments, elevating digital shelf initiatives, and improving reporting for sales, trade, pricing and marketing performance.
Additionally, she will help evolve retail capabilities and unify leadership of the company's Next Gen Retail (Thrive 2.0) initiative to modernize retail and sales execution across categories and channels.
Also: Hershey’s first CTO details IT transformation roadmap and priorities
At the core is a cross-functional effort. She will work closely with Hershey's CTO and CIO to meet broader IT needs while ensuring commercial execution supports not just modernization, but company growth.
"By embedding IT leaders within cross-functional teams and prioritizing shared outcomes focused on business strategy, we shifted IS from being a support function to a proactive value-creating business partner, driving strong collaboration and mutual accountability," CIO Gene Kholodenko previously told CGT.
The company has invested extensively in its infrastructure to support this growth initiative, implementing SAP S/4 HANA as its digital backbone and developing predictive analytics platforms to optimize demand planning, trade spend and supply chain processes, using technology enabled by AI, digital twins and machine learning.
