PMI’s Digital Quality Journey: A Blueprint for Transformation
Philip Morris International (PMI) is a leading international consumer goods company, actively delivering a smoke-free future and evolving its portfolio for the long term to include products outside of the tobacco and nicotine sector.
While this vision touches every function of the organization, quality plays a critical role in ensuring our new smoke-free products are developed, manufactured, and delivered to the highest standards of safety, compliance and consistency, all while operating at speed and scale. Quality becomes a true value driver.
Achieving this has required more than incremental improvements. We’ve had to redefine how quality operates in a digital-first environment and ensure we are able to adapt to emerging technology like automation, advanced analytics and AI. In 2019, we began our digital quality transformation, recognizing that relying on fragmented legacy systems and high numbers of paper-based processes was holding us back. Rather than waiting for the perfect plan, we established a clear vision and embraced a pragmatic approach: think big, start small and move fast.
By following these principles, we’ve transformed how quality is managed across the organization. With over 25,000 global users, PMI now runs a harmonized and connected digital quality ecosystem covering more than 20 standardized processes, and growing.
Building for the Future While Transforming the Present
Digital transformation is not just about technology and replacing tools. It needs to reflect the realities of a complex, fast-moving business environment and evolving consumer and market expectations.
Solutions have to be flexible, adaptable and scalable from day one, empowered by high-quality data to enable our people, processes and business groups to work better together. Relentless focus on adaptability, high-quality data and our people has yielded tangible results for our business.
Balancing Competing Priorities
A digital transformation program will challenge you to find the balance between competing business needs — there are trade-offs to consider. For example:
Applying out-of-the-box solutions to simplify efforts or configuring designs to adjust to bespoke requirements
Utilizing data in an intelligent way to drive continuous improvement.
There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for quality. The key is to listen closely to stakeholders and empower experienced, knowledgeable and adaptable people to make decisions in line with your vision.
End-Users Support Continuous Improvement
At PMI, we realized early on that end-user satisfaction is key to driving both adoption and long-term success. Following our first rollout, over 80% of users recognized the solution as a significant improvement over legacy tools.
With user and stakeholder feedback shaping our continuous improvement strategy, we prioritized intuitive design and efficient capabilities, resulting in a 300% increase in adoption.
Adoption and engagement have continued to increase since then, year on year, coupled with continued expansion and continuous improvements. There are now three to four times more people using our digital solutions with efficiency improvements of up to 90%. On training management efficiency, we have seen an 83% improvement.
Partnering for the Long Term
Our partnership with Veeva has supported key aspects of our work, including software implementation, effective communication and seamless collaboration. This engagement has helped PMI align solutions with evolving needs and benefit from general industry insights. We remain focused on ensuring that our investments continue to support and advance strategic objectives.
Our quality teams have established helpful cross-functional partnerships within the wider organization. While our initial focus was on quality, we quickly realized that digital solutions have synergies across business units and functions. We’ve subsequently expanded to collaborate across other management systems within the business and subsidiaries to maximize value and position quality as a leading business partner.
A Journey, not a Sprint
Our experience proves you don’t need to have everything planned out in detail to get started. The important thing is to have a clear vision with a holistic plan over the mid- and long-term timeframes. Focus on one key area of interest and use that to demonstrate value. Take a pragmatic, step-by-step approach and adapt as you go.
Once the business started using the solutions, and the more we digitized processes, the more opportunities emerged to unlock business value.
Five years into our journey, we’ve changed beyond recognition, but the journey is far from over. As we look ahead, the foundations we have built are achieving meaningful results today while paving the way for predictive and ultimately AI-enabled quality that will play a vital role in realizing our vision of a smoke-free future.
