‍About the Client: ‍

Built on Innovation

This CPG company is in the business of delighting and winning customers with its suite of private brand food products, offering on-trend product innovations and sourcing local ingredients. Products can be found nationwide in the center-of-the-store, refrigerated, and food ingredient sections. With a strong commitment to food safety and product quality, customer service, and industry-leading supply chain practices, this leading CPG company makes innovation a part of its DNA. 

The Situation:

Optimizing the Supply Chain to Increase Performance 

The pandemic disrupted supply chains for multiple businesses. To offset the impact, many organizations doubled down on digital transformation initiatives to optimize supply chain performance while also unlocking additional value. 

That’s what this leading CPG company did after realizing that the only way to thrive in today’s uncertain economy was to improve its operations. For the health of the organization, it decided to focus on the following business outcomes: decrease spend and oversupply while increasing revenue. 

The company started by conducting a supply chain assessment by analyzing the SKU performance.  Doing so would enable the company to find opportunities to make small but significant changes to improve forecasting accuracy, meet target service metrics, and enhance customer service performance. 

But there was one problem. The company lacked the in-house expertise needed to execute the supply chain optimization initiative. Someone that could lead the design and implementation of new processes across replenishment, forecasting supply and demand planning, and sales and operations planning. 

The Solution: 

Onboarding Former McKinsey Consultant with Deep Supply Chain Expertise 

Time is money in the consumer goods world, so finding an expert was a top priority. After conducting market research for onboarding supply chain expertise on demand, the CPG company landed on Graphite — an on-demand talent acquisition platform that enables seamless access to independent talent.

In collaboration with its Graphite Account Executive (AE), three top-ranking candidates emerged from a pool of 45 highly qualified candidates with S&OP process design and implementation experience.

Of the top three candidates presented to the CPG company, the AE provided a special recommendation for one particular expert: a former McKinsey consultant with over 15+ years of experience. 

The company used the Graphite in-app messaging tool to review and vet each expert. Ultimately, the company decided to go with the recommendation due to the candidate’s strategic-level thinking and experience in developing S&OP playbooks for companies like Nike and Zefry. 

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The Results:

Supply Chain Innovation Drives Better Business 

The expert moved quickly to establish a current state assessment of the supply/demand planning. The big picture overview would serve as a guide for future-state workflows and processes to maximize efficiency.  

Once completed, the expert moved to design and recommend optimized processes for supply/demand planning and S&P planning. Through this exercise, the expert completed the replenishment design, which would help the company to maintain optimal inventory levels based on SKU segmentation and demand and supply planning design, enabling the company to meet customer demand in real-time.

In addition to these two outcomes, the expert also completed the sales operations and planning design that would enable the company to integrate sales, operations, and finance processes in one place — giving it a holistic view of the business. 

The expert then moved into implementation mode — putting into practice the first and second cycle of supply/demand balancing and S&OP practices. In turn, the CPG company could attain its desired business outcomes.

Throughout the engagement, Graphite connected with the expert and the company at several established milestones to ensure the project's success. The CPG company was pleased with the quality of the talent and the ease of managing the project and the expert via the platform.  

More importantly, the ability to pay the expert on Graphite was an add-on they were pleasantly surprised with, which made it easy to track all moving parts in one place. 

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