Kraft Heinz, a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world, faced a far too common retail challenge: meeting customer demand in 2022 — while demand waned during the pandemic, it’s come roaring back to life, and retail companies like Kraft Heinz have been pressed to meet this newfound demand with a broken supply chain.
In a recent Alteryx webinar, Melissa Torres, Business Intelligence Engineer at Kraft Heinz, shared how she and Nick Halyund with Tesselation saved Kraft Heinz 5,500 analyst hours a year with Alteryx, giving decision-makers across the business a single source of truth that guided capacity planning and implemented unseen levels of accountability. Here are the top three takeaways from their conversation.
The importance of having trustworthy data
Creating a powerful culture of analytics requires three things: the right people, processes, and technology. A crucial factor in Kraft Heinz’s success was its process. The upfront work of building and perfecting a repeatable Alteryx workflow took multiple meetings and hours of collaboration; they vetted data sources, scrutinized numbers, and asked all the right questions. But after it was complete — once the data was fully trustworthy — the reports took just minutes to run, and business leaders knew they had reliable data.
This allowed leaders to make confident forecasts and decisions for their business. They could give third-party manufacturers accurate information about what they needed and review week-over-week historical data to evaluate past decisions. The team even uncovered typos in the data from other parts of the organization as their data wouldn’t match their single source of truth. This accuracy held teams in the organization to a much higher level of accountability and helped iron out discrepancies in the decision-making process. Pressure eased on the plants for not producing enough, and instead, the onus was on the demand planners to make accurate requests. In the end, it helped leaders build data-centric strategies.
Empowering your people
Companies can spend thousands on software and processes, but it takes a conscious decision to empower people and to trust them enough to implement a solution. One step further is investing the resources to train and upskill those employees to do that job. Kraft Heinz eliminated the red tape, giving Torres everything she needed to succeed. Not only did they give Torres the free reign to create an analytics solution, but they also paid for training and upskilling in the form of Haylund and Tesselation as a data coach. This conscious decision was a critical factor in building and implementing a solution that saved 5,500 analyst hours.
A common language for analysts
The last aspect of a strong analytics culture is technology. With Alteryx, the analysts and data scientists had a common language. Typically, Alteryx is used as a low-code solution to help analysts upskill in data science, but at Kraft Heinz, Alteryx enabled the data scientists to become much more agile and speak the same language as the analysts.
Instead of building solutions with SAP or Python, the data science team could rapidly iterate ideas in Alteryx with a drag-and-drop interface. It allowed the entire data team to communicate and collaborate. This overlap led to greater productivity, teamwork, and analytic solutions.
Ready to optimize your supply chain?
Watch Kraft Heinz’s webinar on demand.