Mars’ Secret to Improving Their Supply Chains? Analysing Data

We were delighted to welcome Deepak Jose, Head of Business Strategy and Advanced Analytics at Mars, to our recent Innovate Together event, to discuss Mars’ success in harnessing data and analytics to improve their supply chain and increase profits.

More than ever, supply chains need to be transparent, collaborative, connected, and ultimately more adaptive and resilient.

An increasingly connected world offers organisations more and more data that can be used to predict and even pre-empt supply and demand shocks, so organisations can be ready to adapt and be prepared for potential issues.

The imperative to become an agile digital business has never been stronger. The businesses that embrace the power of data and leverage tools to make fast, connected decisions, will thrive in an increasingly volatile environment.

B2B Commerce, re-imagined

Siloed legacy business models create disjointed experiences across the value chain, which throws up challenges in differentiating between product and business with little customer and channel partner loyalty.

This then provides an opportunity to offer up a consumer-like user experience for partners and digitally enhance the day-to-day activities of account managers. To do this, there has to be a drive towards efficiencies to reduce costs, which causes difficulties in leveraging integration and analytics to drive decisions.

Collaborative and symbiotic relationships across supply chains can help to bring together siloed data in order to react quicker to changes in the market and demand driven by macroeconomic factors.

Mars: Putting Digital First

The power of data analytics, and increasingly AI, has been well understood by manufacturers and consumer goods companies for years, but the key to an agile, resilient and adaptive supply chain is how you use this data.

Adrian Smalley, Consumer Goods Transformation Senior Director at Salesforce, caught up with Deepak Jose, Head of Business Strategy and Advanced Analytics at Mars to explore how they harness this data to improve their business strategy at what he calls “100x speed”:

Deepak leads a global team of data scientists and business translators, “who work hand in hand with the business leaders on solving the most important business problems for Mars at 100x speed.”

“As part of this advanced analytics team, we try to build the capabilities from end to end across various areas of demand, which integrates with areas of the supply chain”. Integration is key to Mars’ business strategy, as he goes on to explain that it’s this which helps drive profitable and strategic revenue growth formats.

“We have the opportunity to support all these different teams – Mars Wrigley and Mars Petcare, to drive that profitable growth, which I’m quite excited about.”

Mars is using data for a digital-first future. By using advanced analytics, AI and automation, they’ve unlocked a truly complete, cohesive and connected understanding across every aspect of supply-chain.

The benefits of a connected supply chain

At Salesforce, we help our customers achieve these outcomes in a few different ways.

Firstly, we help our customers gain visibility and insights across their supply chain, with real-time connectivity powered by MuleSoft, combined with the AI and analytical capabilities in Tableau.

Secondly, we help organisations engage with their customers and consumers through world-class digital experiences. Building that first-party data asset can help sense changes in the market.

By combining these capabilities together on a single platform, we enable those organisations to become more agile and foster a culture of data-driven decision-making based on that single source of truth.

To get a fuller picture of how Mars saw their profits soar, by harnessing data and analytics and committing to a digital-first future, the complete interview is available to view on-demand. Watch it here.