Though many Mars products are eaten, the company has developed significant pathways to interact with ... [+] customers digitally.

Sandeep Dadlani is the Chief Digital Officer of Mars, a post he has held for a bit more than three years. As he noted in a recent conversation I had with him, his mandate is to leverage technology, data, analytics and new digital experiences to help Mars achieve its purpose and its ambition faster. He noted, We call it 100X or 100 times faster.

This is a remarkably aggressive goal. By way of example, he noted that the thrust of this will be accomplished by making the enterprise more digitally savvy, by creating new business models and by driving synergies in the companys technology platforms. He indicated there are two teams and added automation that are important to bring these to life.

First is a team called User Centricity. It is a small team that helps the company engage consumers better to drive new insights, which then drive the companys offerings, products and business model in new directions.

The second team focuses on data and analytics. Over the last three years, we set up some great data lakes, infrastructures, hired data scientists, created a vendor ecosystem now that has hundreds of petabytes of data, said Dadlani. Now, we are in a position move forward in the data and analytics journey meaningfully.

Automation has also been critical. Dadlani noted, To take away menial work from [employees] jobs, then to provide them more meaningful work, automation became an important area to be good at.

Collectively, these three pillars make up what Mars refers to as its Digital Engine. The magic is in the combination. The Digital Engine enables Mars to find the problem with the consumer, solve it using analytics and data, then once [we] find the solution, scale the solution using automation, said Dadlani. Over the last three years, his team has tracked over 500 sprints using the Digital Engine. Though he underscores that the team is still in the early stages, the company has shown greater agility, and the pace of innovation and change is picking up toward the 100X goal.

User Centricity has become a movement of sorts within the company that Dadlani believes will be a catalyst for even greater progress. The User Centricity team has worked with every segment of the business from Mars Petcare to the chocolate and gum business, Mars Wrigley, to Mars Food (with brands like Uncle Bens and Dolmio sauces) to the personalized nutrition brand Mars Edge. The team framed the problems each business hoped to solve through their plans for the future and reframed them using User Centricity.

In partnership with Mars University, which provides training across the company, Dadlanis team provides modules on topics of growing importance. Machine learning is an interesting example. A course was created for technical associates across the company, but the link for the training was accidentally forwarded to thousands of associates who were not in the traditional technical disciplines that the course was developed for. To my shock, I found many of those associates in Sales, in Supply Chain in other functions eagerly signing up for that training, said Dadlani. Because everybody wanted to learn machine learning, a sense of collective awareness that these skills are becoming more important as we move into the future, regardless of what you are going to grow up to be. That allowed us to create a curriculum around myAnalytics for which level zero is applicable for everybody.

Ultimately, Dadlani believes that the path to realizing the 100X vision is the focus on the consumer. This idea of continuously forcibly dragging the consumer into the conversation; that has driven pace, he said.

I asked Dadlani about the metrics he and the team use to gauge progress. He indicated that they use lagging and leading metrics. The former includes revenue streams and pace at which digital or eCommerce revenue is growing, as well as supply chain costs and throughput. The leading metrics, which he believes are early indicators of whether the company are correctly traveling towards a digital journey, include the number of processes automated and the number of hours freed up due to the changes made.

Though the company has further to go on this journey, the progress has been remarkable so far, and Dadlani believes he is bending the culture just enough to achieve this audacious goal.

Peter Highis President ofMetis Strategy, abusiness and IT advisory firm. His has written two bestselling books, moderates theTechnovationpodcast series, and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow himon Twitter@PeterAHigh.

Original post:

Mars Will Be 100 Times Faster Through Its Digital Engine - Forbes