FOOD & BEVERAGE
Nestle´, the Swiss transnational food and beverage company and the largest food
company in the world, made its decision to get serious about digital technology
during 2010, following a disaster in its use of social media and made the key
decision that digital was now mission critical and ‘key to get it right!’
This led to a series of reviews and a new digital investment strategy being
developed. There was a recognition that a lot could be learnt from the best digital
players and would give an opportunity not just to learn but to leapfrog
competition. So links were established with the likes of Amazon, Google and
Facebook and people sent out on fact-finding missions to learn how to take full
advantage of developments in digital technology. A dedicated Silicon Valley team
was set up to get close to these organisations and learn how to ‘co-innovate’.
In addition, a ‘digital acceleration’ team was set up at Nestle´ HQ. Employees
applied for a 6 to 12 month secondment for intensive training, to establish
common understanding and ways of working and to bring that back out to local
markets to enable faster coordination and adoption. There are now even ‘satellite
training centres’ in China, Italy and other locations.
The overall goal was to establish new common, shared global platforms; the
ability to collaborate easily and efficiently; achieve the full benefits of scale from a
global brand in its manufacturing, distribution and marketing; and to implement
new ways of working that incorporate digital technologies that can ‘permeate’ the
entire company.
At the heart is a SaaS business model. But alongside that is a deep commitment
to establish a single centralised data platform that will give Nestle´ a single global
view of its B2B - and potentially also its B2C - customer data and enable insight
that could drive better end-customer engagement, find new sources to sell-in the
full product portfolio and new ways to generate revenue growth. The interest in
getting this universal data view, to understand it and have the analytics capability
to take advantage of it, is seen as the key benefit.
4
Emerging Needs
The drivers for change are many and compelling.
provide, support and manage this consumption
In order to retain customers and gain competitive
model. A service provider must be able to provide a
advantage, organisations today must display the
enterprise grade environment that you can plug in to
nimbleness and flexibility that characterises a
and just consume as the business need demands.
responsive company. And they must be capable of
Apart from the additional functionality, such as
demonstrating these characteristics in each and
increased bandwidth requirements and better traffic
every territory in which they operate.
management it will add to your company"s network,
This flexibility has many aspects. Firstly, you must
SDN holds another major appeal. Since its standards
consider casting aside the management ethos of
are open, your enterprise is not beholden to or
working in silos in favour of developing a multi and
dependent on any one vendor, and open source SDN
cross functional collaborative working culture,
application program interfaces (APIs) can be written
irrespective of where people are located, to produce
by service providers to increase capabilities as needs
the ideas and approach required for innovative new
and technology evolves.
products, applications and services.
So, whether you want to have a BYOD (bring your
Secondly you need flexibility in the deployment of the
own device) policy and then implement a mobile
new tools. If you have a new team being set up in a
device management (MDM) plan to manage
remote location then they need support immediately.
resources and security or have a virtual desktop
If you add 20 employees to an existing team, they
infrastructure (VDI) you need a service provider
need common tools straight away and not in weeks.
capable of delivering whatever you decide ‘to throw’
And if you need fewer team members on a project
at your network in the future.
you must be able to reduce the number of tools you
And the other major consideration is security. Not
use without penalty. Only the cloud based
only is there a legal obligation in most countries to
deployment model can deliver that flexibility.
protect customer data but also to protect a valuable
Consider too the networking requirements between
company asset.
sites. You need to be able to flex up the bandwidth
Security has become increasingly significant in an
when you add those 20 employees and perhaps
environment where employees are working from
reduce it when they are moved elsewhere. You don’t
absolutely any location and often in a wider,
need that extra bandwidth in six weeks time, you
borderless ecosystem where BYOD and home
need it on day one and you don’t want a penalty from
working limits the ability to separate the enterprise
your supplier when the requirement is throttled back.
from the rest of the world.
Only the flexibility of a Software Defined Network
(SDN), Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), SIP
trunks and a professional services provider can
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T r a n s f o r ma t i o n T h r o u g h I n n o v a t i o n
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