CPG companies: Learn strategies to simplify operations and accelerate growth with AWS technologies in new ebook

More than a century ago, when consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies first started to manufacture branded products, the goal was to produce and sell goods through physical retail stores. That model worked for decades.

Fast-forward to the current day, and that seemingly simplistic approach has transformed in ways company leaders couldn’t have imagined. Now, large CPG companies oversee the production and distribution of a vast array of brands, categories, products, and distinct varieties within product lines. There are mergers and acquisitions to augment product lines and unlock new markets. At the same time, new distribution channels, like online marketplaces, self-service kiosks, and social media platforms, have become new opportunities to offer consumers the products that they want, when and where they want to buy them. There are also challenges and unexpected disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain bottlenecks, and global economic changes, that force CPG companies to morph and pivot to meet consumer demand for products.

The bottom line: as CPG companies grow and evolve, they become more complex.

Over time, that complexity can bog down an organization with slower time to market, decreased innovation, data silos, technical debt, manual workarounds, and duplicate processes—leading to higher costs. However, by simplifying processes and systems, large CPG companies can reduce costs, accelerate innovation, and scale operations to achieve new levels of success.

Three key strategies to simplify a CPG organization

You might wonder how a massively complex organization, like a CPG company, can simplify processes, operations, and technology infrastructure. These three tenets are core strategies to streamline an organization:

Standardize

Though it might be difficult to standardize all the processes in a CPG company because of the different brands, categories, and product lines, you can standardize common technology systems and enterprise-wide processes across departments, like HR, training, legal, finance, and customer service.

Centralize

By strategically centralizing core processes, infrastructure, and applications, CPG companies can drive out duplication and unify disparate systems. A centralized strategy could be particularly beneficial to combine disparate, siloed data sources to democratize data across a CPG enterprise.

Modernize

By migrating legacy systems to the cloud and shifting from in-house IT management to vendor-managed systems, you can simplify your IT organization. You can also shift costs from capital expenditure to operating expenditure, which streamlines budgeting.

These are just three strategies to streamline your organization so that you can accelerate growth. Our new ebook, entitled Drive Costs Out: How AWS Helps Large CPG Companies Simplify and Scale to Drive Operational Efficiencies, covers so much more. In addition to these strategies, the ebook also covers these topics:

• The benefits of simplifying your CPG organization;
• Opportunities across business lines to streamline systems and processes; and
• A three-point plan to drive out complexities with digital transformation.

Highlighting customer successes

The ebook also showcases innovators from the CPG industry who’ve implemented Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies to simplify their organizations, such as:

• iRobot—The company’s connected line of smart robot vacuums is so streamlined that it needs only a team of 10 people to manage the AWS solution that serves more than two million vacuums.
• Coca-Cola İçecek—This Coca-Cola distributor used AWS technologies to build a digital twin of its clean-in-place process to sanitize the interior surfaces of production equipment without disassembly. This solution helped the company gain 200 production days of throughput.
• Dollar Shave Club—This cloud-native CPG company optimized its traditional data warehouse infrastructure with a dynamic AWS compute environment, making internal and external data easier for employees to access and saving the company $300,000 annually.
• lululemon athletica—Because the company’s collocated IT environment impeded application development, it migrated its development, test, and production environments to AWS, paving the way for continuous integration and deployment.

Please take a few minutes to download and read our new ebook to gain insights to help you simplify your CPG organization with AWS technologies so that you can drive costs out and accelerate growth.