Make the most of AWS re:Invent 2020 – Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Attendee Guide

AWS re:Invent  routinely fills several Las Vegas venues with standing-room only crowds, but in 2020 it was an all-virtual and free event. We had an exciting program for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry with five keynotes, 18 leadership sessions, and over 500 breakout sessions beginning November 30. The sessions provided insights into how AWS experts and talented members of the CPG industry are using cloud technology to transform their businesses and innovate on the behalf of their customers.

You can find more information on re:Invent here.

CPG at re:Invent 2020

From AI/ML-powered smart factories and supply chain to data-driven marketing and personalization, consumer packaged goods (CPG) organizations are challenged with innovating fast enough to support their rapidly changing business. In these sessions, you’ll hear directly from CPG innovators and technology leaders who are harnessing the power of the cloud to transform the way they make, move, and market their products and services.

CPG sessions

CPG201: Driving innovation in Consumer Packaged Goods with Coca-Cola
Available on YouTube here
Discover how Coca-Cola Freestyle is partnering with AWS to rapidly develop and deploy new solutions that increase consumer engagement, reinforce brand, and grow revenue. This session will provide an inside look at how the Coca-Cola team is leveraging cloud-based services to offer a touch-free experience for their retail partners that allows consumers to select and pour drinks quickly, safely, and in a fun new way. You’ll come away with a better understanding of Coca-Cola’s innovation process and how AWS can help you reinvent the consumer goods industry.

SVS302: How LEGO.com accelerates innovation with Serverless
Available on YouTube here
After experiencing scaling issues on Black Friday, the LEGO team fully refactored their monolith to serverless microservices on AWS. In this session, LEGO Senior Engineering Manager and AWS Serverless Hero Sheen Brisals will show you how LEGO.com rebuilt a monolith into an event-driven architecture with Amazon EventBridge and AWS Step Functions at its core, and how designing with a serverless-first mindset can provide surprising benefits. You’ll learn about successful architectural patterns, but also see how LEGO.com manages and grows their serverless team to deliver more in less time at the scale of millions of customers.

IOT205: How Carrier is transforming the cold chain to eliminate food and medicine waste
Available on YouTube here
The cold chain, the network of logistics providers and technologies used for transporting and warehousing items that need refrigeration, is highly fragmented today, leading to limited visibility and control of cargo. This leads to billions of dollars of losses and inefficiencies in transporting perishables like medicines and produce. Learn how Carrier Refrigeration is building a platform using AWS solutions across analytics, machine learning, and IoT to reduce waste and transform the cold chain. Learn how the platform will collect, process, and analyze data from telematics units across the fragmented chain, turning it into actionable insight and recommendations.

RET401: How Stich Fix is delivering personalized experiences
Available on YouTube here
How can organizations deliver dynamic personalized customer interactions? Hear how the platform engineering team at Stitch Fix is transforming customer interactions by delivering a highly concurrent and scalable solution for real-time product recommendations. You’ll also come away with an understanding of the architectural requirements for leveraging Amazon DynamoDB to optimize near real-time machine learning workloads to deliver the right user experience.

Additional sessions relevant to CPG attendees:
AIM210: Building a successful inventory planning solution with Amazon Forecast
Available on YouTube here
Learn how to save millions of dollars building an inventory management solution powered by Amazon Forecast. Retail companies today use everything from simple spreadsheets to complex planning software to attempt to accurately forecast future product demand. These tools build forecasts by looking at a historical series of data, an approach that struggles to produce accurate forecasts. In this session, you will learn how Amazon Forecast uses machine learning to provide more accurate forecast for inventory management, including a real life deep dive on how More Retail saved millions of dollars by building an inventory management solution with their technology partner, Ganit, on Amazon Forecast.

MFG301: 3M optimizes their global supply chain with AWS
Available on YouTube here
AWS is helping industrial customers with their Industry 4.0 journey to transform their business operations. Hear from American multinational conglomerate corporation, 3M and learn how 3M was able to aggregate data from multiple, disparate sources across different functions within their business to create a single view of their supply chain in an AWS Data Lake. This allows their users to quickly build secure, self-service reporting for questions they may have on raw materials and finished goods to glean valuable insights from their data, and optimize operations.

ANT311: Under the hood: How Amazon uses AWS for Analytics at petabyte scale
Available on YouTube here
As Amazon’s consumer business continues to grow, so does the volume of data and complexity of analytics done to support the business. In this session, hear how Amazon.com uses AWS technologies to build a secure, compliant environment to process and analyze petabytes of data. We look at how Amazon is evolving the world of data analytics and ML with a combination of data lakes and parallel, scalable compute engines, such as Amazon EMR, AWS Lake Formation, and Amazon Redshift. We will also look at the challenges Amazon faced in building and migrating to a next generation data lake of Amazon scale.

AWS on Air – Industry Live: Consumer Packaged Goods update
Available on YouTube here
Join David Ahuja, AWS WW Lead for CPG and Ilan Raab, AWS CTO for CPG, as they discuss current trends and recently released services that are relevant to the consumer packaged goods sector.

Extras you won’t want to miss out on!

Andy Jassy keynote
Available on YouTube here
Andy Jassy takes the stage to share his insights and the latest news about AWS customers, products, and services.

Machine Learning Keynote
Available on YouTube here
Join Swami Sivasubramanian for the first-ever re:Invent Machine Learning Keynote. Hear how AWS is freeing builders to innovate on machine learning with the latest developments in AWS machine learning, demos of new technology, and insights from customers.