Hear from our Procurement Game Changer
How it all started
For more than a century, Mars has worked to make a positive impact on the world around us. As a global, family-owned business, Mars believes one can only be truly successful if their partners and communities they operate in prosper as well.
About Mars:
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Inspired and guided by The Mars Five Principles – Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency, and Freedom.
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A family-owned business driven by the belief that “the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today."
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Diverse and expanding portfolio of confectionery, food, and petcare products and services.
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125,000 dedicated Associates across 80+ countries.
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$40 billion in annual sales, producing some of the world’s best-loved brands, including WHISKAS, ROYAL CANIN and SNICKERS.
Challenge
When de Frates joined Mars, it was clear the company had set the right ambitions and the key ingredients for making this a reality were there – they had the business backing, category expertise and analytics skills. But de Frates quickly realized that as an organization, Mars needed additional support to reach their goal. Fundamentally they had to challenge the organization’s culture to take pride in setting stretch goals and closely track their performance more efficiently.
Solution
Choosing Sievo was about more than providing a technology solution. Mars wanted a partner to take part in the design process, bringing best practices to underpin the performance culture transformation.
Sievo’s Savings Program Management (SPM) allows Mars users to create and manage savings projects, while collaborating with their business stakeholders. SPM’s dashboards visualize the Mars savings pipeline status, run a robust approval process and capture the value. Via this united view, Mars can now easily track their performance by region, category, finance aligned, finance approval, projects and more.
Image on right: example of Sieve Savings Overview dashboard
Results
The Mars performance culture transformation has firmly landed the business’ belief in their savings ambition. Thanks to Sievo, the alignment between the Mars Procurement and Finance teams has significantly improved. This is attributed to the SPM’s user-friendliness and ability to dig into project details such as line-item level.
New behaviors have also developed, and with conversations based on live data, they are far more efficient. For example, the bi-weekly ‘performance drumbeat’ meetings at Mars are based on numbers tracked in Sievo’s tool. The results speak for themselves: P&L savings have doubled and, at the start of the year, business alignment on the pipeline exceeds 90%.
