The Art of Possible

Connect, collaborate, and grow Mars’ business with AI

Mars, Incorporated is a global enterprise that works in multiple markets with multiple suppliers, customers, logistical partners, and financial institutions in a hierarchal value chain. These value chains can be disconnected, creating operational silos and added costs, which can create a decision-making lag, as well as prevent best value to the end customer.

Key challenges across the enterprise value chain include:

• Complex and hierarchal value chains

• Online growth fragmentation of demand

• Information silos, increased cost and latency

• Partners reach is limited to one up/one down

• Rigid supply chains with increased risk of disruption

Creating a digital-twin of your existing networks of manufacturers, suppliers, service providers, customers and financial institutions is critical to compete in the global economy.

Automate Artwork review at Mars with AI

Artwork designing is one of the most critical functions of brand building for any large global manufacturer like Mars, which typically has multiple brands and a large number of products or SKUs under the same. Artwork designing is an extremely skillful task; the design not only has to take care of the brand identity, aesthetics, appeal and ensure correct product messaging, but also has to comply with various regulatory norms and standards. These include the use of images, placement and usage of symbols, calling out contents, disclaimers, to name a few, and also ensure that customer’s rights are protected and respected. All these elements have to be present in the product packaging artwork.

Post-development and before rollout to production, artwork review and proofing needs to be done. Due to the subjectivity involved Review is currently a manual and time-consuming activity, except for some basic checks automated.

Grow the Mars Brand with Trade Promotion Effectiveness and Optimization

Building a resilient supply chain with data fuels future growth, creates new customer experiences, and helps define business goals. A cognitive, connected supply chain helps companies like Mars transform into a data-driven organization.

Today, the variability in marketing channels has increased, and the marketing mix of global manufacturers like Mars is rapidly evolving with spend on digital marketing increasing while offline media marketing spend drops considerably. The customer’s journey with the product happens frequently online, and BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup In-Store) is the new norm for customer purchases. In this context, older promotion tactics used may not even remain relevant and the digital discovery angle should be considered.

Global organizations spend up to 20% of their revenue for Trade promotions. As per research, 59% of promotions do not even break even. Given this, companies are always on the lookout for ways and means to measure the trade promotion effectiveness and optimize the spend on trade promotions.

However, they can struggle to do effective promotion effectiveness analysis due to:

• Reliance on excel based solutions for TPx, which is clearly inefficient to handle the complexities of data variations and volumes

• Lack of advance and automated post-event analysis capability

• Lack of predictive modeling capabilities for trade promotion optimization

Promotion effectiveness analysis cannot be done in siloes anymore with the increase in complexity of the omnichannel marketing mix and digital trade promotion coming into play too.

Amplify procurement transformation at Mars with AI

With an increasingly complex ecosystem of technology, suppliers, and market information, Procurements Leaders within large global manufacturers have to tackle certain challenges to meet the rising expectations. Procurement is increasingly expected to evolve from a support function to a key strategy enabler. Critical tasks include optimizing cost, bringing in innovation, and moderating risks and costs, all the while keeping high supplier performance in mind.

91% of CPOs agree that procurement needs to be more agile to respond to market changes and 78% Procurement Leaders say that cost reduction is their top priority. From this perspective, large organizations like Mars are looking to make procurement visible, meaningful, and simple by addressing key challenges in a way to make spend management both insights-driven and autonomous. Key challenges include:

• Data spread across multiple ERP systems

• Missing connections between internal and external insights

• Limited Spend Visibility, supply risk and spend leakages

• Lack of insights on performance issues

• Critical obligations in supplier contracts that lack proactive monitoring

• High Contract leakage and non-compliant spend

• Limited ability to influence buying patterns

• Lack of awareness on opportunities that exist

• Business decisions delayed or not the most optimal

• Different views across various stakeholders

Enhance contract visibility and searchability at Mars with AI

Food industries, including pet food and the pet health industry in which Mars operates, are highly-regulated, where legal and regulatory frameworks keep evolving. Failure to maintain effective control processes could lead to violations, unintentional or otherwise, of laws and regulations. Legal claims or regulatory enforcement actions arising out of failure or alleged failure to comply with applicable laws and regulations could be very damaging for the organization.

Large organizations like Mars work with multiple suppliers, partners, distributors, retailers, customers, and the labor force for different services and create contracts with them. Contract negotiation, tracking, and review is a key activity involving a big team of lawyers, process SMEs and is a manually intensive process. The contracts are often present in hardcopies and at times as unscanned documents. The contracts govern how business is conducted and are governed by the law of the land. Not understanding legal obligations could lead to legal issues and, in turn, to incurring of unnecessary expenses.

Managing contracts with all your suppliers & partners is a human-intensive process and involves high costs incurred as fees of legal experts and legal process SMEs. The process is also slow and time-consuming.

Automating the contract analysis and review process can help gain better visibility and searchability across contracts to identify the right clauses to watch out for and keep a track on expiring contracts, or any policies being violated by any of the involved parties in the ecosystem.