Fonterra, shipping dairy worldwide
How to generate $70+ of additional profits with digital assets
Fonterra is the largest private organization in New Zealand, clearing around $20 billion in revenue each year. In 2018, the VP of Digital came to our team with one question: how do we generate $50M of additional profit within the next 5 years on our digital channels?
- Fonterra / NZMP
- Primary Industry
- Product Strategy, Product Build
- 12 months
Creating business cases for each concepts proved instrumental in shaping a realistic but profitable roadmap.
Approach
The discovery phase proved interesting. We had lots of data to start with, we had to start from scratch for our qualitative research: no personas, journeys, pain points or expectations map.
In any case, any broad request like Fonterra’s needed a very structured answer. I proposed:
- Identify target markets. Not all markets had the same potential for growth, so I wanted to look at the sales data to evaluate which market to serve first, to create traction and generate immediate revenue.
- Deep-dive into 2 key markets. I needed to fill the qualitative gap by talking directly to customers and sales reps in markets. I wanted to model customer behaviours through archetypes so that I could identify gaps in expectations. Off we went to China and Malaysia.
- Create concepts and build their supporting business cases. An intense iterative process to generate concepts in a highly complex, constrained environment.
- Prioritize concepts and their use cases on a macro-roadmap.
Create and implement a comprehensive stakeholders’ communication plan to onboard all necessary parts on the journey.
Beyond this strategic phase, I wanted to structure the build in a very efficient way, with one dedicated team that blended both Accenture and Fonterra people, so that Fonterra quickly grew autonomous.
Project
The strategic phase took 3 months and landed us on 7 approved concepts of digital products. From optimizing the low-margin, high volume orders to enabling complex chemical innovation with AI, each product served a business objective. Whether it be “optimize operations”, “Sell more high-value products” or “Reduce sales rep admin workload”, I made sure each concepts delivered massive value on one or more of these.
This paid off: before we dove into the implementation, the overall business case for this suite of products reached $70M over 5 years. Fonterra did not hesitate and decided to implement the whole suite. It was one of the biggest win for Accenture NZ, leading to a long-lasting partnership that lives up to this day.
Role
I personally led the the strategic phase and the implementation of the first product. I wanted to make sure that the strategic intent we painstakingly built was infused into the products themselves. Beyond this leadership role, I became the key decision maker to balance user value, business impact and technical effort during the build.
After a few months, I progressively transitioned out of this product manager role to get into a more strategic one, where I advised Fonterra’s digital stakeholders on best practices, next products to think of and larger digital trends to monitor and experiment with.
