Sara Lee Case Study
When the global food and consumer goods giant reorganized, it knew it needed assistance with optimizing its product portfolio, but in-house expertise was lacking. The Project Strategy Consulting Group assisted them with understanding the appropriate practices that would help their unique lines of business better manage its capital and align their oversight capabilities for enhanced market penetration.
Overview
New product introduction was nothing new for Sara Lee, but when it reorganized its 17 existing lines of business into just three, it realized that there would be challenges with managing the competition for both its production and its people resources. Numerous consultancies were brought in to help facilitate the supply chain, project management, and business management changes that were needed. But senior strategists within the company knew that critical product portfolio governance was missing from the reorganization planning. The Project Strategy Consulting Group worked to help identify appropriate control and risk authority and manage the development and implementation of structures and tools that allowed the company’s three lines of business to work interdependently while managing towards corporate strategy.
Outcomes
Sara Lee was provided with an in-depth assessment of the current state and a detailed understanding of the risks, challenges, and opportunities associated with a variety of options for moving forward to the envisioned future state senior leaders had articulated. This allowed for an informed level of decision-making by the leadership team regarding the way forward, with costs and impacts of doing (and not doing) certain efforts clearly known. The Project Strategy Consulting Group then provided tool selection and implementation support, including organizational change management and training assistance. Sara Lee’s three lines of business now employ a robust portfolio management mechanism that ties into their new product development processes and helps them better manage to their strategic roadmap. Resources are optimized across the company; integrated marketing communications and business development and sales teams are better equipped to be successful; and the senior leadership teams have deeper insights to make more meaningful decisions regarding opportunities.
Summary
By leveraging an external consultancy that can bridge corporate political and cultural divides, Sara Lee was able to gain actionable insights into areas where there were challenges and understand existing strengths that could be leveraged moving forward. Guesswork on how to mature operations in a substantive manner was removed from the equation, best practices were more properly examined for applicability to Sara Lee’s unique proposition, and new practices were quickly institutionalized. This yielded significant returns in both time-to-market, product viability, an enhanced product development lifecycle, alignment with strategy, and improvements with client and employee satisfaction.
