Kraft Heinz: How End-to-End Visibility Drives Resilience

While facing ongoing disruption across the world, businesses need to have confidence in their own supply chains. For a multinational company like Kraft Heinz, this can be incredibly difficult.

As the third-largest food and beverage company in North America, the company has an expansive supply chain. This puts it at risk of disruption and supply chain fragmentation.

To avoid this, end-to-end visibility is key. Gaining these insights allows businesses to see which suppliers are at risk and how they can gain more control over their supply chain.

The visibility gap

Until the last few years, global organisations had been confident in their supply chain stability. Now, following a constant stream of geopolitical disruption, businesses are turning towards supply chain visibility tools in order to spot risks as they arise. 

In its Global Supplier Risk and Sustainability Survey, Achilles – a global leader in risk management and business intelligence – examines where visibility gaps still remain. 

According to the report, only 6% of organisations state they have full visibility into Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers. Ongoing disruption and regulatory expansion are consistently adding new levels of complexity to businesses. 

“Supply chains today are more complex, more interconnected and more exposed to disruption than ever before,” explains Adam Whitfield, Head of Global Compliance and ESG at Achilles.

“Building resilience now requires more than periodic supplier assessments. Organisations need structured supplier data, consistent governance and continuous monitoring to identify emerging risks early and intervene before problems escalate.”

Jump-start to action

Laís Piccinini Doi, Associate Director S&OP – Meals at Kraft Heinz Company, explains that COVID was a majorly disruptive event for the company, but it allowed Kraft Heinz to examine its operations.

“It was a very good test to see how we perform in a very different system that we are used to,” she says. 

“We had to revamp all our operations to make the best with the resources that we had and still be able to maintain reliability, consistency and quality at a fair price to the customers.

“Having full control of our operations is not feasible because there’s too many moving parts. We don’t know what's going to happen, but we know the weak links that we need to protect and work to make sure that we’re going to have a continuous and resilient operations and supply chain.”

Going through this major event, Kraft Heinz was able to see where the areas of risk sat.

Though AI has made preparing for risk easier, there is still no way to fully predict it. As a result, having this overview of a supply chain and its potential risks allows businesses to prepare for the worst or to put in the resources to strengthen the risk point. 

Innovative strategies

If a company fails to build visibility across its operations, it risks both company trust and also company stability. Through an increase in visibility, teams across the organisation can communicate better, leading to innovative strategy discussions and a more collaborative organisation. 

“Being able to tell the story end to end across all of our stakeholders really makes a difference in not only building credibility and trust, but also making changes to the system,” Laís adds. 

Through these discussions, supplier bases can be discussed with the complete information needed – is this supplier risk too much, or can it be solved with a new strategy or larger investment?

From this, companies can decide whether or not they want to diversify their supply chain – something which has been a major theme within organisations amid ongoing disruption. 

“It’s all about the trade offs,” Laís says.

“You can have this reliable supplier with this price, but on the other hand, if you change to maybe a more competitive price supplier, how does that impact your operations?”

Building supplier relationships 

The benefit of visibility goes both ways – if a company expects visibility from its suppliers, it should also ensure visibility to its suppliers. 

"The suppliers nowadays also want more visibility,” Laís adds.

“They want to make sure that they can count with the business for a longer period of time than just being one offs and all of those things play in the negotiations that we are going to have.”

If a supplier does not have the confidence in the organisation it is doing business with, it may look elsewhere. Communication and transparency are key for a number of reasons – strategy development, supplier relationship building and withstanding geopolitical disruption.