The Bits and Bites of Transforming an Analog Company
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- May 17, 2021
Simon Lowden said the word “transformation” in his job title challenges the workforce at iconic Australian biscuit company Arnott’s.
Lowden, who has joined Arnotts as the chief transformation officer after a two-decade career in a global role at PepsiCo, says transformation is challenging for people “because it means pain.”
“They think I’m going to cause them to do things differently,” Lowden told an audience at Forresters’ CX APAC event last week.
Of any organization, Arnott’s is perhaps the very definition of an old “analog” business. The company is a biscuit maker with a 170-year history in Australia. It is famous for its range of sweet biscuits such as the Tim Tam, one of the nation’s favorites.
In addition, said Lowden, many staff have been at Arnott’s for an extended period. It was not uncommon for people to be with the company for two decades. While this created a “familial” culture of working together, which had a positive side, the downside was that there is a lot of “legacy behavior,” which made it difficult to inject new ways of working.
It’s about time
Arnott’s, transitioning from the ownership of U.S. company Campbells to private equity house KKR, has invested in digital technology for its logistics operations. But it is now up to Lowden to tackle the digital transformation of the culture.
People in leadership positions, he said, “know they need to change but don’t how.”
Younger people in the organization are impatient because “they can’t believe we aren’t working that way already, because they are digital natives.”
The people in the middle were “fearful of change,” and these were the ones that the transformation needed to focus on, said Lowden.
“We need to find champions in that middle ground, people who will be leaders of the pack,” he said.
It was essential to have these people as “visible proponents of the change you are trying to make.” Then, the culture change will happen.
Making small changes at the periphery, said Lowden, was a “waste of time.” The most significant impact he learned at PepsiCo was to be ambitious, not “play on the edges,” and seek to make “big changes to big things.”
“It is a massive change to move an analog company into a digital future,” added Lowden. Still, it was possible if people understood they were part of something big and that although their working lives would be different, they would ultimately be better.
Three pivotal areas of transformation
To this end, there were three key focus areas for his early work in the transformation role.
The first was around quick wins. The key to that was about “building relationships with customers.”
When employees come into the building, they now see what people are saying on social media channels about Arnott’s, about the products, and what they mean to them.
“It piques the curiosity and creates a level of digital appreciation,” says Lowden.
The second initiative was to automate the score carding system, to create one source of truth so that people spend time “analyzing rather than collecting” data.
Previously, many people created scorecards to track the business, but the fact that the responsibility was distributed means that the “source of truth is vague.”
The third piece was around data collaboration, such as aggregating data collected from retail partners, call centers, and digital sources such as Google.
“We never had a way of collecting that,” says Lowden.
“How do you create a data lake and convert that into ‘talkable’ information so we can build archetypes out of the data lake and extrapolate based on that source of truth.”
Making every bite current
Arnott’s is in the early stages of this process. Still, the aim is to take data from multiple sources which can all talk to each other and build that into decision-making around pricing, communications, and process.
Asked how Arnott’s could achieve this, Lowden made the point that “we sell biscuits, we don’t sell data machines.”
“I am not interested in building our own data machines,” he said.
“I want to partner with people who do that for their day job. As soon as you create an internal team, it gets too complicated.”
A final question was about his ambitions at Arnott’s. What did he hope this transformation would achieve?
“Everybody in Australia has a memory of an Arnott’s experience, but that is probably 15 years ago,” said Lowden.
“My ambition is to make sure that everybody who wants to consume our brand has an experience from yesterday and today, and not from 15 years ago.”
Lachlan Colquhoun is the ANZ correspondent for CDOTrends and HR&DigitalTrends, and the editor of NextGen Connectivity. His fascination is with how businesses are reinventing themselves through digital technology and collaborate with others to become completely new organizations. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Adam Jeffers