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Case Study

Nestlé Continuous Excellence: Operations and beyond

By Bettina Büchel

15 pages

June 2012

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Reference: IMD-3-2314

APRIL 2010. Nestlé Continuous Excellence (NCE) had been implemented in 300 factories in 15 countries, and had achieved well over CHF 1.5 billion in cost savings the year before. It had been rolled out using a deployment plan that involved pilot locations that had volunteered for the program. José Lopez, Nestlé’s executive vice president of global operations, had convincingly demonstrated the benefit of NCE in operations. Now he wanted to see it rolled out to the rest of the organization. One major advantage of NCE was its built-in sustainability. It had a sequence of steps, which were supposed to take on average between two to ten years to complete. At each step, there was an assessment of progress against milestones to demonstrate concrete performance improvement in waste elimination. The gate was not a “one-time pass – always pass;” monitoring was done on a regular basis. As such, the gate served as a continuous improvement tool. NCE’s sustainability, employee engagement and impressive financial returns convinced Lopez that if NCE were implemented in other functions, it could serve as the competitive driver for Nestlé. How should he convince his colleagues on the board?

Learning Objective

The objective of this case is to encourage participants to think about (1) how to engage employees across a global organization, (2) how best to convince the top level of management of the benefit of rolling out a successful operations initiative across the entire organization, and (3) to explore the key success factors for the successful roll-out of a global initiative.

Keywords

Performance Improvement, Quality, Engagement, Bottom-Up, Strategy Deployment, Strategy Roll-out, Matrix Organization, General Management, Strategy

Settings

World/global, Switzerland
Nestlé, Consumer Goods, Food and Beverage
2007-2010

Type

Published Sources

Available Languages

English

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