Nestle Case Study

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Introduction
Nestle’s received its start in 1867 when founder Henri Nestle, a German pharmacist, saved a neighbor’s child by introducing Farine lactee, a combination of cow’s milk, wheat flour, and sugar. This started Nestle to establish a mindset of focusing on nutrition in all products. Since this time, Nestle has focused its mission on leading the world in nutrition, health, and wellness while offering a “wide range of food and beverage categories and eating occasions, from morning to night (Nestle Corporation)” leading it to become the number one food and drink company in the world measured by revenues.

Today Nestle competes in several markets, including baby food, bottled water, breakfast cereals, coffee, confectionery, dairy products, ice cream, pet foods, and snacks “employing 253,000 people worldwide in the production of more than 15,000 different products (Total Logistics ).” Some key competitors (subject to which market you want to analyze) consist of Unilever, Kraft Foods, Hershey, Natural Balance, Dasani, and Maxwell House. To effectively compete in all of these markets, Nestle has expanded into a global organization with 113 locations. Headquarters are still based out of Switzerland, while they maintain a presence in the United States out of Glendale, California (Nestle Worldwide).
Challenges
Over a decade ago, Chris Johnson, Executive Vice President at Nestle, was presented with a huge project that would change the way Nestle operates. He established a “Global Business Excellence program, [which is] a worldwide initiative to implement a single set of procurement, distribution and sales management system (Steinert-Threlkeld)” and he was struggling to generate buy-in from managers. He had one chance to help managers ...

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...ablished a shared set of processes, in factory and administration, supported by a single way of formatting and storing data; and a single set of information systems which was imperative to Nestle operating efficiently in 200 countries. Nestle has been successful at developing a strong supply chain management process by not simply looking at its manufacturing operations, but all areas of business. By keeping the pro-active approach mentality, they have been able to maintain their strong supply chain management processes and offer an improved JIT delivery system without increasing costs. It also appears that they keep a great relationship going with several different types of consultants that are able to provide a non-biased view to make sure they continue optimizing their efforts and allowing them to focus on what they truly exist to do – manufacture their products.

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