PROCTER AND GAMBLE (P&G) 1. Company Profiles The name P&G combines William Procter with James Gamble – Procter & Gamble. On April 12, 1837, they started producing and selling their soap and candles. On August 22, they formalized their business relationship by pledging $3,596. 47 a piece. The formal partnership agreement is signed on October 31, 1837 what began in 1850 as a small, family-operated Soap and Candle Company now provides personal care of superior quality and value to consumers in 140 countries. Since 2000, the P&G president and chief executive A. G.
Lafley leads community consists of nearly 98,000 people working in almost 80 countries worldwide. Procter & Gamble SA (P&G) is a chemical company. It is one of the newest P&G subsidiaries. The company offers services in the areas of beauty and grooming, health and well-being, and household care. It markets different brands like Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Pampers, Always, Tampax, Oil of Olay, Vicks, Pringles, Old Spice and Hugo Boss. Procter & Gamble in South Africa principally into production of cleaning products and beauty care products. P&G uses its South African base to export to neighboring SADC countries.
The company has offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town. P& G has its Headquarters in Ohio, US. Legacy systems in particular lock companies into old business designs and bury management in multiple views of disaggregated and inconsistent information. Untangling the web of competing priorities and misinformation is a critical component of preparing to handle new compliance burdens. But regulatory requirements are not the only force of change. Companies are relentlessly pursuing supply chain improvements. Emerging markets, having been tapped as sources of low-cost production, are quickly becoming the focal points of top-line growth.
Competitive forces are demanding that companies collaborate beyond enterprise walls in “business webs,” and the real time exchange of data across the supply chain is rapidly evolving into a standard business practice. Innovation cycles are accelerating rapidly. Almost twenty years ago, Procter & Gamble (P&G) started preparing for this evolution by changing its approach to information across the organization. The company began to treat information as an asset separate from the applications that “housed it” and focused on managing that asset more strategically—in particular, by creating truly global IT systems.
In doing so, P&G offers a leading example of how a company can prepare itself both to meet compliance burdens and to compete effectively in the age of transparency. P&G is now well positioned to deal with the new compliance regulations and able to cut costs from the supply chain, accelerate innovation cycles, realign its internal IT resources, extend competitive advantage in M&A activities, and enable holistic views of stakeholder relationships. At P&G, compliance and performance optimization are two sides of the same coin.
Transparency, via accurate, unified data and standardized global systems and process, is the foundation for both compliance and performance. Optimization and Compliance Supporting systems are not much better than human middleware if they contribute to fragmentation in the enterprise. Without a centralized system, different methodologies, standards, and metrics evolve on their own, and it can be close to impossible to get all these processes speaking the same language.
Often, fragmented information systems are a symptom of other geographic and organizational fractures that resist change. An integrated approach that carefully bridges these divides can head off compliance/ regulatory concerns and better serve the strategic interests of the organization. P&G was investing in the concept of process optimization. In 1993, Process and Operations Research (OR) became an important part of a broader movement to rethink data management and use data as an asset. P&G started by examining its North American operations to identify new efficiencies.
Models by the group tasked with the project suggested a reconfigured supply chain that would consolidate P&G’s American manufacturing plants, and was forecast to save $200 million annually in supply chain costs. More importantly, the project team pointed towards the future potential of the OR group to help transform the company suggests Glenn Wegryn in a Computer World article: “That project planted a seed,” recalls Glenn Wegryn, one of the analysts on the project and now associate director of P&G’s 17-person OR group, known as IT Global Analytics. It really was a wake-up call about the capability you could provide by using OR tools tied to a deep understanding of how P&G’s operations worked. ” In essence, Process and Operations Research boils down to understanding exactly how an organization runs and putting the processes in place to make it function more efficiently. The foundation upon which both compliance and optimization are built is an effective “single version of the truth” (e. g. , a master data management system) and standardized, global systems and processes that enable the company to use and disseminate this data effectively.
Because P&G spent the last decade building these capabilities and processes, the company has a much easier time meeting the new compliance regulations and can focus more on building sustainable competitive advantage through more strategic endeavors. 2. Mission, Vission & Phillosophy Mission “We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s consumers, now and for generations to come. As a result, consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work to prosper. Vission “We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s consumers. As a result, consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit, and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders, and the communities in which we live and work to prosper. ” Phillosophy Procter & Gamble Professional, the away-from-home division of Procter & Gamble, is committed to environmental responsibility, a core company value. P&G scientists design safety and product efficacy into every product and every package.
They use scientific tools to evaluate human and environmental exposure throughout the lifecycle of the product. P&G company values and policies ensure environmental and human safety standards as well as compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements. So while no disinfectant can be certified as “green,” all P&G customers can rest assured that the company is committed to both high quality and fully compliant products. 3. External factors – The opportunities and threats presented by the external environment. Today, Regulatory and Compliance issues are among the biggest drivers for corporate transparency and information sharing.
A global crisis of trust is casting a harsh light on businesses and on their information sharing and reporting practices. Companies addressing risk issues adequately, are their financial statements valid, do they adhere to social, ethical, and environmental guidelines. Other companies point to P&G’s process and approach as the benchmark, but argue that they cannot use compliance issues as a driver to replace core systems. Some are so far behind that it’s unrealistic to tackle these daunting process and systems issues.
In truth, it’s hard to make a high-return business case for undertaking such systematic transformations solely for the purpose of meeting compliance regulations: other tangible benefits must be identified and linked to these IT investments. However, even companies that accept and quantify these potential benefits and choose to pursue process re-engineering for strategic purposes quickly run into another barrier. While P&G maintained a consistent vision of its desired end state and understood the strategic benefits that could accrue from it, the business case couldn’t always be made at the “local level. ”
While integration is invaluable for compliance and regulatory requirements, it’s also an engine of competitiveness. Far from restricting P&G’s agility, process standardization has enhanced its ability to handle unanticipated business and strategic challenges. Those charged with compliance efforts have leveraged the benefits of integration and standardization where it exists, and helped create the conditions for it where it does not. The result is a strategic approach to compliance and business strategy that helps unify risk management, governance, and other related disciplines under a common set of practices and approaches. The ollowing sections of this report describe several strategic advantages of P&G’s standardization and integration effort: • Compliance: P&G leveraged in-place controls for SOX compliance. • Analytics: Analytics and business intelligence have improved. • M&A: Acquisitions are integrated more quickly at a reduced cost. • Outsourcing: Standardized utility IT functions are easier to outsource. • Global Data Synchronization (GDS): Clean internal data facilitates external information sharing. • Innovation: A standardized approach that engages external innovators has reduced costs and increased the success rate of new innovations.
Working with its external auditor, P&G determines which countries are SOX relevant/irrelevant, and then decides what applications, databases, and operating systems need to be “mapped” for compliance. 4. Internal factors – The strengths and weaknesses internal to the organization. The internal factors may be viewed as strengths or weaknesses depending upon their impact on the organization’s objectives. What may represent strengths with respect to one objective may be weaknesses for another objective. The factors may include all of the 4P’s; as well as personnel, finance, manufacturing capabilities, and so on.
The external factors may include macroeconomic matters, technological change, legislation, and socio-cultural changes, as well as changes in the marketplace or competitive position. The results are often presented in the form of a matrix. While many organizations find improved efficiencies through declines in error rates and measurable improvements in productivity, they are not equally shared across the P&Ls of various business units. In other companies, such points of resistance often derail the best laid plans: a single manager trying to meet next quarter’s numbers can trump the overall value of integrated, standardized work processes.
It takes strong internal culture and committed senior management support to overcome such barriers, and P&G had both. As IT Vice President Robert Scott notes, “For the good of the order we’re driving to a standard platform that will pay off in the future. ” Companies experiencing undue difficulties in risk management or compliance initiatives may well be victims of larger information disconnections within their organizations. They face the choice of either handling these issues piecemeal by tackling the symptoms of the problem, or confronting the more difficult but effective approach of an enterprise transformation.
Getting executive buy-in for regulation specific compliance investments (e. g. , SOX) is not hard, the potential penalties for non-compliance scare the daylights out of many senior management teams. But convincing the organization to take an integrated approach to managing strategic governance, risk, and compliance – in addition to meeting compliance requirements requires another level of support. P&G says its critical success factor was top management sponsorship from the beginning of its ERP program.
Executive support ensured the vision and architecture for the implementation came to completion. According to Gartner: “This sponsorship has provided the governance to support the transition to the global standards, allowing the implementation teams to concentrate on fast deployment. ” With executive support in place, the next step in a successful implementation is to assign responsibilities to the appropriate offices: “managing data is a business issue, not a technology issue. If the IT organization tries to take it on by itself as a technology issue, it won’t work,” says Robert Scott.
P&G established global leaders for each business process within the newly established Global Data Services (GDS) group. These people were responsible for learning the data and process requirements for each function P&G wanted to standardize, and for getting buy-in at the “local level. ” In addition to overseeing the one-time standardization effort, they had to ensure that the global data management system was a “living” process, and that the central group led all updates. These leaders greatly simplify the eventual SOX compliance effort.
P&G has global “horizontal process owners” who develop one standardized global approach, in contrast to other companies that often have site or country specific approaches. Such owners help integrate strategic governance, risk and compliance practices across the organization. Similarly, an integrated Global Development Environment (iGDE) was created to enforce a single source of change. By consolidating two development4 systems (one for finance and logistics, and one for HR) P&G was able to accelerate rollouts, changes, and upgrades. A virtual web of local stakeholders supported this centralized group.
P&G’s innovations were developed internally by taking an integrated, strategic approach to their systems implementation, P&G was ideally prepared to deal with the fluidity of the competitive environment and provide a leading edge example of how to compete using transparency. P&G improved internal performance through streamlined operations and accurate, accessible data. SOX requirements are about proving this truth to external stakeholders and monitors—while SOX highlighted a few areas that P&G needed to strengthen, in most cases the appropriate controls were already in place.
As Eugene Munson remarks, “We never [before] had to prove to any non-P&G group that our internal controls were in place. Though a lot of this isn’t new, it was scattered. ” Transparency is the key to driving SOX compliance. 5) SWOT Analysis SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving that objective.
SWOT analysis is just one method of categorization and has its own weaknesses. For example, it may tend to persuade companies to compile lists rather than think about what is really important in achieving objectives. It also presents the resulting lists uncritically and without clear prioritization so that, for example, weak opportunities may appear to balance strong threats. * Business description – A detailed description of the company’s operations and business divisions. * Corporate strategy – Analyst’s summarization of the company’s business strategy. SWOT Analysis – A detailed analysis of the company’s strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. * Company history – Progression of key events associated with the company. * Major products and services – A list of major products, services and brands of the company. * Key competitors – A list of key competitors to the company. * Key employees – A list of the key executives of the company. * Executive biographies – A brief summary of the executives’ employment history. * Key operational heads – A list of personnel heading key departments/functions. * Important locations and subsidiaries – A list nd contact details of key locations and subsidiaries of the company. The profile analyzes the company’s business structure, operations, major products and services, prospects, locations and subsidiaries, key executives and their biographies and key competitors. * Understand and respond to your competitors’ business structure and strategies, and capitalize on their weaknesses. Stay up to date on the major developments affecting the company. – The company’s core strengths and weaknesses and areas of development or decline are analyzed and presented in the profile objectively.
Recent developments in the company covered in the profile help you track important events. * Equip yourself with information that enables you to sharpen your strategies and transform your operations profitably. – Opportunities that the company can explore and exploit are sized up and its growth potential assessed in the profile. Competitive and/or technological threats are highlighted. * Gain key insights into the company for academic or business research. – Key elements such as SWOT analysis and corporate strategy are incorporated in the profile to assist your academic or business research needs.
P&G’s OR group was very successful at finding ways to streamline U. S operations for superior returns. In 1997, after some early successes with localized implementations, P&G started its evolution to a globally standardized platform with a harmonized global ERP rollout. Such platforms are crucial to help overcome regional fragmentation issues, achieve consensus on priorities, establish global practices, and manage risks and opportunities globally. P&G had four main objectives for this project: • Harmonize and leverage global scale for business processes in finance, human resources, and the supply chain. Shift the company to a web-enabled platform to allow an integrated, consumer-driven supply chain. • Build in enough upfront flexibility to streamline future acquisitions and divestitures. • Deal with the looming Y2K issue which, regardless of other strategic issues, required the company to change many existing applications. P&G designed a three tier data model to facilitate business process harmonization across multiple SAP instances—a platform for running a truly global business. The foundation of the model was a globally standardized IT system.
One specialized R/3 system – The Global Data Client was the “bedrock” for the entire system. This client was the key standardization mechanism, as the system was rolled out simultaneously around the globe. Fully standardized R/3 transactions systems (accounting, logistics, etc. ) are layered on top of this client, with web-enabled decision support tools sitting atop the system. The sheer scale of the exercise required multiple identical instances. For example, P&G divides the supply chain geographically into the Americas, EMEA, and Asia/Pacific.
But each instance is built off the same template with all “local” requirements baked in, eliminating the need for local “add-ons. ” The global ERP and supply chain backbone implementation was highly successful. By summer 2002, R/3 was handling all finance and HR, and about 90 percent of the manufacturing sites used R/3 for materials purchasing, supply chain planning, and execution. In 2002, there were more than 45,000 registered users, and typically 5,000 concurrent users were on the 38 production systems. Because of its integrated approach, P&G was better positioned to meet SOX requirements than many companies.
Within P&G, SOX was not viewed as a burden. That’s because a mature control structure was already in place. Complying with Sarbanes-Oxley simply extended that control structure and made it transparent to regulators. The objective was to enhance and leverage existing systems, not reinvent the wheel. Standardized processes and systems make P&G’s challenges less daunting than the ones that many other companies face. SOX compliance at P&G is made easier by the fact that many of the financial reporting systems are consolidated within regional service centers.
This consolidation of infrastructure, controls, and systems results in fewer systems and less complexity. P&G then uses internal tools, such as management scorecarding, to monitor progress on “open issues” and control self assessments, and to meet the requirements of internal and external audits. While SOX itself has not driven many internal process efficiencies, the controls framework has. Based on the visibility it provides, process change that might have occurred locally can now be implemented regionally or even globally—with a focus on ata integrity. P&G is particularly focused on the protection of its information assets as they traverse through the infrastructure ecosystem. This includes the integrity of the data, security issues, and intellectual property ownership. Information assets are protected at every stage: while in the application, while being calculated, while in storage, while in transit, and when placed on external Web sites. 6. Critical success factors A major impetus for P&G’s transformation was the opportunity to use and manage information as a strategic asset.
Early on, the OR group focused on supply chain issues. With globalization, the international trading environment introduced many variables and nuances into optimization decisions: trade terms and trading barriers (including trade passages between companies), duties and duty tariffs, taxation, approval processes, labeling, and other issues. Structuring classification systems to determine how to get the best returns on investment can be a science in itself. One example is duties that can sometimes equal 100% of the value of the end product.
Duties depend on where the material originally came from, but (for example) sometimes you can ship the material to another location for some value added work, but return it to the original country for completion and offset the duty impact substantially. As recently as the mid1990s, P&G could not computationally manage many of these complexities, but optimizing such decisions has an enormous effect on profitability. It’s no coincidence that the development of this new capability coincided with the huge effort to standardize processes globally.
In order to succeed, analytic capability, standard systems, and clean data must all be working together. It’s an evolution that continues today. Analytics group says: We knew that it was a matter of completing the installation of the ERP system to create new visibility into areas we never had access to before. We knew that the time for more advanced analytics would come, and lo and behold, it’s here. Now the demand is for us to really understand how to leverage the information from this global view to address compelling business needs, such as improving decision reaction time with better, more insightful analyses.
We need to invest in better analytical capability to be able to tap into that. Inventory provides an early example of optimization. P&G’s ERP system uncovered the connections (and in many cases, the lack of connections) between many different stores of inventory. P&G is now applying more advanced techniques to view and analyze these multiple inventories in order to reduce its total amount of in-stock volumes. The company is investigating advanced techniques that effectively replace inventory with information, and drive margin growth as a result.
P&G is also leveraging the core systems and processes that enable this optimization to help meet compliance requirements. The process of optimization analysis continues to evolve along similar lines to the global ERP system. As P&G develops its analytic capability, Wegryn says, “The hardest part is trying to track down all the different people who are out in the company’s business units around the world doing this type of work and find out what applications or what analyses they developed.
We needed to learn whether they were answering the same questions, but in different ways or with home cooked methods that needed to be pulled together. Only then could you capture the synergy of consistent methods and analysis tools. ” Bridging these silos together and overcoming fragmentation within the organization is crucial to long-term success. P&G CEO A. G. Lafley has said that consumer packaged goods is ultimately a scale business: scale drives margin growth and the ability to reinvest. By standardizing its global processes, P&G has greatly increased the value it can derive through M&A activity.
Standardization has paid big dividends: when it acquired Clairol in 2002, P&G’s speed of integration had increased by a factor of four: companies twice as big could be integrated in half the time. In a press release announcing the acquisition of Gillette, P&G forecast revenues and cost synergies of $14-$16 billion (USD). Wegryn’s Global Analytics group was heavily involved in issues ranging from advising the company on supply chains synergies to advising the product groups on product names. Compliance issues are one of the areas of standardization that makes typical M&A activity easier.
Still, even with standardized global processes, complying with SOX requires a lot of legwork, and gets better with practice. P&G has learned through its recent acquisitions that the policies and procedures for becoming SOX-compliant are different across companies, even if they share the same external auditor. P&G therefore has to take a measured approach to integrate acquisitions into its control systems. P&G sets a very high bar, so managing to the P&G standard in a single year can be a tremendous challenge.
It depends on the acquired company’s control framework, company culture, tone at the top, and business ethics and conduct. All of these things are foundational, it doesn’t just happen overnight. While the improved processes have helped facilitate these major acquisitions, another opportunity is “When it acquired Clairol in 2002, P&G’s speed of integration had increased by a factor of four: companies twice as big could be integrated in half the time. ”Emerging in relation to smaller enterprises.
The SOX deadline for small-cap companies keeps getting pushed back: in SEC filings, these enterprises argue that the cost of compliance is too great. Many experts believe the looming threat of compliance obligations will drive many of these companies private, but it could also drive an acceleration of small-scale acquisitions. Companies that have developed standardized processes and simplified the integration process may find attractive acquisition targets, as the benefits of economies of scale increase. Outsourcing Utility IT Functions P&G historically favored relative self-sufficiency for IT.
For example, during the ERP initiative, P&G built up the SAP skills of its own staff for the global rollout. By the end of 2002, P&G had a thousand internal staff members within the P&G virtual SAP Competence Center alone. But in 2003 P&G changed this strategy, signing a 10-year, $3 billion dollar deal with Hewlett Packard to manage P&G’s IT infrastructure, data center operations, desktop and end-user support, network management, and some applications development and maintenance support. Approximately 1,850 P&G employees, mostly from the GBS unit, were transitioned to HP Services.
This change occurred after the bulk of the integration work was complete, and represented about half of P&G’s internal IT organization. It would have been a considerably more difficult option without the integrated, strategic approach P&G took to their global IT systems. While P&G successfully aligned IT and business leaders to drive the global ERP implementation, the company decided to outsource its utility IT functions. The managed services contract with HP freed P&G’s remaining IT staff from day-to-day IT management issues, allowing them to focus on strategic uses of IT that further corporate objective.
In fact, the remaining IT resources are mostly embedded in the business units, intimately linked to their respective business objectives. IT can now focus its energy on breakthrough use of technology to drive business innovation and value creation. Examples include creating real time business intelligence systems or managing interactive marketing initiatives. CIO Filippo Passerini outlined three key areas of focus for internal team members: • Create better connections with stakeholders: Support the goal of building one-to-one connections with target audiences. Help P&G make better decisions across the board in all areas: Faster, smarter and increasingly in real time. • Help drive innovations to market faster: Expand current tools, create new ones, and virtualize processes wherever possible. While P&G is pushing strategic issues to the forefront, outsourcing a utility process obviously doesn’t absolve P&G from meeting SOX requirements. The company maintains a very close relationship with HP and dictates the kind of control structures that are in place.
Section 404 rules outline the obligations of both P&G and HP (or any outsource vendors) in regards to meeting compliance issues. In P&G’s case, these are written directly into the contracts—standard service level agreement arrangements. Other issues include whether industry or company standards will be the benchmark. For services or environments relatively unique to P&G, the company creates specific contractual requirements. In “standard” outsourcing arrangements, where the vendor offers similar services to multiple companies, P&G generally requires the vendor to adhere to industry standards.
Standardized processes are useful since they allow compliance and other activities to be scaled across the organization and beyond its walls. Global Data Synchronization As companies continue to pursue supply chain efficiencies and begin to exhaust internal sources of improvement, connections between trading partners offer important new efficiencies and lower transaction costs. When companies can’t communicate and coordinate effectively with internal and external collaborators, they waste time rectifying data inconsistencies, and efficiencies are lost.
This has led to a major push for global data synchronization (GDS) throughout the retail supply chain. While low-cost retailers like Wal-Mart are seen to be leading the charge in order to drive an estimated 1–3% from supply chain costs, P&G is among the leading consumer packaged goods companies that have fully embraced—and are in many cases driving—the evolution at a global level. For example, in Guatemala, P&G learned 3. 6% of orders from La Fragua (a large retailer) were related to obsolete products. By implementing GDS the company reduced this number to 0. 8%, out-of-stock items were reduced from 8% to 3%, and speed to market for new products dropped from three to two months. As P&G’s IT Manager for Central America explains: P&G has put much effort in building the business cases to gain a critical mass of retailers and providers to jointly complete this work. Focus has evolved from the ‘convincing’ stage, both internally and externally, to then moving to the ‘touch with reality’ stage when we found that internal data cleansing was needed before proceeding.
Today, we start the desired ‘business transformation’ stage, providing a real time connection among providers, customers and consumers. The issues related to GDS are not intimately tied to compliance regulations. However, these investments are helpful in complying with retailer requirements, and improve the capacity of consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to engage outside of corporate walls. The frontier of compliance, risk management, and governance activity is about managing the information, standards, and integration required throughout the business web and supply chain.
While data synchronization will become a standard supply chain practice, the ability to harness information effectively and coordinate it among multiple players will be a competitive differentiator. Evolution of the Innovation Process P&G and other players in the industry are working toward systematic processes for innovation. For example, data synchronization initiatives can accelerate the innovation cycles in the consumer packaged goods industry by up to 12 weeks.
Although this sounds like good news, starting with private label goods, leading retailers can leverage data standardization and external collaboration to dictate not only how products are delivered but also how they are invented. This is where GDS and other collaborative initiatives move from a cooperative deployment aimed at reducing supply chain costs to an area of strategic competition. Already facing extreme pressure on margins, top CPG companies like P&G are resisting retailer control of the innovation process – and the commoditization that would accompany it by leveraging investments in their own internal processes.
These reactions are aimed at tilting the balance of power in the retail supply chain: “It’s a high stakes game, and CPG companies recognize that. Innovation has been their traditional source of strength, and if they focus on it, they’ll be able to start taking back the power in the channel relationship. That is what many are trying to do, and P&G is succeeding. ” P&G, much of this evolution is tied directly to the continued expansion of its Global Analytics group, as it continues to find new ways to leverage internal data to fuel growth opportunities.
Throughout its history, P&G’s best innovations have come from connecting ideas across internal businesses, and information shared across standardized systems and applications is accelerating the process. At the same time, reacting to a challenge from CEO A. G. Lafley, P&G has enabled a “radical new strategy of open innovation” which now produces 35% of the company’s innovations—with a target of 50% in the near future. The company has developed a structured approach for sourcing new innovations called “connect and develop. Typically, it identifies a problem with commercial appeal and opens it up to the “innovation community”—for example, the 90,000 scientists on InnoCentive, or other networks that P&G engages with to rapidly develop new solutions. 7. Conclusion “The frontier of compliance, risk management, and governance activity is about managing the information, standards, and integration required throughout the business web and supply chain. ” 8 The key issues to overcome are primarily around fragmentation—corporate silos, disparate systems and different local practices.
An integrated approach is required to break down barriers and silos in each area, aligning strategic governance, risk management and compliance issues to meet common objectives. Done properly, the strategic benefits that accrue to leading organizations allow them to view these initiatives as capacity building investments. The alternative—ad hoc approaches that treat compliance as a burden—often cost more and forego strategic opportunities. Procter & Gamble started preparing for this evolution almost twenty years ago by beginning to consider data as an asset—separate from the applications that housed it—to be managed strategically.
In doing so, the company has demonstrated how to prepare to compete in the age of transparency. By re-inventing its internal processes, P&G is not only well-positioned to deal with the burden of new compliance regulations but is also driving costs from the supply chain, accelerating innovation cycles, allowing the strategic realignment of internal IT resources, improving integration with trading partners, increasing competitive advantage in M&A activity, and enabling holistic views of stakeholder relationships to drive sales and improve negotiating power.
P&G demonstrates compliance and performance optimization are really two sides of the same coin. The foundation upon which both are built is an integrated approach to managing strategic governance, risk, and compliance issues—supported by an effective information management system and standardized global systems and processes. “Procter & Gamble started preparing for this evolution almost twenty years ago by beginning to consider data as an asset—separate from the applications that housed it. ” Procter & Gamble: References
AMR Research Special Advertising Supplement, as cited inBusiness Week, March 27, 2006. Eugene Munson, P&G Financial Manager for Fabric & home-carebusiness. As cited in “Can Tech Untangle Sarbanes Oxley? ”Fortune, September 29, 2003. D. Prior and N. Rayner, “How Procter & Gamble Runs Its Global Business on SAP,” February 25, 2002. Gary H. Anthes, “Modeling Magic,” Computer World, February 7,2005. Interview with Glenn Wegryn, Global Analytics, Procter & Gamble, conducted by Alan Majer and Denis Hancock, March 23, 2006
Interview with Robert Scott, Vice President of IT, Procter &Gamble, conducted by Alan Majer, December 7, 2005. Interview with Leslie Hagan, Content Manager Leader, General Electric, December 15, 2005. “Can Tech Untangle Sarbanes-Oxley? ” Fortune, September 29, 2003. “P&G Signs Deal to Acquire The Gillette Company: Raises Long-Term Sales Growth Outlook”, The Procter & Gamble Company,January 28, 2005 http://www. pginvestor. com/phoenix. zhtml? c=104574&p=irolnewsArticleMain&ID=667876 Geoff Smith, former Deputy CIO of Procter & Gamble, “You can’t
