In 1935, R. Stanton Avery invented the first self-adhesive labels used to merchandise objects in a small loft in Los Angeles. He established Avery Adhesives with a $100 loan. Now, Avery Dennison is a global materials science and digital identification solutions company with locations in over 50 countries, and approximately 35,000 employees worldwide.
Avery Dennison provides branding and information solutions that help optimize labor and supply chain efficiency, reduce waste, advance sustainability and circularity, increase transparency, and deepen brand-consumer engagement.
Supply chain optimization
Supply chain optimization is a major focus. Kalyan Pabbisetti, Vice President of IT Customer Experience and R&D Applications, explains, “We work hard to get better at being flexible in having the right raw materials in the right location to meet demand for our customer’s finished goods. For example, sometimes we must move raw materials from Honduras, when we don’t have the demand, to Vietnam, where we do. We end up shifting raw materials by air. Not only is that expensive, but it impacts customer satisfaction because delays while we’re waiting for goods to arrive often mean we can’t meet our standard lead time of seven days. We want to be better at forecasting demand to avoid shifting raw materials around unnecessarily.”
Technology transformation for business optimization
Having grown through a series of strategic acquisitions, Avery Dennison inherited a lot of IT complexity: legacy systems, a lack of integration between systems of record, and little consistency in business processes like the Quote-to-Cash lifecycle, diminishing standardization of pricing and selling processes across portfolio. IT fragmentation also inhibited Avery Dennison’s ability to implement innovation initiatives.
Technology transformation has been a very significant enabler to help Avery Dennison optimize its business. Pabbisetti adds, “We want to help top-line growth without increasing our employee count. In the past, when the business grew 10%, the headcount also grew 10%. We need automation of processes and to find better ways of serving our customers. Technology, especially in our Selling, General and Administrative (SG&A) systems, helps us do that.”
Shifting to cloud
Avery Dennison is in the process of shifting IT systems to Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Applications. They started with Oracle Sales Cloud and are continuing with Fusion ERP. Alongside Fusion Applications, they also implemented Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI). FDI is a family of prebuilt, cloud-native analytic applications for Oracle Cloud Applications that provides business users with prebuilt insights to improve decision making.
FDI helps Avery Dennison analyze their business. Pabbisetti explains, “With Fusion Data Intelligence, we get a 360-degree view of what’s in pipeline, what’s in forecast, how are we doing by country and by product. With that information, we can devise better sales strategies.”
Forecasting accurately
Accurate forecasting is also connected to being able to manage the supply chain accurately and efficiently. Pabbisetti puts it like this: “In our business, forecasting is challenging. If you look at end-to-end value chains, we are very early in the process because we make the raw materials that go into our customers’ products. Before you spot something happening—good or bad—in the market where our customers sell their goods, it’s already factored in. It’s important to us to have a healthy pipeline, and visibility of that pipeline, so we can make good decisions on the supply chain, keeping the right levels of inventory in the right locations. Fusion Data Intelligence helps us do that.”
Before Avery Dennison started their digital journey, they had 20 legacy systems for ERP and Customer Experience and dispersed reporting systems. Business units were managing their own access to data to inform decision making. They’d use tools like Informatica to pull data from wherever they could find it and QlikView or Google Looker to create custom reports on it. Results were inconsistent, and it was inefficient and costly. The first major benefit of using FDI was the speed with which they could deploy new information to the business. A prebuilt report that used to take 4 to 6 weeks to custom develop can now be created and deployed in minutes.
From creating reports to using them
Pabbisetti said, “Eighty percent of what we needed was available out-of-the box in Fusion Data Intelligence. That was exciting because we got away from the business of creating reports to starting to use them. We could then focus on completing the remaining 20%—the reports that were unique to our business. At the same time, Avery Dennison values the flexibility provided with Fusion Data Intelligence. Out of the box, Oracle Fusion CX Analytics provides all the data needed on pipeline and forecast from Sales Cloud. The real value comes in when we can get disparate sources of data into Fusion Data Intelligence. We need to combine pipeline data with sales data for booked revenue to get the full picture.”
Because the data pipelines from Sales Cloud to FDI are prebuilt, they are accurate and reliable. Pabbisetti said, “We have more confidence in the data. When we were developing custom reports, the data pipeline was ‘massaged’ to solve issues in the data. With Fusion Data Intelligence the flow of data is direct, pipeline to dashboard. And that’s what we want—real data, no manipulation. If there are errors in the data, we go and fix it. And when you can visualize the data, you can spot any issues more easily.”
Getting buy-in from users
Commenting on how executives were adapting to the new systems, Pabbisetti said, “Our audience is sales, sales management, and executive management—a diverse group. We conducted a workshop with one of the experts from Oracle to show them the new capabilities in Fusion Data Intelligence, comparing it with existing reports they were already using. Even though they were skeptical, the presentation and the content really resonated. They were very keen on not having to write their own reports, just consuming the data. The pre-built dashboards really impressed them.”
Real-world challenges
Avery Dennison’s customers need flexibility to shift manufacturing operations as geopolitical factors such as climate policy and international trade relationships affect business. Pabbisetti explains, “We work with large customers that have their manufacturing operations in many countries—China, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, Honduras. With all the rhetoric around Paris Climate Accord and changes in international trade policy, there is a lot of talk about China Plus One moving manufacturing from China to other countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh. We need to ensure our own supply chains match the flexibility demanded by our customers to shift manufacturing. Fusion Data Intelligence gives us visibility to inform our own supply chain decisions.”
Hearing the voice of the customer with AI
What of the future? Pabbisetti said, “AI is a big topic. In the markets we service, we don’t talk to end consumers; we’re business-to-business. We’d like to be able to get more consumer demand signals, and more consumer sentiment for analysis. There’s a lot of data out there in our market we could leverage with AI to improve our forecasting. It’s one of our priorities for the next year or so: how can we use data that’s publicly available to improve our forecasting and ultimately improve customer satisfaction?”
Learn more about Avery Dennison and FDI, and you can always ask questions in the Oracle Analytics Community.