Nestlé Delivers Faster to Market with Scrum

The leadership of Foods Oceana turn to ZXM to help them deliver faster and get ahead of the competition with Scrum.

The Situation

ZXM was engaged by the executive general manager of Nestlé Foods Oceania to help them accelerate their time to market for a new set of products. ZXM coached them through contemporary ways of working with the executive leadership across marketing, sales, legal, product management and distribution, starting with a three-day leadership training that introduced them to agile, Lean, waste, flow and hypothesis-driven metrics.

Nestlé needs included:

Faster to market

Reduce lead time of traditional projects to get a product to consumers.

Improve workforce effectiveness

Maximise the collective knowledge of product leadership by working in a team with laser focus on a single, collaborative goal.

Focus on value creation

Re-prioritise the focus on value-based metrics and MVP to help differentiate business-as-usual and line management work from their collective strategic focus as a team.

The Solution

ZXM created a custom training and coaching strategy for Nestlé to introduce them to agile principles and practices in a product development domain. We mentored them through forming an agile team with a single Product Backlog that made their strategic initiative transparent across all traditional functional silos from marketing, logistics, sales, and research and development, to product development, retail and finance. This was the first time all leaders had a single, collaborative perspective of what it would take to realise their strategy.

ZXM then coached the leadership team to use Scrum as a mechanism for collaborative planning for this new product, mentoring them to work in two-week Sprints to plan and execute immersion activities, assessing sourcing cold, fresh, and frozen products, and bringing these to the Australian market.

The Results

With ZXM, Nestlé fast tracked their initiative delivering to the market in a 6 months time frame. With Scrum, the leadership team found transparency, alignment and shared understanding between all the heads of department was significantly improved.