Determining Supply Chain Variability at General Mills
Determining Supply Chain Variability at General Mills L to R: Frederick Zhou, Christine England, Teresa Viola, Rajat Bhatia, and Carol German With roots going back to 1856, founded in 1928 and headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb, General Mills, Inc. is a multinational manufacturer and marketer of branded consumer foods and other packaged goods sold through retail stores in more than 100 countries. The company, which reported 2017 revenue of $15.6 billion, operates approximately 79 food production facilities in a more than The General Mills Tauber team was tasked with a dozen countries, and has approximately 38,000 employees. It determining cumulative effects of common variability manufactures cereals, snacks, yogurt, and other food products under sources on the supply chain performance. such well-known brands as Gold Medal fl our, Annie’s Homegrown, Betty Crocker, Yoplait, Colombo, Totino’s, Pillsbury, Old El Paso, Häagen-Dazs, Nature Valley, Cheerios, Trix, Cocoa Puffs, Wheaties, and Lucky Charms. “These interviews allowed the team members to understand General Mills’ operations with more depth,” said Viola. General Mills supplies major retailers and provides services to its core customers for improving display confi gurations and stocking The Tauber team also created a variability network illustrating cause solutions. The company prides itself on best-in-class customer and effect relationships in the supply chain, and identifi ed key service and continually seeks to improve its service performance. variability sources that affect customer service performance. But over the past three years, variability has increasingly affected “The original project endeavored to establish and quantify linear or customer service performance and cost, while the cumulative nonlinear relationships between variability sources, and intermediate nature of these effects is only partially understood by supply chain and fi nal metrics,” said Viola.
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