Sept. 11, 2000

Printer ready

Better Cookies Built In Partnership With IT

By Beth Bacheldor

hortly after Doreen Wright took the helm as executive VP and CIO at Nabisco Inc. a year and a half ago, she took an extensive tour of every facet of the company's operations. "I was shocked that, without IT, you couldn't run the plant," Wright recalls.

Wright, who came to Nabisco from the IT-intensive financial-services sector, didn't expect to find that a food-processing company was so deeply dependent on and steeped in information technology.

But on that tour of Nabisco's Atlanta bakery, which makes Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers, she saw systems that automate the ordering of raw materials, software that calculates ingredient costs, a decision-support system that helps plant managers wring the greatest possible efficiencies out of the plant, and kiosks that let factory workers schedule their own hours.

Since joining Nabisco, Wright's top priority at the $8.27 billion company has been to use the Internet to understand more clearly how consumers feel about its foods. Among the objectives are building brand awareness, increasing customer loyalty, and continuing to improve factory productivity.

In a time of retrenchment for most food companies, Nabisco is running counter to the trend: Nabisco Holdings Corp.'s earnings surged 51% in the second quarter. The food company is being sold to Philip Morris in a $14.91 billion deal that will bring together Nabisco products and Philip Morris's food holdings unit, Kraft.

Despite that future uncertainty, Nabisco is determined to sustain its momentum by undertaking a series of E-business initiatives. "We certainly are moving in E-time," Wright says, emphasizing that Nabisco is pushing for greater speed and nimbleness in every part of its business effort to become an Internet-savvy company.

Part of that strategy is to build better relationships with consumers and increase brand awareness, and to that end Nabisco has launched three Web sites--Candystand.com, NabiscoRecipes.com, and NabiscoWorld.com. The sites generate more than 2.5 million visits a month, with the average visit lasting 55 minutes.

Though chiefly informational, the sites have proven to be valuable assets in terms of the number of visitors, the time those visitors spend on the site, and the insights into those consumers that Nabisco is able to glean. And that value can go even higher, says David Nelson, a Credit Suisse First Boston analyst, if Nabisco fulfills its goal of trying to "link the company and its brands to consumers more closely."

Each site serves as an advertising channel comparable to that of print, television, and other media. Take Candystand.com, for example. "We spend about $1.5 million on that site a year and the site generates ad-equivalent values. We're figuring $7 million in return on investment," Wright says. Her ROI calculation is based on what the company would have had to spend on advertising in print and on TV to reach that many consumers.

That kind of ROI from a project spearheaded by the company's IT staff puts technology high on the minds of top management. "IT is viewed as a partner in business," says Wright, who sits on Nabisco's executive committee. "Business strategies aren't set here without addressing the technology aspect."

Return to main story,"IT: Always In Good Taste"

Illustration by Jeffrey Fisher

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page

---