The Future: End-To-End Digital

Passerini knows the danger with this kind of grand ambition: "The risk when we talk about real time and digitization is that it becomes a fluff thing," he says. So the global business services team is working to quantify it.

P&G has identified 98 processes that the company runs on. It's looking at how long each of those processes takes--is, say, 90 days the right timeframe for completing a profit forecast? Or should it be 30 days? A week? Then it looks at process and technology changes to make it happen.

All executives have this mission--to find these opportunities and report on what they're doing to digitize their piece of P&G. With that kind of executive backing, Simone isn't worried about doing a lot of evangelizing. "We look like help rather than someone trying to enforce a process to digitize the company on them," he says.

Yet the hard work lies mostly ahead. Looking at those 98 processes, P&G thinks it can cut cycle times for some of them by two thirds, by digitizing those processes and making much more data available at the time it's needed to make a decision. "We're probably 10% there," Passerini says.

In two to three years, he thinks his team can deliver more like 70% of those real-time data needs. How exactly will the team do that?

Passerini will have to get back to us on that. But trust that they're working on it, even if they don't have the perfect solution right now.