SAM GANGA: Thank you for joining us at Google Cloud Next '21.
My name is Sam Ganga, and I'm a partner at KPMG.
With me today is Bob Howland, chief digital officer
of Dawn Foods.
Dawn Foods is a global leader in bakery manufacturing
and ingredients distribution business
and, about two years ago, launched
an ambitious digital transformation initiative.
KPMG has had the privilege of being
Dawn's partner in both the strategy and execution
of this initiative.
Bob and I would like to take you through the Dawn
digital transformation journey.
But first, Bob, please share a bit about your background,
your role at Dawn, and some company history.
BOB HOWLAND: Thanks, Sam.
Great to be here with you.
I've been in e-commerce for 20 years.
I've launched over 25 different e-commerce businesses
that today are doing billions of dollars of revenue.
Dawn Foods is an amazing company, 100-year-old privately
held, family-run company, really a leader in the US
and in many of the markets it serves around the globe.
And for me, the opportunity to join Dawn
was really about taking a company
on this digital journey, really fulfilling
their digital ambition from the ground up.
SAM GANGA: Thank you, Bob.
So Dawn's a 100-year-old company and has
gone through several transformations
and been part of the Great Depression, the oil crisis,
and, over the years, gone through lots of ups and downs.
With regards to this transformation,
what were the market dynamics influencing your decision
to launch at this time?
BOB HOWLAND: I think there were two things.
So I joined the company a little over two years ago.
They had made the commitment to go out and engulf
on this digital transformation, as they called it.
But they really didn't know what that meant.
And they really felt that they needed someone to head that up.
There were two things that really drove that for them.
Number one, their customers were asking.
So in the bakery ingredient space, there's not--
there was not online ordering happening for Dawn
or any of their competitors.
And their customers were saying, hey,
we would like to order online, like we
do in every other walk of life.
When are you going to bring that to the table?
So that was the first one.
The second one, and we'll get into this in more detail--
there were a lot of business model opportunities
for the company.
And in many cases, the business felt, instead of incrementally
addressing some of these things, why not leapfrog over
all of these challenges?
Years of maybe underinvestment in the infrastructure--
leapfrog over that and really build a digital-first business
model, and build it the right way.
And really, for the company, the second point
was all about future-proofing the business.
And so we really set out to do that.
We had the benefit of having the CEO and the board fully
on board.
And then we really set about, in terms
of the partnership with KPMG, to start to bring that to life.
SAM GANGA: Yeah.
I remember that and remember the tireless work
that you did in order to get stakeholder alignment.
And we began partnering with your newly formed digital team
in early 2019.
And our joint approach was really
about business-led digital transformation.
How did this guide your journey?
BOB HOWLAND: It really did.
We really thought about this business-first,
customer-centric--
and really put the technology piece in the back as something
we could readily do.
So again, I've done this a number of times.
And I tell people time and time again
there are three elements to this.
There's the people side.
There's the process side.
There's the tech side.
The tech side is super easy, maybe 20% of the effort.
The people side, both internally,
changing the hearts and minds of our internal employees,
changing the way customers behave
in the marketplace-- that was really going
to be a game changer for us.
And so we really needed to break down all of this.
And leveraging KPMG's Connected Enterprise framework really
helped us give each of the key functions
really a scorecard, key questions to ask.
How can you go about this in customer service?
If you're in the operations side or the supply chain side,
what are the things that are going
to hold you back from on-time and full distribution?
And what are the things that you can then do to overcome those?
And so this framework that you brought to the table
really allowed us to go out and partner
with each of the functions and really drive
the important part of the change management, the people
side and the process side.
SAM GANGA: I remember those discussions.
And one of the things that you mentioned with,
of course, the technology side, while might
be the long pole in the tent, is not necessarily
where you're going to spend most of your effort.
But you did give a lot of consideration
to the technology stack.
Could you share a little bit with the listeners
about what were the guiding principles for your technology
stack, your digital architecture,
and how did the Google platform help
enable that transformation?
How did it provide the chassis and the infrastructure
for that transformation?
BOB HOWLAND: Yeah, for sure.
Full disclosure here-- I have worked at two platform
companies in my background.
And so I knew firsthand the benefits
of going to a one-stop bundled platform and some
of the challenges.
I also knew that Dawn--
Dawn is, first and foremost, a manufacturing and distribution
company.
We were never going to have the ability
to have a very expensive technology solution.
And so as we thought more and more about this,
we really thought about this concept of modular.
E-commerce is becoming very commoditized now.
And so you need someone to run your back end--
to provide the checkout, take the payment.
You also need a content engine to allow
all the great content that is really the skin of the website.
You also need a product information management tool.
And as we thought about all the four, five, six,
whatever key modules, key components, of this engine
we were trying to build, we realized that no one provider
had it all.
And that was a really big epiphany for us back in 2019.
But when we looked at the landscape,
there were really two or three best-in-class solution
providers for each of these key components.
And when we started to have conversations with them, what
we found were that they were having conversations
with each other as well.
They were building in an API alignment capability
so that if we chose the two of them together,
they were already connected to each other.
And so that helps us understand that this whole composable
commerce concept is something that potentially we
could bring alive.
And so it really rested on this concept of microservices,
really taking each piece of a user action
to the smallest possible technology solution.
We really thought about API.
We really wanted the entire site and all of the different data
points to be API-first.
With Google Cloud's input and a lot of help,
we really wanted this to be a cloud-first solution.
And finally, we really wanted this to be headless.
We really wanted separation between the back end
of the house and the front end of the house.
And we're-- lo and behold, we found best-in-class providers,
many of them that had Google relationships already.
And the Google Cloud infrastructure really
allowed us to enable this a la carte or module architecture
to come to life.
SAM GANGA: That is an excellent vision
that you had from the beginning, and your ability
to execute that vision.
I know you said this multiple times in our journey together,
and you've maniacally focused on the business outcomes.
Can you share some of the measurable outcomes
that you achieved from this initiative for Dawn?
BOB HOWLAND: Yeah.
One of the things we looked at pretty
clearly was we thought that by building an online product
catalog, which the company had never had before,
that we would have the dynamic of customers discovering
products that they didn't know we offered.
And, by that fact, we would have customers putting more SKUs
in their basket and, therefore, we
would see an incremental lift in the number of SKUs
and the size of the basket for an online customer as
opposed to an offline customer.
We estimated it, based on experience
that I and others had, to be somewhere in the neighborhood
of 5% to 10% by year 1.
So by the 12th month after launch.
And we're right on track for those numbers today, which
is very, very exciting.
And that's probably the biggest customer
feedback we get is, wow, I didn't know you had this.
Now you are getting a bigger and bigger piece of my business
because I know that you can be my main or a more
significant provider for me.
And so in addition to incremental SKUs,
we're seeing just crazy customer satisfaction numbers.
Our customers are incredibly satisfied with not only
the platform we've given them, but they're
becoming more satisfied with the Dawn relationship, which
is, frankly, something we didn't expect
in the first six to 12 months.
And we're still really getting our sea legs
under us from an e-commerce perspective.
SAM GANGA: Makes a lot of sense, I think.
You always maintain that artisan bakers are a partner.
They're not necessarily just a customer relationship.
You want to be with them on this journey.
Love the fact that you had this focus on the business,
delivering for the business, for your customers,
for-- on the customer experience-- as you said,
business-led, customer-centric, technology-enabled--
and the fact that it all came together under the Google Cloud
Platform.
You've been on this journey for almost three years, you
and the team, Bob, and the organization at large.
You've been successful by most standards, if not
all standards.
What's the one thing you would do differently
that will benefit our listeners as they start on their journey
or they've been on their journey?
BOB HOWLAND: It's an interesting question.
So I have a very large network of e-commerce professionals,
digital executives, across the US,
certainly, and across the world.
The one refrain, the constant refrain I hear from my peers,
is that they don't have support and buy-in
from their boards and their executive teams,
and they struggle to get that.
I feel fortunate that in my boss and the CEO and then our board,
we have had buy-in.
But besides-- in spite of that, I
do think, if I was to do this over again, I would have put 2X
the focus on change management.
I would have really spent much more time
in the people and process side.
And why do I say that?
So change is hard for people.
And when you-- it's kind of like getting married.
The honeymoon phase is great.
But once you're married, it's actually a different phase
of the relationship.
It requires just as much involvement.
And oftentimes, you find that that doesn't happen.
And so in the lead-up to our launch, which
was a national event, there was buy-in.
Everybody was rowing in the same direction.
We did find that after launch, some people said, hey,
we checked that box.
And they're hard to get back.
It's hard to get people back to the table to say, hey,
we just launched technology.
But this change management, this building a business model
that's e-commerce-first, and, oh, by the way,
there's a lot of other things about the business
that we want to bring into the digital world
and future-proof-- we lost some of the ability
to bring-- to continue people on that journey once we launched.
And therefore, with all humility,
I say I wish I'd spent more time on the change management piece
up front to really, really try to get that foundational.
SAM GANGA: That's interesting you said that because I know
how much time you spent on stakeholder alignment,
on leadership alignment, on change management.
And for you to say that you could have spent more time
is very telling.
And you walked into this knowing that that's the case.
You put a lot of energy against it.
But I hope our listeners are taking that away, saying,
you need to spend a lot more time on change management
than you originally might anticipate.
Bob, I want to thank you for your time.
It's always a pleasure talking to you.
Every time I talk to you, I learn something new.
And this time was no different.
Thank you again for your time, Bob.
BOB HOWLAND: Thank you, Sam.
Great to be together.