Molson Coors brings procurement to the core of the business by using Cirtuo.

Client overview

Molson Coors manufactures and markets beverages. Molson Coors Beverage Company operates through Molson Coors The America’s and Molson Coors EMEA APAC; it is listed on NYSE and TSX. The company has specialized in brewing for over two centuries. Molson Coors strengths reside within its primary supply and production operations. They are committed to exceeding industry standards for ESG and HSE compliance and to leaving a positive imprint on its employees, consumers, communities, and the environment.

Business challenge

Molson Coors’ continuation of primary supply and production activities is crucial for maintaining its success as a globally leading beverage company.  To remain competitive amidst challenging market conditions, such as the constrained supply of commodities – successful operations required new approaches. Molson Coors’ procurement teams are a key component within the organization that ensures access to supplier capacity for mission-critical goods, services, and raw materials. In their quest for sustained supply assurance, procurement teams are responsible for implementing category strategies that enable supplier diversification from single-source to multi-source to avoid supply chain disruptions.

Building on Molson Coors’ emphasis on maintaining long-term supplier relationships, Molson Coors’ procurement team faced the following challenges:

1. Employing new ways of identifying viable strategic options for improved sourcing and sustained supply assurance
2. Diversifying outcomes of category strategies from “go and bid” to more sophisticated value creation activities
3. Manifesting Molson Coors' business strategies through its external spend and the relationships with their 3rd party suppliers
4. Facilitating a deeper alignment of stakeholders and procurement teams around business objectives
5. Scaling the capability to create high-quality category strategies, without large-scale and time-consuming investments into training
6. Empowering teams to deliver better category strategies

Business impact

Molson Coors implemented Cirtuo’s Guided Strategy Creation solution to significantly improve the impact of procurement for the organization. Building upon a 12-year track record of delivering category management workshops and distilling those learnings and best practices into Guided Strategy Creation, Cirtuo enables Molson Coors’ category management team to develop, present, and implement category strategies within the organization that convert into high-value business outcomes. Cirtuo has enabled Molson Coors’ procurement teams to deliver more structured and targeted conversations to drive insight and capture the responses of their strategies clearly and concisely. The improved clarity of the strategic approach to creating value within each category is instrumental in bringing procurement to the core of the business.

“Building upon a 12-year track record of delivering category management workshops and distilling those learnings and best practices into Guided Strategy Creation, our procurement teams deliver more structured and targeted conversations to drive insight and capture the responses of their strategies clearly and concisely.”

- Gary Froehlich, Director, Procurement COE – Molson Coors

1. Increase to 75% of categories covered by category strategies
2. Voluntary participation in category strategy review meetings attended by 75% of category managers
3. A significant increase in quality of category strategies across the entire procurement team
4. Less time required to create category strategies
5. Built in best practices to ensure depth of category strategies

Solution advantages

• Builds resilience: Cirtuo enables a faster reaction to changes in the market environment through a higher cadence in category reviews
• Super-charges stakeholder engagement: Category Managers have targeted, informed discussions with stakeholders on key aspects of their categories
• Improves team capabilities: From simplistic “let’s go out and bid it” approach to sophisticated value creation strategies
• Drives company strategy: Key enabler in building a holistic approach to securing access to supplier bandwidth across all critical categories simultaneously
• Enables team agility: Makes transition into assuming responsibility for new categories easier

The additional advantages have enabled Molson Coors procurement team to:

• Overcome supply chain disruption and significantly improved the organization’s supply assurance
• “Manifest the company strategy” and gain its seat at the table
• Increase strategy documentation, allowing the organization to set targets for creating category strategies, resulting in a significant increase in spend covered by category strategy
• Standardize the process of category strategy creation and reducing the time to develop and implement strategies

Through the use of Cirtuo Guided Strategy Creation™, Molson Coors’ procurement team has realized further benefits:

• The team conducts bi-monthly category strategy reviews; using higher-quality data generated by Cirtuo with 75% of the procurement team in attendance
• Increase in knowledge transfer and cross-category learning through bi-monthly category strategy reviews
• Increased confidence and presentation skills when a category manager presents their strategies
• Increase in organizational wide communication, collaborations, and stakeholder buy-in
• Increase in team spirit and capability building

“There is no doubt about the fact that Cirtuo has helped us create better relations with our stakeholders and become real partners to the business. We are sharing category strategy with our stakeholders; before, you were trying to sell what procurement could do for the business, now our category managers can confidently show and make them part of the solution by asking for input – which increases ownership and buy-in.”

- Gary Froehlich, Director, Procurement COE – Molson Coors‍

Molson Coors’ procurement Team is leveraging Cirtuo’s solution for employee onboarding, training, and promoting organization-wide category management best practices. Molson Coors is enhancing their procurement processes, category strategy creation capacity and capability, and improving the company’s stakeholder relations internally.

Key improvements for Molson Coors’ include:

1. Improved category strategy visibility and engagement with global procurement and c-level management
2. Accelerated pace of strategies delivering greater business impact and supply assurance
3. Deeper stakeholder alignment and collaboration
4. Guided Strategy Creation makes teaching strategy much easier than teaching from a template
5. Improved knowledge sharing across procurement
6. Wide-scale adoption of Cirtuo to guide category managers toward quickly identifying, presenting, and implementing high-value category strategies
   

Solution highlight

Cirtuo is building capability at Molson Coors by helping their procurement teams create, deliver, and implement leading category strategies that leverage AI to guide category managers through the process of category strategy creation. Cirtuo’s Guided Strategy Creation™ functionality is helping category managers to become more strategic in their thinking and assisting them in asking the right questions. As a result, Category Managers operate more efficiently and effectively with improved business-wide collaboration.

Molson Coors’ procurement team is unified, leveraging Cirtuo as a single source of truth in developing category strategies that convert into profitable business initiatives. Although  Molson Coors’ faced some of the most challenging supply chain disruptions in the organization’s history over the past 16 months, the organization’s supply assurance has never been in better shape thanks to Cirtuo.

“Cirtuo software has helped procurement “manifest the company strategy” and gain its seat at the table within the organization.”

–  Gary Froehlich, Director, Procurement COE – Molson Coors