‘There Is No Hierarchy’: Inside Conagra Brands’ IT Integration Playbook

Lisa Johnston: Hello, everyone. Welcome to “Conagra Brands' ‘Secret Sauce’ Integration Playbook.” My name is Lisa Johnston. I'm senior editor at CGT, and I'm excited to welcome you today. Today's topic is to explore how Conagra Brands has built an IT integration model spanning divisions. It's not only helping the company navigate today's complex environment, but also helping it maintain an important competitive edge.

We're going to learn how they've built the model to pull in business, IT discovery, and integration teams; the methodology used to power through integrations during the pandemic; and how partnerships have been instrumental in success. Finally, we'll talk about how they've adapted to disturbances and other scheduling impacts without losing momentum.

Joining us today are John Gibson, director of supply chain systems roll-out at Conagra; Andre Hoffner, IT senior director at Conagra; and Rick Ingham, senior principal at Infosys. John and Andre are going to begin with some background on Conagra, and then Rick will join for some more details. Then, we'll finish by taking some questions.

John Gibson: Good morning, everybody. My name is John Gibson, the director of the supply chain systems roll-out for Conagra Foods. Today, we're going to talk to you a little bit about our integration lifeline and lifespan, and how we got to where we are today. Andre, do you want to introduce yourself?

Andre Hoffner: Good morning, everyone. I’m Andre Hoffner, senior director of IT at Conagra. Like John, I've been here a long time, more than 22 years. I'm excited to talk about this integration today.

Rick Ingham: Hello, everybody. I’m Rick Ingham, we've partnered here for a while. I've been working on the Infosys side to understand and adapt to John's team and it's been a good experience and we keep evolving.

Gibson: All right, we’ll begin with a little bit about Conagra Foods. Conagra Foods has approximately 16,500 employees. Headquartered in Chicago there are just over 50 facilities and offices, and currently 47 producing plants. We make a lot of the food you love: Birds Eye, Duncan Hines, Wishbone, Hunt's, and Slim Jim’s to name a few. There are also some great items like Healthy Choice.

I've been with the company for 18 years — I started with the SAP installations, which we called “Project Nucleus” at the very beginning — and have been along for the Conagra-SAP journey the entirety of my career here. Conagra, overall, is primarily a grocery and frozen business — about 85% of our total business is domestic grocery and frozen.

We have a small international and food service footprint, both in Canada and Mexico. Conagra is a fascinating experience. We started as a company with lots and lots of divested organizations. In 2004, we decided as a company that we would like to become one single company. We started that journey in 2004, by joining all of our organizations underneath the SAP umbrella and cruised along that path. However, we finished up and were one single SAP company.

In 2017, we went through some major changes and started acquiring a handful of companies. If you look at this one, this shows a bit of our frozen, snacks and food staples business. We had a single vision and single focus. Our vision is very simple: we want to have an impactful, energized, inclusive culture in our food.

We have a very diverse organization and we want to have strong brands that compete in the marketplace. Our mission is to create a strong portfolio of diversity and inclusivity to accelerate growth, and of course, improve our margins and cash flow.

We started out as an agricultural business back in 1919 when we went through our Conagra journey. In 2016, we divested a significant amount of our business, primarily the potato business, as well as our agriculture and went to a truly, purely branded play organization. When we did that, we began acquiring.

This shows our four acquisitions that we've made over the last three years. The first is Thanasi Foods, which has sunflower seeds to go along with our DAVID's Brands. We bought Duke's, which is a high-end meat snack business to go along with our Slim Jim Brand. In 2017, we bought Angie's BOOMCHICKAPOP in the popcorn business. Then, Sandwich Brothers that same year.

Our largest acquisition was the Pinnacle Foods in 2018, which brought in 14 new operating plants, as well as a large number of high-value brands. With that, the decision was made that we were going to make them Conagra. The way we do that is by integrating them to our Conagra policies, procedures, and systems, which brings us to the conversation we're having today: How do we take these four disparate businesses, put them together, and deliver that. We'll talk a little bit about how we do that, and I’ll let Andre talk a little bit about our supply chain design.

Hoffner: Thanks, John. Leading up to this we made sure we were buying businesses that fit into our portfolio between grocery, snacks and staples platforms, and buying businesses that we could assimilate into the existing footprint. This little high-tech diagram on the left shows when we buy life businesses that fit in — either frozen, grocery or wherever — then we can assimilate them. We're not transforming our core; we're assimilating a business into it.

The Conagra supply chain wheel on the right side shows how we think about the buy, make, sell, deliver spectrum of our business because supply chains can get quite complicated. John and I work to find ways to talk about it so it doesn't overwhelm the folks we're working with.

We start with the Conagra rectangle, we add on the Pinnacle Foods triangle, and we end up with a bigger rectangle. We're not changing to a circle, a square, or something else. We're just making a bigger rectangle. It sounds so simple and silly, but it helps us to say, when you buy a business that fits into your portfolio and core strengths, you know how to do frozen foods, how to do grocery. We have core competence in delivering those world class services and building great brands and driving margins. John, myself, and many other folks, hundreds of people, have been part of this journey and have worked to make that a bigger rectangle.

There have been hundreds and hundreds of design decisions along the way that say, "Should we go left or right on the design." John and I say, "Hey, we're integrating a new business into our existing business." We use that simple formula and playbook across all integration work streams to assimilate a business into the existing Conagra Brands footprint.

A couple highlights: We put order to cash and supply chain as our highlights on our work stream. There's a whole bunch of other work streams that we didn't call out, but we want to focus on these two today, mostly on the supply chain work stream.

When you acquire a company, there's a lot of organizational design that needs to happen upfront. The teams do all of that through the integration management office where senior leaders sort through it all. Then, sorting through office locations, network data centers, laptops, emails, all the infrastructure operations, cybersecurity considerations, and when you perform an acquisition, there's an opportunity window that starts to close and our strategy is to move as quickly as possible to get them integrated into the Conagra Playbook. There's a lot of things we've been working on over the last couple of years that we didn't include here, but all aspects of the company would be considered and integrated into the existing Conagra footprint.

That single decision of buying a company — where we have a core competency and our goal is to assimilate, not to metamorphize or change how we do things — that key strategy helps provide guiding principles and a centralized focus around a single mission to integrate. That helps move quickly, get on the Conagra Playbook, get integrated in Conagra, and helps the brand teams drive growth to bring those brands into our portfolio and drive profitable growth.

John, want to provide a deep dive into the supply chain playbook?

Gibson: Thanks Andre. I've been around a long time, 18 years, and all of it in different phases of the SAP installation, primarily on the business side. What you're looking at is the model that we use at Conagra Foods. We start with what we call our order-to-cash model. Think of it from a customer service sales and overall high-level supply chain perspective. In our trade in financials, the piece of the puzzle that we're going to spend a lot more time talking about today is the second half, which is the supply chain component. We call it Supply Chain Heavy here at Conagra.

The goal of that is to bring the facilities, both third-party partners, as well as the production plants online as part of Conagra Foods. You can see that little laundry list of items down at the bottom.

If you think about it from start to finish, when we first started this run of installs, I was part of the installation and I threw a temper tantrum. I said, "This is how it ought to go. If we're going to do this again, we should do all these things. We should look at it from an end-to-end process. We should truly understand the business that we've acquired and spend a lot of time going through those processes in each of the components."

If you look here, from production planning to detailed scheduling of the facility, the transportation in and out of those facilities, the network, the manufacturing, warehousing, and quality — it’s the operations phase of that business, as well as, how do they buy, how does the maintenance component work?

We put all those together into a cohesive model to deliver. While I was having my little temper tantrum, they said, "Great, John. Now deliver that," which was fantastic, I was excited to do it. Today, I’ll show you how we do that, it's a fairly straightforward model.

The goal of the model is this: We have 15 plants, we want them to be Conagra so they can unlock the value for us, and the way we do that is to have our little own triangle, and to go fast. However, we want it to be an effective install, limiting any downtime to any facility (ideally having none), we want it to be accurate, and of course, we need to be respectful of the people that we're changing. That change management component.

We do this in five phases. First, we have a plant operations kickoff where leadership meets with the plant leadership to share what the journey for them is going to be. That journey goes into four phases. We break the organization into two groups: a discovery team and an installation or integration team. The discovery team is business leaders from across all our organizations — we have that big laundry list of procurement, warehousing and manufacturing — we grab the experts in each of those, from our existing organization., and put them together on the discovery team.

The second phase is our integration team on-site. This is where Rick comes in. We have a second group of people who are experts in their fields, but are specialized in training. They go on-site for a period of time to deliver a training program in each of those modules, as well as end-to-end training. The plant understands the process from when the food arrives at the door as a raw material until it leaves as a finished good, and the end of the network.

We then have a major event called the “cutover.” We choose a weekend, generally on a period-end, in which we cut over an all-in-one move over a four-day window. Then, we call a stabilization after that. Ideally, the cutover goes well and we immediately move into stabilization on day one, where we stand up each of the lines in a phased approach and spend around five weeks at the facility to ensure they're successful and can run on their own.

On day one we do a lot of the heavy lifting, but by the time we're done, they’ll be asking us to leave. This graphic shows discovery, advanced rollout, and stabilization. We break discovery into two phases. There are two weeks where we have a central session to learn about the facility overall, while in the non-operations phase to learn about the brand and division we're working on.

Then, we have a two-week event at the plant: the first week, a lot of time is spent doing planning and recipes, meeting with the HR organization to understand any unique challenges with that facility, most importantly, the master data to ensure we understand how that plan is built from a master data perspective.

The second week, we focus primarily on plant operations, what we call the survey. We have a giant Excel spreadsheet with a million questions, and we review all of them. Most of them are from prior go-lives to get the details of the facility. We spend a lot of time walking the floor of the plant to truly learn exactly how each of the operations work. It's fascinating what new and interesting information can be found by simply going to the floor and asking questions.

We take the outputs from those discovery sessions — we have a detailed site and people analysis that is built, which we then use to define and build as-is processes. One of the biggest pushes is that before we start talking about how we're going to make them Conagra, we need to understand who they are and focus exclusively on that. Before we have a conversation about what's going to happen to them, we provide an as-is on each and every one of those modules, where we say, “This is what we learned by listening to you, this is what we understand.” We make sure they sign off that we properly understand how the business works today.

From there, as a group, we start building gaps in our system challenges — what we call the cookbook, a detailed configuration of that plant in SAP, in every single component, as well as gaps.

We make food, but I say we do three things: We bring things in, we make them into something else, we ship them out. However, that's not entirely true, as each plant has something unique. When we bought the Birds Eye division, we never worked in vegetable packs. Each one of them has something different that we need to accommodate for.

As we go through, we build out what we call the “to-be processes,” where we sit down and say, "This is what we heard you say, this is what it's going to look like in the new world." We present that to all of Conagra — not just to the plant, but to the brands, the finance organizations — there are up to 700 people watching the “to-be processes” and providing a forum to add and contribute to those processes to make sure we have it right.

Once done, we know what the plans are going to look like, the configuration is built, and has been shared with technical partners. Then, hand off that future plant model to another advanced team to do all the true details. They build BOMs and recipes. They build that cookbook and complete it so that we know exactly where every bean and material, all the buying, the vendors — where everything you can think of comes from.

How quality works: We drop the plants, scrub all of the MRO or indirect materials for maintenance. We have partner plants, so we take existing Conagra facilities that are successful in SAP, and pair them up with one-to-one. This way the buyer gets a buyer from another facility that is excellent at their job, so they can ask questions. We call the “stakeholder spreadsheet,” which is every employee at the plant, to make sure that no one gets missed — they are all trained, get IDs, and know what they're going to be doing on day one — all the while direct material scrubbing, making sure everyone knows, and there are hundreds of horror stories when you don't do it.

Master data is the backbone of any installation. Making sure that we know exactly — down to each grain of sugar — how it's set up in the plant and that it will be successful, which brings us to the next phase. I'm going to hand it off to Rick to share how we did this.

At Conagra, we had to do a large number of installs very quickly, but we did not have a team of people built to do that — we did have some. I took some folks as part of the roll-out team and reached out to my partners at Infosys to help me out to fill in the blanks. They were wonderful and immediately jumped at it. Rick and I became partners, and then Rick started to build that team for me. Rick, I’ll let you talk about how you built that roll-out team and what they do.

Ingham: We came into Conagra, which was a pretty mature SAP house. They understood the tools, solution, and how to roll it out. What they needed help with was the bandwidth and making sure it was done in a timely manner. We partnered early on with BOOMCHICKAPOP and Sandwich Brothers, leveraging what we brought in as our merger and acquisition playbook to help with the process. The first thing was to partner closely with the team to understand their solution, what they're doing, how they're trying to do it.

Then we had the opportunity to actually bring in a number of the Pinnacle resources to complement our team as well. They brought in a wealth of process, people, and culture experience. Partnered with our SAP technical skills and our M&A playbook, we developed a process to help support going through all the training, perform and support the UAT testing, which is to ensure that the supply chain solution is working as planned and will support the business.

We are there to help engage and work through all of the physical activity of the cutover. We've got boots on the ground, working with the conversion, helping the plant people understand what they're looking at to validate and verify things are coming over correctly.

At cutover, we takeover for stabilization. A key component, this allows John and his team to start moving onto the next wave of sites and stuff, working on discovery and the build while we stay behind and take care of the stabilization. We work with the site, partnering with them until, as John said, they ask us to leave. Honestly, it happens. The last implementation went very well, they were prepared and eager for us to go, so they could prove and stand up on their own.

It's a great team that we've built. We work hard to make sure that most of the team doesn't know if they're Conagra, Infosys, or Pinnacle resources — it’s one team that works together seamlessly.

Gibson: To our credit — I'm going to do a bit of bragging — it's gone, not just OK, but extremely well. To the credit of Rick, Andre, and myself, we treat everyone as Conagra. It doesn’t matter whether they're a source from Pinnacle, Infosys, or legacy Conagra employees. We are one Conagra and treat everyone on the rollout team as such. There is no hierarchy, which has been a real key.

The roll-outs have been absolutely fantastic, we are getting ready to do the final wave in March. There have been some challenges, but none of them from the roll-out standpoint (we'll talk about those when we get to scheduling). From a roll-out perspective, the last three waves, some of which have been the largest and most technical in Conagra history, have been, as our president described them, flawless.

No one knew we did it, which was the goal. There was no downtime. We basically do a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday run on those conversions. We shut the plants down on Thursday morning, do inventory and make sure that all of the inventory is done. Then, we start loading that inventory and transition on Friday into Saturday. Next, we spend Sunday getting ready to stand up the plan for a Monday morning startup. They have gone exceptionally well and that is absolutely to the credit of that role at our organization and our partnership with Infosys.

When we go-live on day one, we ensure a lot of different things from a change management perspective. Although we've spent eight weeks training them, not everyone is a training learner. A lot of people have to just do it on the floor. So we do lots of things to ensure that all different types of learners are getting what they need from day one. This is done by using partner plants. Those are folks that we go to because they’re really good at this and we ask them to help the plant. We build those relationships and bring those folks on-site during those first couple days to help actually support it.

It's one thing for a trainer to say, "This is how you do it." It's another thing for someone to say, "I do this every day, all day long." Both from how to do it correctly, and also not to stress about it. It works and it works well. We try to get those folks at that plant to go to those other facilities.

Our pandemic activities have limited the ability to do that, but we have managed to do the partner plant support on-site all the way through. We ask for our operation leadership to support us and that means all the way up from our VPs of manufacturing.

We have monthly meetings, if not more, to understand what we're doing at each of the locations. We share, at a level of detail, what we're trying to accomplish and have them partner with us, so that it's not just a systems implementation, but truly a Conagra implementation. Everyone's on the same page long before that, and that way we don't get any noise, dissension, or anyone who doesn’t know — that’s solved for early on.

Hoffner: That's a key call out. The integration board that we form, which is made up of department heads across all of the functions, across finance, supply chain, R&D, IT, global business — all of the functions that are impacted — that integration board guides the overall scope, timing, and schedule. We have a board specific to those functional leaders that own and run that business. The transportation person, quality person, procurement person, finance, across all of those functions, we mirror that board.

Then John and I meet with them to provide updates as well as ask for updates to say, “How are you helping with this integration effort and how are you preparing your function for bringing this plant onto SAP?”

That's what lead needs to streamline the stabilization period during the hyper-care period. If we've got those functional leaders on board with board meetings and owning this with John and I — it's not us working better, it's us working differently to integrate different business functions into the process as well. When the stabilization period has the ball — because they're the business leaders that run that business ongoing and all the way down to our customer order management group — and making sure that customer orders are staged around the go-live and that we're getting shipments ramped up as we stabilize. That's been a key part of the stabilization, the functional leader partnership along the way, outside of the core integration team that's doing the go-live, is partnering with folks that run the business.

Gibson: One of the keys to our successful install is that we have everyone rowing the boat in the same direction and a great partnership across all of those things. Part of that is also our promise that we're going to give 100% to deliver this go-live and make them all look good. I'll finish up stabilization within five weeks. I'm a tactical person, I like theories fine, but there's a couple different ways you can stand up a facility. I'm not saying that any of the models are better than any of the others, but this one has been much more successful. Instead of bringing in four or five random folks, or maybe they're a dedicated team that goes site-to-site, we believe in overwhelming support.

Hoffner: It's not an easy thing when you've got three waves going at a time. You could have folks talking about anywhere from six to eight plants at the same time. That's what I call the “hot zone,” when you've got everything open at the same time — that's a challenge for folks. That's where we fall back to roles and abilities to say that the discovery team, advanced team, and training team shouldn't be in all eight plants at the same time. They should be focused on where they are at that moment, but it can be a challenge with the overlap of multiple waves going at the same time, it’s not an easy thing to accomplish.

Gibson: Let’s talk about how complicated it can be. Here you can see, at a high level, what's happening, but let’s take a look on a deeper scale at what is happening. It's easy to talk about the integration team and discovery team, but there's a lot of people on the backside that make this happen. This is what the actual schedule for a single go-live looks like down below. You can see the discovery team, you can see the small yellow thing that says the To Be readouts, and then you can see what happens next.

Our IT organization jumps in and starts working on the configuration. We're doing development for any new items that need to happen. Our recipe team, which we call the PLM organization, starts building the recipes while master data's doing all of the data cleansing, building that master data, and making it cohesive to the current Conagra system. The network or IT organization is ordering the VMU and getting everything ready to go, making sure that the Wi-Fi works correctly, and building any advancements while the backend network is doing the same thing.

Andre, maybe you can talk about how we partner between my business side and you on the IT side. Everyone thinks we're best friends, but we work in two separate groups.

Hoffner: We do like to be one, though. The question is: How does IT do due diligence on the integration framework? I would break that into two parts. First, we plan for what we call the “assimilation strategy” to look at every aspect of IT, including all the infrastructure, operations, cybersecurity, laptops, network IDs, calendar, Outlook, Office 365, all those aspects. That work stream is called an IT integration. We bring all of those employees into the Conagra network and the Conagra framework. They’re essentially “Conagr-ized” and have a Conagra laptop, know how to work, which is well in advance of us getting to the site.

The second half is a work stream we call SAP Readiness, which our team runs. That team focuses on going into the plant, partnering with John's team, doing a site survey, and looking at the network connectivity, cabling, Wi-Fi connectivity, coverage, all of those aspects and circuit lead times. We try to order the circuits and do that at least a year in advance, get the network circuits in there and order so we can turn those up and have the network on the Conagra network with Wi-Fi coverage, VMU, printers, and everything called SAP Readiness, then partnership with John. The IT integration workstream is well in advance to get them onto Conagra standards. The SAP Readiness Workstream stays ahead of John's team, but mirrors the timeline so we can deliver as expected.

The second question is: How do you work with IT and the business unit? We have an emphasis person, an IT person, and a supply chain or R&D person — that’s a three in the box. Those three folks are across all functions and partner together on all conversations and aspects. They work together to deliver this integration.

Gibson: One of the things we've done well, at least from a Conagra standpoint, is that Andre's on the IT side, I'm on the business side, but Andre and I spend a lot of time together talking through any challenges or issues and having a united front. We're just Conagra. I say that a lot: We're just Conagra, it doesn’t matter what your external role may be, we work together to deliver results.

I'm a very solution-minded person, so are Andre and Rick. It doesn’t matter what we were doing before this, what we’re doing now is helping deliver. The biggest part is that the business and IT should be one-in-the-same. We work together and unite our results. Andre is telling the same story that I'm telling, Rick's telling the same story that Andre and I are telling, we do it all together.

Johnston: Thank you for sharing those insights, that was a valuable, detailed perspective for the CGT audience. Looking at your timelines, much of the work was completed during the onset and then the thick of the pandemic. How did this affect your strategy and what kind of adjustments did you need to make? We're probably going to get a slightly different perspective from each of you. Andre, can you start and then go around the table?

Hoffner: There's a couple aspects of the adjustment. We had a go-live scheduled right at the onset of the pandemic. One of our largest brands was a strategic brand, it was close to go-live, and we had to make a tough call to adjust the schedule. John talked about our functions, we're just people at Conagra, and we are a business-first organization. We're focused mainly on what we do to deliver the business. We need to replace the technology, but we're business-first folks. We had to adjust the schedule. Once we adjusted the schedule a bit, it was John, Rick, and the core team getting into not when to do things, but how to do things.