E-Business Practices of Leading Company (Nestle)

Nestlé is a 135 years old, Switzerland-based company ranked as the world’s largest food producer. In some 70 countries around the globe, 230,000 people and just under 500 factories strive to bring 8,000 products to the world’s table. Some Important products of Nestle are Nescafe instant coffee, of course, but also Perrier bottled water, breakfast cereals including Cheerios, Kit Kat bars, Stouffer’s prepared meals, Buitoni pasta and Maggi cooking sauces. From his office at the company’s headquarters in Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Nestlé’s senior vice president of group information systems and logistics, Jean Claude Dispaux, occupies a place at the cutting edge of global business. It’s a place shaped by the combination of Nestlé’s worldwide scope and CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe’s commitment to an "e-revolution" to boost revenues and slash $3 billion from the cost base. Dispaux’s role calls for a firm, hands-on approach, experiencing for him how NestlŽ’s far-flung operations can play their part in consolidating and standardizing the food giant’s business processes to reach Brabeck-Letmathe’s goal. In recent years Nestlé India has focused steadily on improving operational efficiencies, gaining and implementing consumer insights, and increased efforts to ensure that Nestlé products are visible and conveniently available. Recognizing the need for a more flexible sales force capable of tapping emerging opportunities, the Company had earlier in the year restructured the sales organization. While the sales structure that was put in place is now stabilizing the Company has significantly, during the past one year, increased the outlets that retail its products. About this revolution Brabeck-Letmathe’s message, “the new regime seems to have been a case of steady-as-you-go for Dispaux”. In the job for almost 11 years, he’s fiercely proud of the progress that has been made in welding Nestlé’s widely scattered forces into a coherent whole. "Ten years ago, we had every spreadsheet and word processing program you’d ever heard of? Now there’s Microsoft Office," he says. "There was a time when you couldn’t send an e-mail from the U.S. to the U.K., and now you can send an e-mail from anywhere to anywhere." When he came into the job, he adds, an informal audit showed that Nestlé had around 140 different financial systems, now it’s down to a handful, and there will ultimately be only one, SAP. Improved technology has helped in the consolidation, but so have the impact of trade liberalization and the easing of Cold War tensions. "These days, my constituency is much more homogenous than it was 10 years ago," Dispaux says. "Then, there were countries such as India and Brazil into which you couldn’t import AS/400s, and the Eastern bloc was pretty much untouchable. Now, we deal with Russia like we do with Spain." In this paper we covered impact of Information Technology over the Company, its detailed functionalities, position in the market, business strategies followed in the perspective of FMCG industries, and some of the negative aspects of this company. Lastly we concluded with the revolutionizing affects of e-business strategies taken by the company, for better marketing opportunities.