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Over its more than 100-year history, Carrier— the global leader of healthy, safe, sustainable, and intelligent building and cold chain solutions—had acquired scores of smaller companies, all with their own unique operating processes and footprints. Most of those companies came with their own enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, as well—and by 2020, the organization’s procurement operation was pulling from a fragmented network of ERPs, making real-time business analysis a vast, complex, and inefficient task.
“Our data was sitting in over 100 ERP systems, and those systems were not stitched together,” said Gundeep Singh, Digital Leader and Head of Data and Analytics at Carrier. “As a result, something as fundamental as understanding routine spend in their organization was taking lightyears in today's business landscape.”
Meanwhile, Carrier had spun off into an independent, publicly traded company that same year—meaning it faced a very different operational future. When the organization committed to the Carrier 700—a three year run-rate savings target of $700 million—its leaders identified the supply chain could be a primary lever of efficiency.
Carrier’s Digital team set out to turn a once lengthy process that took weeks into an efficient process that now takes just seconds.
Making real-time on time
Even just five years ago, tech limitations would have deemed a problem like this nearly unsolvable. But as technology was advancing, so was Carrier, using its newfound independence as an opportunity to transform into a more data-driven organization.
In practice, this meant strategic investments in data platforms and the teams to manage them. Carrier assembled a core team of data scientists—seeking individuals who could not only understand the fabric of their data, but who would also be fluent in their business processes. As the scientists worked to uncover a way to better mine the data, they knew they needed to build their own tools in partnership with industry experts rather than adopt a pre-built platform. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a strategic and platform partner, they developed a solution: the Spend Performance Management (SPM) system.
Hear how they built the Spend Performance Management system
Designed to give a 360° view of Carrier’s spend profile, this flagship solution aggregated data from across the organization, then used analytics, AI and ML processes from AWS to unlock insights from that treasure trove of information. The vendors the company is spending money with, how much is spent and hundreds of other types of data points now come together in a single platform.
It gave procurement managers a comprehensive view of enterprise data like invoices, orders, and spend patterns; and customer and market data to help forecast spend. The tool also provides real-time information and analysis, powered by data, analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence services from AWS, to help the organization procure, source and buy more intelligently. It uses a data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon DynamoDB to store metadata for dynamic ETL pipelines and Amazon SageMaker to predict commodity classifications.
“All of this information is extremely valuable in the business environment that we're operating in today,” added Singh. “Commodity prices have increased. Every supply chain is strained and challenged. So, you have to make buying decisions in a span of minutes and having information available to you real-time is extremely important.”
Undoing a legacy process that spanned decades
The process of implementing a massive new system at Carrier came with its own complications. SPM’s birth meant asking procurement veterans to change the way they work based on a tool’s recommendations that may not align with their experiences. It wasn’t easy.
But a careful change management track was launched in tandem with SPM’s kickoff. For one, Singh and his team gathered input from a range of stakeholders throughout the process, which built a sense of ownership across the company. That, along with strong executive sponsorship, proved critical to the platform’s internal acceptance.
Hear how carrier planned their change management track for SPM
“As the product was being defined, every voice was heard and factored and prioritized,” said Singh. “This culmination of executive sponsorship coming right from the top, and bottoms up taking everybody along with you—it has hit a sweet spot for us.”
There’s one more secret to SPM’s successful adoption at Carrier: sharing and celebrating their wins across the organization. “Everyone wants to be associated with a winning team and a winning culture,” continued Singh. “That drives a lot of momentum for the work that we’re doing.”
It’s not just SPM’s successes that are shared across the organization—it’s also its very potential. Today, the rest of the platform’s story is in the hands of Carrier's employees. The teams that built it are turning to the people who use it every day to point to what functionalities and data streams will make it more intuitive, effective and useful. And for Carrier, that’s just a start to a process of continually optimizing SPM—and its data operations at large—over time.
But for now, SPM’s successes speak for themselves. “SPM is a key enabler for identifying savings,” said Ed Dunn, VP of Procurement.
Since implementing the new tool, Carrier has seen the kind of dramatic efficiency improvements it was hoping for, resulting in identifying millions of dollars of opportunities. In addition, adoption of tool and expansion of data driven culture has been a key aspect of this program.
Data that used to take a lot of manual effort and time to reach—is now accessible in one click. “This has helped make the organization more data driven,” added Dunn. “We now bring up the tool to address questions on the spot.”
“There aren't a lot of digital investments that pay themselves back in such a short span of time and in such a sustainable manner,” said Singh. “But we’re starting to see a lot of that with SPM—and that’s now making the case for further expansion of analytics, AI and ML skills here at Carrier.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for AWS.
