Defining a Digital
Roadmap to Transform
GP P&C’s $30 Billion
Business & Operation

Georgia Pacific Paper & Pulp is a leading global supplier of paper and pulp to various industries. As part of a greater IT and business transformation initiative Infor Hook & Loop, Accenture Digital and Fjord partnered together to define a roadmap of digital initiatives for the company to invest in over the next 3-5 years that would build off of a new ERP system being implemented.

Responsibilities

I served as a digital strategist bridging the gap between business process owners and the digital transformation consulting team identifying operational pain points and opportunities where digital tools and applications could solve these challenges.  I also played a key role in customer interviews, client site visits, the ideation of concepts for the digital roadmap, and defining the final future state reference architecture together with client and Accenture solution architects.

Tools / Skills

• client engagement

• ideation workshops

• user research

• digital roadmapping

• business process analysis

Process

Context & Challenges

Market Trends

Customer Insights

In order to define customer facing digital opportunities and experiences, we interviewed and visited several GP P&C customer to gain insight around their pleasures, challenges and needs around doing business with GP P&C and other competitors. We ultimately discovered that customers like doing business with GP P&C for its cost vs quality advantages, and for the good relationship with its people. However, many customers did indicate that getting updated information from GP P&C and the tools and tactics they were using were outdated - relying on traditional tools such as email, phone and fax. There was a desire for better digitized tools and services, such as at minimum a customer self-service portal for ordering and checking the status of orders. What customers sought to avoid most was the domino-effect of long lead times and delivery delays, since these issues would impact their own production and delivery schedule resulting in unhappy customers and potential financial losses.

Business Insights

In addition to customer interviews, we also interviewed several stakeholders within GP P&C’s business, from executives to factory level employees, to get a better understanding of GP P&C’s business objectives and mission, and identify challenges and opportunities within the organization where digital tools and innovations could solve and/or optimize processes. Three of the greatest challenges we identified were around marketing & sales, unplanned downtime and forecasting. All these practices were done manually using spreadsheets, often leaving them open to human error and with an inability to scale beyond their current means. Digitizing these three areas would liberate people’s time to focus from constant execution to more strategic activities and services.

Ideation Sessions

Together with Accenture Digital, Fjord and Infor, we held a series of ideation workshops with a variety of client stakeholders from different business units and functional areas (e.g. sale, operations, finance) to define a strategic vision and goal for the new unified business. The workshop format involved a presentation of our research findings from business and customer interviews, and presenting themes we identified. From those themes we identified subjects to ideate around - such as defining a new customer experience focused around delivering shipment visibility. We also ideated around the customers value chain, identifying opportunities to innovate around the company’s production and distribution lifecycle, and how we could ultimately provide more value for GP customer’s and their customers. Finally we collectively started ideating concepts for new tools and services that would address the challenges and opportunities identified, and prioritize them into a digital roadmap of tools and services to build for the future.

8 Digital Disruption Territories

Combining our insights from research and the ideation sessions, we identified 8 core themes to focus our design and innovation efforts around. The digital tool and service concepts we would ideate around would map to one or many of these themes to ground them. Most these themes revolved around information visibility, marketing/branding and eliminating siloed operations. Ultimately our ideation exercises lead to 28 concepts, which we briefly articulated with a description and to which themes they mapped to.

Concept Prioritization

In order to prioritize and refine the 28 digital concepts we collectively defined, we held prioritization workshops with key client decision makers and domain experts to prioritize these concepts based on perceived business value and ability to execute. We ultimately narrowed down the concepts from 28 to 14. These 14 concepts were later proposed on a digital roadmap as features and products to develop in the next 3-5 years.

Service Blueprint

Together with Accenture Digital and Fjord, we built a single page view and blue print combining all our insights from the project, and to illustrate the future end-to-end customer journey from discovery to receiving product from GP P&C. This service blueprint would also indicate what challenges we would address in each step of the service journey, and what concepts and systems would be addressing them. My primary contribution to this exercise was defining the end-to-end steps in the journey, and providing the business needs - since I was most familiar with the business.

Future State Architecture

Working directly with Accenture and GP P&C solution architects, I owned the creation and illustration of a future state reference architecture which would be required for fueling GP P&C’s operation, and the various edge-solutions also required to fuel the prioritized digital concepts proposed. This exercise involved several iterations and was in constant movement over the lifecycle of the project.

Implementation Plan

As part of the final deliverable of this project, I designed and visualized the final implementation roadmap working directly with the Accenture, Infor and GP P&C project owners. While most of this focused around the implementation of a new ERP system, the idea was to also illustrate the timing and rollout of digital applications and edge solutions in parallel.

Impact

Conclusions & Lessons Learned

This project was unique in that this was the first time Infor co-owned an implementation project together with Accenture - who was selected as a partner for implementing Infor product. The idea was to use this project to onboard Accenture about Infor product, capabilities and technologies so that they could sell and own future implementations in order to scale the selling and implementation of Infor product.

The greatest challenge in this project was facilitating the standardization of business processes across the different business units. Each of these units in some cases would operate very differently. As a result there were cases in which some business units wanted one process, whereas others did not. While these disagreements were ultimately settled, it made the process slower than expected which lead to forced decisions in the end.

While the ultimate output of the project was not perfect, the proposed technologies and implementation plan provided enough confidence to move forward with the implementation of new IT systems - with the goal to refine. The project concluded in the singing of a $130 MM software deal - which was a large success for Infor.

Personally I learned a lot in this project. My main role was becoming a specialist on the business operation, bridging the gap between the 50+ people in this project, and making sure the ideas we came up with and were proposing were relevant.