Cargill Aligns Global Sustainability Initiatives in Portfolio Management Processes

Cargill, the largest privately held company in the United States, is a trusted partner for food, agriculture, financial, and industrial customers worldwide. After exploring dozens of solutions to track and measure their sustainability efforts and thousands of global projects and products spanning 70 portfolios, they sought a more consolidated approach to portfolio management. Their goal was to have a single solution for the entire organization that offered total visibility and complete management of their overall portfolio.

As the company migrated toward one corporate approach to portfolio management, they implemented Planview’s portfolio solution AdaptiveWork across all businesses and functions, configuring and designing it to support their process, data, and analytics strategy. This aligned the entire portfolio management process to enterprise standards in a single solution and enabled the integration of their sustainability efforts into a cross-functional system.

How Cargill works to nourish the world

Cargill is committed to providing food, ingredients, agricultural solutions, and industrial products to nourish the world in a safe, responsible, sustainable way. They connect farmers with markets, customers with ingredients, and families with daily essentials. Cargill has more than 160,000 employees across 70 countries and works as a global network, bringing together the people, ideas, and resources that can impact lives across the world. They combine 158 years of experience with new technologies and insights to serve as a trusted partner for food, agriculture, financial and industrial customers.

Each year, Cargill invests significantly across five different project types, including build/construction; new product development; information technology, mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and joint ventures; and continuous improvement. With thousands of global projects spanning 70 portfolios managed through disparate technologies, they knew they needed a different approach.

“A common solution around portfolio management was critical to our business needs,” said Michelle Misko, PPM Center of Excellence Leader. “We wanted total visibility into our overall portfolio so we could consistently track all projects, measure and drive execution, and understand financial accountability, and we wanted to do that in one solution. Planview portfolio management solution provided that.”

Cargill had spent a great deal of time ensuring their processes were sound before implementing a standard solution around portfolio management from a data and technology perspective. In 2016, when the time came to evaluate such solutions, business and information technology representatives agreed that Planview best suited their needs. Through a joint effort between the two organizations, the portfolio management solution was implemented globally across all businesses and functions in 18 months. This rapid approach was deliberate. Today, Cargill’s 14,000 active users access the solution's core features daily across 46,000 active projects and 3,000 products, 1,250 which impact sustainability.

“Despite the ease of configuration and its flexibility, choosing Planview was a business decision and not technology-driven because it helps us be more efficient in our business by providing visibility into our data, resource and demand management, the ability to track the spend and value of each product, and robust security provisioning,” Michelle said. “What’s more and just as critical is that we’ve been able to configure the tool to measure the impacts relating to defined sustainability thresholds and thus ensure we are true to our sustainability aspirations,” Michelle said.

For Cargill, Planview enforces rigor around sustainability processes and enables them to create a standardized approach to clarifying the connections between portfolio management best practices and sustainability initiatives. Senior leadership defined how to measure the impact of projects and products related to sustainability in three key areas – climate change, water, and land use. They use Planview Portfolio Management to prioritize aspects in each area, leveraging the tool’s configurable forms to streamline communication, reporting, and executive approvals. This ensures that every product supports sustainability goals, linking them with supply chain and operations decisions.

Easy configuration of uniform templating within Planview for each product and project across the portfolio has played a significant role in helping Cargill track and measure their sustainability objectives. Consistent and reliable data creation via templates leads to more accurate portfolio visualizations critical to identifying areas of sustainability for each impacted product and project. Standardization, in this sense, also ensures global dashboards consistently offer high-level overviews of every project and product, its status, and its impact.

Planview helps Cargill understand the value of a specific project or product related to its sustainability aspirations, and they credit the solution with providing a 5% improvement in project value capture. As those aspirations and thresholds change, the inherent flexibility of Planview’s portfolio management solution allows them to continuously add and analyze the data they need.

Planview also has made Cargill more efficient, with an average decrease of 25% in time spent on manual updates, meetings, reporting, and analysis, and a 2% improvement in capital efficiency from effective portfolio and project management.

“Cargill has become more agile and adaptive thanks to Planview, and it has allowed us to gain the foresight and visibility we need to move faster and with greater confidence, knowing that resources are focused on the right initiatives,” said Michelle. “Our portfolio management solution’s dashboard is the number one dashboard at Cargill. Our people use it and make decisions from the data it provides, so the next steps are making things even easier with the system, including more automation, integration, and advanced analytics.”