Supply Chains Driving Growth Through World-Class Automation

Gartner recently gathered supply chain and operations executives from across the globe for a Leaders in Action event focused on driving growth through world-class automation.

Much gratitude to our Colgate-Palmolive co-hosts and the team at their Hill’s Pet Nutrition business: Luciano Sieber, chief supply chain officer, Emma Rolfe, SVP, global demand & digital transformation, and Jose Borrell, EVP of end-to-end supply chain for Hill's Pet Nutrition. They generously opened doors at their award-winning smart factory in Tonganoxie, Kansas, (shown below), allowing our community to explore the practical realities, cultural shifts, and strategic investments required to successfully scale automation and AI.

Colgate-Palmolive shared their journey toward building a highly automated, resilient, and agile supply chain. Their transformation is anchored in several core themes:

• Moonshot Portfolio Thinking: Traditional ROI hurdle rates can stifle necessary long-term automation investments. To overcome this, Colgate-Palmolive has adopted a "moonshot" strategy. Rather than relying strictly on incremental continuous improvement, leadership works backward from a bold future state—such as their goal to operate with significantly higher productivity and lower costs in the next five to 10 years. By evaluating ROI across an entire site or portfolio rather than project-by-project, operations can justify strategic investments that might have longer paybacks. This mindset is essential for staying ahead of inevitable labor cost increases, labor scarcity, and the need for speed-to-market.
• Speed to Value at Scale: Colgate-Palmolive uses a "Scale to Win" approach to foster innovation. They encourage local teams to experiment with proof-of-concepts, validate the business case of the results, and then quickly expand winning solutions, globally. A prime example is an AI sourcing assistant built by a recent engineering graduate acting as a "citizen developer." This tool reduced “total landed cost” analysis from weeks to minutes. To prevent unchecked proliferation of new tools, they established a central governance structure to review, scale and fund local innovations.
• Driving ROI Through Integrated Robotics: A core principle shared at the event was that you can’t just throw technology at issues. Operations must master process fundamentals and clean up related data before applying automation. When deploying robotics, the hardware is often the easy part; the true difficulty lies in socio-technical integration—ensuring systems talk to one another and the workforce is equipped to manage them. To drive ROI and successfully deploy AGVs and AMRs, leaders must prioritize front-end design workshops, system-wide integration, and comprehensive upskilling programs alongside closed-loop digital twin simulation.

We also had an active roundtable discussion highlighting insights from other supply chain leaders navigating the complexity of automation:

• Sysco’s Balanced Investment Approach: Our other community speaker, Stephen Higgs, SVP of global operations at Sysco, discussed the complexities of automating food service distribution. Sysco’s short order-to-delivery windows and high SKU/temp zone complexity can challenge automation investments in some environments. In other cases, they strategically invested for future ROI. For instance, Sysco is pioneering in their launch and expanding fleet of EV delivery tractor-trailers.
• The Brownfield vs. Greenfield Challenge: One member highlighted the stark contrast in justifying automation costs. While a massive Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) is easier to justify in a new greenfield site, the financial math skyrockets and becomes a major barrier when attempting to retrofit those same autonomous technologies into a legacy brownfield facility. Another member noted the opportunity of bidirectional technology transfers between greenfield and brownfield sites.
• Global Sourcing and Safety Tech: A community member shared strategies for overcoming cost-prohibitive automation by utilizing teams in India and China to break down expensive OEM solutions and build them back more cost-effectively. They also praised the use of wearable technology as a powerful EHS solution; if an employee enters a restricted area without their tech or proper training, the machinery automatically shuts down.
• AI Democratization vs. Governance: The group of operations leaders discussed the tension between empowering employees to build AI tools and maintaining IT governance. As technologies become more accessible, deciding whether to buy provider solutions or build in-house agentic models remains a tricky and dynamic puzzle for CSCOs.

We’re grateful for the inspiring two days spent together in Kansas and look forward to continuing these discussions with the COO/CSCO community at our future events.