The Customer

The Hershey Company, one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world, is 127 years old with revenue of over $8 billion. Headquartered in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Hershey’s offers more than 90 products, including some of the most recognizable desserts globally, such as Hershey’s Kisses, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Kit Kats. With three global distribution plants, the company sells in over 60 countries.

The Challenge

Hershey’s knew they needed to become more Agile to deliver better value while reacting to the impact of COVID-19. With much of their annual revenue upended when Halloween was canceled due to shutdowns, the company needed to innovate quickly in a time when customer behavior was quickly changing, and supply chains were being disrupted.

Hershey’s asked Rego to help them identify what was meaningful to the organization and their stakeholders and then deliver that value consistently by implementing Value Stream Management practices and tools.

The Solution

Rego was able to help Hershey’s leverage Broadcom’s ValueOps solution to reach their Value Stream Management goals. This was done quickly to help the company pivot with agility. Rego helped Hershey’s,

• Map their current processes, identify departmental silos, find bottlenecks and issues that were keeping them from delivering value quickly
• Recognize that moving towards a Product Funding model would help them meet their needs
• Empower the PMO Center of Excellence tasked with implementing Value Stream Management (VSM)
• Develop a transformation plan to evolve from the “current state” towards a “utopian end state”
• Implement their ValueOps solution on AWS, to ensure seamless upgrades and minimized expenses, as upgrades on Rego SaaS are free.

The Results

By focusing on their VSM goals, Hershey’s:

• Experienced a 38 percent growth in sales in one month alone
• Were able to quickly pivot to avoid massive supply chain issues
• Leveraged VSM and ValueOps from Broadcom to optimize their Information Systems environment