How a snack-industry leader drove digital transformation through continuous innovation
Frito-Lay focuses on customer experience and continuous innovation to power impactful digital transformation across its e-commerce and frontline-workflow tools.
Modernizing e-commerce and frontline-workflow tools to delight employees and consumers
Frito-Lay North America has 60,000 employees, of which 25,000 are frontline sales employees who service more than 300,000 retail stores weekly to replenish inventory, arrange displays, and rotate stock to ensure freshness.
To optimize productivity across its systems and better service retailers of all sizes, Frito-Lay worked to centralize and modernize its tools. To ensure user adoption, the company engaged user-focused experts from IBM Garage.
Lay's Classic potato chips are simple yet delicious — just potatoes, oil, and salt. The team conducted nearly 1,500 hours of user research and created roughly 40 personas, ranking every pain point by user and business value.
Innovation fuels transformation and agile development
Frito-Lay and IBM co-created two solutions: Snacks to You, an advanced e-commerce solution, and Sales Hub, which streamlines frontline-employee delivery routes.
The approach succeeded because of the synergy between innovation and transformation tracks. Teams established "Golden Threads" — aspirational visions of end-user experiences threaded through every part of the project.
Working from a backlog of experiences, the innovation team came up with ideas bound by no restrictions. Once validated with a working MVP, transformation squads used scaled agile practices to build, test, and deploy.
Agile culture and modernized solutions kickstart further transformation
The team can now deploy code into production every week instead of once a month — addressing user feedback and delivering solutions to market 98% faster than before.
30,000 active customers and growing, with the platform flexing to shifts in demand. Retailers see fewer out-of-stock scenarios and expensive rush shipments.
Gives Frito-Lay real-time visibility into key operational and stocking metrics, now expanding to absorb electronic handheld device functions like ordering and invoicing.
Delivery Schedule Adjustment (DSM DSA)
Used by Delivery Specialist Managers to assign trucks to routes and manage deliveries — resolving customer run discrepancies that previously required manual Excel and SharePoint work.
Building brand-new routes within a Zone
A one-time setup based on travel time, unload time, and logistics — used to plan the schedule every zone follows, replacing a complex, error-prone legacy process.
Finding relief workers, fast
Lets Zone Leaders locate relief employees to cover absences, replacing inconsistent Excel, Google Docs, email, and phone-based planning across North America.
Three processes, one consistent product
The role led three connected processes for IBM Design across both the USA and India teams.
Govern
Responsible for modification, addition, and removal of components across four systems: FLNA design system, Labor Management design system, Retail Execution library, and Timecard library.
Quality Analysis
QA on every artboard before handoff — components linked to the system, consistent spacing, no overlaps, everything contained within its artboard, and consistent row dividers.
"It's not like there's a start and stop to this transformation. It's a process. We're on this journey and will continue as we evolve with our workforce."
— Kevin Buehler, Senior Director, Snacks to You, Frito-Lay North America