Driving Organisational Simulation Maturity in a Food and Beverage Company Through Democratization M.

S. Tibos ¹ , A. Manfrinato ¹ , A. Vadala ^1
1 PepsiCo International

In recent years there have been technology and industry trends which have been enabling simulation and democratisation of simulation to become a reality for Food and Beverage companies. These include developments in computing and power software capability, the desire to develop products faster with new materials and the ongoing wider trends in digital transformation.

PepsiCo has a Global Modelling Simulation Council (GMSC) formed of experts, practitioners and senior stakeholders that help drive simulation impact. The progress is measured via a maturity matrix framework using four key indicators. One of these indicators is “organisation” which measures the breath and regularity of simulation use across business units. Democratization and the development of Apps* is employed as a tactic to drive the organisation forward on this metric.

PepsiCo have built a number of Apps over recent years. One of the most successful is the Extrusion App which is used for extruded shape development, scale up and capacity unlocks. The Extrusion App was used by the Brazil Region team and the Global Product Function team to launch Cheetos TikTok in record time. The team also saved trial running costs, raw material costs and avoided significant production downtime. Non-simulation practitioners in the team used the simulation technology themselves and were able to produce the desired shape through virtual iteration. This was a true example of “virtual-first” and simulation democratization.

_{^*An App that has an underlying model in the background, however all the complex detail is hidden, pre-handled and automated by an expert, the user is simply shown the inputs and outputs.}