Nestlé Purina PetCare North America builds one AI-ready way of working and saves 87,000 hours a year

Few companies touch as many households as Nestlé Purina PetCare North America. Founded nearly a century ago by a small group of pet lovers, it has grown into one of the world's largest pet care manufacturers. “The purpose of Nestlé Purina PetCare North America is to enrich the lives of the pets and the people who own them,” shares Padma Hari, Chief Digital Officer at Nestlé Purina PetCare North America. “Purina is a huge organization in the pet care industry with USD 15 billion in revenue and 24 factories in North America”

Complexity follows growth

Such expansion brings its own challenges. “As you scale, your complexity and ability to actually track and monitor becomes harder and harder,” explains Jeff Elchert, Director of Project Execution at Nestlé Purina PetCare North America. “Over time, we saw teams create their own spreadsheets and tools to manage their work.” The result was that pulling together project data for reporting and decision-making could take weeks. “Delayed decisions cost us time when it comes to deploying our resources and assessing risks,” adds Siroos Abolahrari, Senior Manager of Project Management at Nestlé Purina PetCare North America.

Jared Agee, Senior Manager, Engineering at Nestlé Purina PetCare North America, saw the cost firsthand. “My boss came to me one time on a Tuesday, and he asked me, ‘Jared, can you give me a report on your project?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I can have it to you next Thursday,’ and he was perfectly accepting of that time frame. And it just occurred to me: what would happen if we could deliver that value at the same time? How would that change our business?”

Hari understood that as artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities matured, siloed data and tools could set the company back. “My job is to find ways for a 160-year-old company to fit into a future with the evolution of AI,” she shares. “We’re starting to enter a world where you have a human employee and a digital employee, and there is a lot more governance and structure required. If you, as an organization, don't take the time to ensure your data is not only clean but also AI-ready, you're going to have a very expensive piece of technology that does not meet the problem that you're trying to solve.”

One platform, shared language

To ensure the company would be future-ready, Nestlé Purina PetCare North America sought a way to bring company-wide data together. 

“We discovered that Smartsheet let us build one standardized way of working, one technology, one way of reporting, while still giving individual teams the flexibility to operate however they needed to,” shares Bryan Lewis, Senior Director, Program, Portfolio, and Change Management at Nestlé Purina PetCare North America. “Smartsheet also gave us the freedom to make changes on the fly, without a big structure, program change, or code deployment behind it.”

The company consolidated its projects in Smartsheet and built tools to standardize how work moved. It started with a project intake sheet. When someone wants to add a new project or program to the portfolio, they enter core details via shared dropdowns rather than a freeform request. That lets the portfolio team review and compare submissions side by side, using the same criteria every time. “Project intake has helped us standardize the information coming into our leaders, so that when they are approving projects, they better understand what the trade-offs are for those projects. This has enabled our governance model to be much more efficient,” notes Lewis.

Portfolio dashboards came next. Leadership now has a single view of every active project, ranked by priority, so they can review risk, status, and progress. The same view breaks work down by category and department, showing where time and resources are actually being spent. 

“Smartsheet dashboards really allow our teams to see the health of our portfolios and to focus our energy on projects that need the most attention,” explains Lewis.

The same way of working at every factory

Today, work runs the same way across the 24 North America factories and five global regions, with room for each site to work the way it needs to. For capital projects, Agee's team builds each project from a single blueprint in Smartsheet, giving every team the same consistent set of tools no matter which factory they're in. A weekly review dashboard brings it all together: project health trends over time, on-site safety incidents logged, cost and resource data, all color-coded to match each project's status. Risks and opportunities are tracked through a risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies (RAID) log, so Agee's team can see at a glance exactly which threats need attention and which opportunities are worth pursuing further.

The digital side runs on its own Smartsheet workflow. Employees submit digital requests via a form, and Smartsheet automatically routes them to the appropriate team member and tracks them from submission to completion. “I can quickly spot if things are marked as blocked, which means they might need my help,” Agee shares. 

Marketing follows a similar principle. With over 200 marketing projects running at any given time across disconnected tools, the team spent much of its time just pulling information together. Now, brief details are captured in Smartsheet forms, Control Center automates project setup, and Dynamic View provides tailored views of project progress to every stakeholder. “Not only did we need to reduce the manual burden on the project managers, but we created a one-stop shop for our cross-functional partners,” shares Amy Mess, Director, Program Management at Nestlé Purina PetCare North America.

Hours returned to real work

By eliminating the manual work of chasing down and consolidating siloed data, Nestlé Purina PetCare North America has seen a measurable jump in efficiency. “We saved about 87,000 hours a year, or three hours per person per week, by implementing Smartsheet,” shares Agee. “Reclaiming those hours means we can focus on the work that really adds value to the project.”

Most crucially, Smartsheet has accelerated decision-making. “There are plenty of AI tools out there that provide great data, but none of them consolidates it,” explains Agee. “When executives need quick answers to make a decision, the Copilot integration can search through Smartsheet MCP Server, pull the data back in, and show us exactly where each number comes from. That’s time I can put toward something more beneficial and help transform the organization.” 

With standardized, accessible data, leadership can more easily compare project trade-offs or reallocate resources. “Portfolio management is not about the projects. It's about delivering the value,” shares Lewis. “Smartsheet has allowed us to get those results faster, make decisions faster, and then ultimately allow leadership to decide: what's going to drive the biggest benefit for the consumer? What's going to drive the business forward?”

Granular, calculated decisions

For Hari, speed isn't the real prize; quality is. 

“AI is giving more granularity to our decisions, as it can process more data than humans,” she explains. “It becomes a strategic advisor, one that understands the market and helps you understand the needs of your consumers in this ever-changing landscape.” 

That constant shift, Hari believes, is exactly why organizations have to be deliberate about what they do and who they become. “The reality of the world we live in is a constant evolution. There is nothing that you have to change, but if you want to really grow, you need to change,” she concludes.