The news: Kimberly-Clark has finished rolling out Coupa, a system that handles buying from supplier sourcing through invoice payment, across the whole company. About 90% of its suppliers are now on the platform, according to a slide from its second-quarter results on August 4.
“Having launched Coupa across our enterprise, we're leveraging a single global AI-powered solution that makes procurement smarter, faster and more connected, while providing enhanced visibility into global spend,” CEO Mike Hsu said in prepared remarks.
The company presented the platform as one of three technology projects behind its cost program. The other two are an AI agent for factory staff and an internal training academy.
Gross productivity, Kimberly-Clark’s measure of cost savings as a share of adjusted cost of goods sold, was 6.4% in the quarter and 6.2% for the first half. Procurement savings are counted inside that figure, per the deck, so the company did not say what Coupa itself has saved.
Supply Chain Dive reported on the three projects this week.
What changed: The slide lists three projects.
Coupa is live across the enterprise, with 90% of suppliers on it.
An AI agent puts 15 years of factory know-how and nearly 19,000 best-practice documents in front of plant employees. In the pilot, workers were about 40% to 50% faster at knowledge-search tasks, which a company spokesperson told Supply Chain Dive means finding documented best practices and pulling information to make decisions.
A training academy covers 17 skill areas, including Agile, AI and data visualization. More than 650 employees have taken part, and the company said their measured skills grew 60%.
All three sit inside Powering Care, a five-year, roughly $3 billion productivity program that began in 2024. Executives said in June that the program was more than halfway through, per Supply Chain Dive's report from an investor conference.
The pattern: Four large consumer goods makers have detailed multi-year supply-chain cost programs in the past four months. Kimberly-Clark is the only one to name the platform behind it.
Mondelez is halfway through a $1.2 billion overhaul of its supply chain and ERP system, built with SAP and Accenture, and about 60% of its U.S. plants have been modernized, per Supply Chain Dive.
P&G said in April that its Supply Chain 3.0 program, which targets up to $1.5 billion in cost-of-goods savings, is "now in full scaling mode."
General Mills announced a $3 billion cost plan in July that includes redesigning its plant and distribution network.
But the programs began in different years, so the cluster says more about earnings season than about a sudden shift in the industry.
The counter: Clorox reported the opposite outcome three days before Kimberly-Clark’s call. Its ERP cutover is part of a five-year, $500 million digital program that began in 2021. But the cutover added costs because of “slower-than-expected ramp-up and demand fulfillment disruptions,” CFO Luc Bellet said, per Supply Chain Dive.
Bellet said he was glad to see “the cost noise and volatility associated with this large, complex implementation in the rearview mirror.”
Even Mondelez, halfway through its own rollout, said the 40% of its U.S. network not yet modernized is running at productivity “below expectations.”
What’s unclear: The 90% figure has no denominator. The deck does not say whether it counts suppliers by number or by spend. And those are different things, because a small share of suppliers usually accounts for most of a company's spend.
The AI agent’s 40% to 50% is a pilot result on one type of task, not a cost figure. Kimberly-Clark did not say how many plants use the agent or what it has saved so far.
What’s next: Kimberly-Clark expects to close its purchase of Kenvue in the second half of the year. The two companies run “6,000 different applications and 15 ERP instances” between them, COO Russ Torres said on the call. And consolidating them onto one platform, Torres said, “will be a huge driver of efficiency in terms of people hours, run costs, and license fees over time.”
Torres also counted more than $600 million of savings from “leveraging our combined scale in procurement,” with half of it due in the first year. But the company did not say whether Kenvue’s suppliers will move onto Coupa.
