Kimberly-Clark Centralizes Data to Save $1 Billion While Accelerating Innovation and Agentic AI

If you’ve ever soothed a stuffy nose with a Kleenex, outfitted a little one in a Huggies diaper or mopped up a spill with a Scott paper towel, you’ve relied on a Kimberly-Clark product. For more than 150 years, Kimberly-Clark has been a leader in consumer packaged goods (CPG), providing customers in at least 175 countries with personal care products from household-name brands. 

A global company with more than 40,000 employees, Kimberly-Clark outlined a bold business transformation goal: achieve $3 billion in supply chain savings in four years. 

That’s an eye-popping number — and more than $800 million of these savings will be backed by data initiatives. To help the company accomplish its objectives, Kimberly-Clark’s Global Chief Technology Officer, Ray Bajaj, turned to Snowflake, consolidating hundreds of data silos into a single source of truth that provides the necessary foundation for innovation, efficiency and agentic AI. 

Previously, Kimberly-Clark’s data landscape included 500 “shadow” data lakes and more than 30,000 reports. This decentralized approach plagued teams with data discrepancies, unreliable insights, time-consuming data wrangling and data governance challenges. Benchmarking diaper manufacturing costs, for example, involved 40 team members and 30,000 hours of work over a six-month period. 

“People were spending time creating metrics that they couldn’t agree on,” Bajaj says. “We wanted insights, but we were drowning in the company’s data that was completely unorganized.” 

Overcoming these data obstacles was imperative for Kimberly-Clark’s transformation from a region-based to a segment-based organization. With the help of Tredence, a Snowflake Elite Partner, Kimberly-Clark re-architected its data environment on Snowflake — all in just two years.

Centralizing data into a single source of truth allowed Kimberly-Clark to establish a library of 400 KPIs and eliminate around 28,000 unnecessary reports, which increased transparency and reduced confusion. “Now we have close to 2,000 reports that we’re running the company on,” Bajaj says. “It’s not just about organizing the data but organizing our insights as well.”

Working with Tredence to engineer a unified data ingestion layer reduced time to value by 70%, making it easier to provide business users with fresh, reliable information. Implementing careful change management practices and continually partnering with domain owners has also set the stage for proper data governance across Kimberly-Clark’s massive enterprise.

According to Bajaj, four capabilities are key to success for any CPG: a powerhouse supply chain, product and resource innovation, revenue growth management and digital marketing. Data is essential to each component — as evidenced by the fact that data initiatives power over 25% of Kimberly-Clark’s four-year, $3 billion supply chain savings goal. 

Kimberly-Clark’s central data lake in Snowflake has already delivered progress toward realizing this goal. Now, analyzing product costs by country, segment, manufacturing group and mill for 18,000 SKUs requires a simple click of a button — saving 30,000 hours of effort and avoiding months of delays.

Fast, reliable insights powered by Kimberly-Clark’s data lake simplify planning for inventory, finance, transportation and other supply chain stakeholders. Data-driven alerts keep team members informed about unexpected changes in the supply chain. 

“While other CPG companies are struggling with poor fill rates, missed orders and order fines, the ripple effect of what Kimberly-Clark created is massive,” says Sagar Balan, SVP & Chief Business Officer at Tredence. “And, in the agentic world, that’s going to be a big competitive advantage.”

With its data all living in Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, Kimberly-Clark has made powerful strides in every other CPG success area that Bajaj outlined — from product innovation to marketing. 

Centralizing decades of research and development data in Snowflake, for example, positions Kimberly-Clark to develop additional innovative products and improve care for customers. Bajaj says, “Now 60 years of R&D data is in one place, and the return on innovation has gone up exponentially because people are not duplicating experiments.” 

Snowlake also plays a pivotal role in Kimberly-Clark’s efforts to fuel profitable sales. “Revenue growth management — making better decisions about pricing, pricing sensitivity, promotion and retailers — is powered by analytics on Snowflake in collaboration with Tredence,” Bajaj says.

Digital marketing and social selling insights around everything from content localization to video analytics help Kimberly-Clark publish omnichannel content that resonates across a variety of platforms and markets. “We created a solid impact for Kimberly-Clark to win in the India market, and we’ve taken that to South Korea as well because the data is all in one place,” Balan says.

Since Kimberly-Clark has democratized intelligence across the company, the company is relying on Snowflake to unleash the potential of AI across teams. For starters, Bajaj’s team has built a natural language interface for users to query data within Snowflake. “You don’t need reports. You don’t need KPIs. If you need the market share for Huggies in the Northeast U.S., you can get that on Snowflake with natural language,” Bajaj says.

Next on the horizon for Kimberly-Clark? Agentic AI. Bajaj says, “We’ve created a consistent orchestration layer through agents so that we are bringing the vision of end-to-end supply chain to life — and that’s all made possible by standardizing processes and data in Snowflake.”