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When you sell everything from baby food to instant noodles across metros, tier-2 towns and rural kirana stores, “one-size-fits-all” supply chains simply don’t work.
In this case, Nestlé’s South Asia Region team set out to make the supply chain both “digitally centralised” and “locally tuned”. The goal: stay close to fast-changing consumer demand, manage India’s fragmented channels, and still run a disciplined, cost-efficient network.
Instead of relying only on historical shipments, Nestlé is leaning heavily on real-time sell-out and secondary data from distributors and modern trade partners to shape demand plans. Local teams get more granular signals by region, channel and SKU, while central teams orchestrate capacity, sourcing and inventory at a portfolio level. That combination of bottom-up market sensing + top-down network design is what gives them the “edge”.
On the execution side, the article highlights how Nestlé is re-thinking route-to-market for South Asia: tighter collaboration with distributors, sharper segmentation of outlets, and differentiated service models for modern trade, general trade and quick-commerce. The ops focus is on availability and freshness in hot zones, without blowing up working capital in the long tail.
For O2C and planning teams, the big shift is governance: cross-functional reviews that look at service, cost and freshness together, not in isolation. The digital layer – data, planning tools, visibility – is used to constantly rebalance that triangle as demand moves.
