Do you carry Altoids, Life Savers, or Juicy Fruit chewing gum? The 116-year-old Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company provides these well-known brands of gum, mints, and candies to consumers in 180 countries around the world. In 2001, the $5 billion company decided to expand the global image and reputation of the Wrigley brand. This move included replacing an aging, disparate IT infrastructure with a single supply chain platform using SAP.

Donagh Herlihy, Wrigley's CIO, spearheaded the three-year, international SAP implementation, and helped shape the governance process needed to carry out the initiative. To help Wrigley continue to build brand awareness with consumers, the IT team is helping consumer marketing lay out a strategy and a presence in the virtual world of Second Life, and to provide a safe, family-fun Web environment at www.candystand.com, where kids can indulge in multi-player games.

In this podcast, Donagh Herlihy, CIO and vice president, supply chain strategy and planning for the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, talks about the lessons learned from deploying SAP on a global scale with a new organizational structure, the role IT has played in shaping the Wrigley Innovation Center, and more.

Resources

SAP CRM Sweetens Wrigley's Trade Promotion

Wrigley Web site

Wrigley's Candy Stand

Bio

Donagh Herlihy is vice president, supply chain strategy and planning and chief information officer for the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company. In this position, Mr. Herlihy is responsible for setting the strategic direction for the global supply chain function and for optimizing the existing supply chain network. As CIO, he is responsible for all aspects of IT. Prior to this position, Mr. Herlihy served as the company’s CIO and drove the transformation of the company’s core business processes, enabled by a global implementation of SAP. Prior to joining the Wrigley Company in 2000, he led the IT function for Duracell.

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host

When Patricia Morrison became the executive vice president and global CIO for  the $42 billion Motorola company in 2005, she had this message for her team of 2,200 professionals and a variety of outsourcing partners: "We need to make sure we deliver what we commit to." Her 25-years of experience as a CIO –- including impressive stints at Office Depot and Quaker Oats -- has been based on doing just that. During Morrison's first year at Motorola, she spearheaded an effort to build a global IT organization that could deliver world-class IT value to all of the business units. Her efforts helped to take Motorola from #46 to #12 on InformationWeek's Top 500 IT innovators in 2006, and #1 in the  manufacturing industry segment.

Morrison gladly accepted the challenge of integrating Motorola's many acquisitions, such as the $4 billion Symbol Corp. And, business process improvements, based on best practices such as Six Sigma, the IT Infrastructure Library, and CMMI, have enabled Morrison's team to overhaul the global supply chain and improve the manufacturing process. Motorola is an internal test bed for its own products, so the IT staff has the luxury of working with the most innovative technology. But, Morrison's organization makes sure that working "on the bleeding edge" doesn’t mean compromising on the reliability and availability of application or network uptime.

Bio

Patricia B. Morrison is executive vice president and global CIO for Motorola, a $42 billion technology company. She oversees all strategic, operational, and financial aspects of the company's information technology architecture, systems, tools, processes and infrastructure. Before joining Motorola, Morrison was executive vice president and CIO of Office Depot, Inc., and she also has held corporate CIO positions at The Quaker Oats Company in Chicago and GE Industrial Systems.

Resources

The  Grill: Motorola CIO on Finding and Keeping Talented People

Motorola  CIO Gives IT a Reality Check

How  to Turn Your Employees into Leaders

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana  Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom  Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host

Being a new CIO in a new company has it challenges, and its rewards. Just ask Vin Melvin, who became vice president and CIO of Arrow Electronics in 2006. The $14 billion provider of electronic components and computer products had grown rapidly through global acquisitions. But as a result of this growth, Arrow's supply chain became highly fragmented, and other key issues emerged, like the need to improve IT governance, and to adopt formal best practices to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.

IT functions like driving innovation and carrying out IT governance remain as works in progress. But compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley propelled Arrow Electronics to adopt formal best practices like the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL. He says, "ITIL has brought a process discipline to the IT community which has made compliance less burdensome to both the auditors and IT."

Bio

Vincent Melvin is vice president and chief information officer, Arrow Electronics, Inc., and is a member of the Executive Committee. He is responsible for managing Arrow’s global information technology systems, services, and capabilities. Prior to Arrow, Melvin was executive vice president and chief information officer of Sanmina-SCI, Inc. (SSCI), a leading EMS (electronics manufacturing services) provider.

Before joining SSCI in 2000, Melvin was director of information systems at Solectron Technology, and earlier in his career, he held various positions of increasing responsibility at IBM Corporation in IT, logistics, and systems engineering during an 18-year career there.

Resources

Arrow  Receives CIO 100 Award for Resourcefulness

Q&A  with Vin Melvin, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Arrow  Electronics

Arrow Electronics Web  site

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana  Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom  Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host