This is a profile from the 2022 version of the DataIQ 100.
The latest list is available here.
Paul Kelly, vice president - digital, data and analytics, PepsiCo Europe
What has been your path to power?
I’ve had a fairly atypical path for a data leader in that most of my career has been spent in business and strategy versus technical roles. My early career was mainly spent in consulting, followed by an MBA in Australia. After business school I spent three years with the Boston Consulting Group in London, working mainly on clients in the retail and consumer goods sectors.
I left consulting in 2010 looking for a role in an operating business, in preference to a classic commercial strategy exit. My first five years in PepsiCo were in our UK business leading revenue management and commercial teams. That period gave me a deep grounding in how our company works, which has been invaluable.
In 2016 I moved to Geneva to lead the strategy group for Europe. That gave me a broad experience in working across a range of different geographies and the full extent of the PepsiCo portfolio. It’s also when I caught the data “bug” in that I could clearly see how transformational data and analytics were becoming for the CPG industry.
From that point on, my career has largely been about driving the data and analytics agenda within PepsiCo. I did this initially from an insights role, then in 2019 we created a dedicated advanced analytics group to build and scale data products. Most recently, we have become part of the strategy and transformation function and my role has expanded to include co-ordination of the wider digital transformation agenda.
What impact has the pandemic had on the role of data in your company / organisation?
The pandemic – and the way that recovery has been phased and uneven across geographies – has been a huge accelerator. That’s logical. The business context has changed so radically that business intuition created pre-pandemic can no longer be relied on to the same extent as before, and robust data becomes critical to decision making across the total value chain. For a consumer goods company that sits at the forefront of changing in consumer trends, shopping behaviors and retail channels, that’s been further exacerbated.
The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation across the globe, bringing new opportunities to reach consumers, engage employees and drive efficiency and sustainability. So data has played a crucial role in ensuring the continuity of business across Europe throughout the crisis.
For example, we’ve used store data (we call this StoreDNA) extensively throughout the pandemic to focus our sales teams on outlets that we know are open for business and that we can predict will see growing sales due to changing shopping patterns, for example due to staycation or home working trends.
The net impact of the pandemic is that business leaders have become much more receptive to leveraging data tools. That’s a trend that won’t be reversed as we return to “normal”.
DataIQ is a trading name of IQ Data Group Limited
10 York Road, London, SE1 7ND
Phone: +44 020 3821 5665
Registered in England: 9900834
Copyright © IQ Data Group Limited 2024