The client
The Gorilla Glue Company is a family-owned, internationally recognized manufacturer of premium tapes, seals, and adhesives. In addition to the Gorilla Glue products, The Gorilla Glue Company also owns and operates Lutz Tools and O’Keeffe’s Hardworking Skincare Products.
The challenge
Gorilla Glue recently invested in a new ERP system. As part of that process, it wanted to compile its data into a robust information system to gain greater insights into its customer profitability and overhead costs down to the brand, pillar, and SKU. Additionally, Gorilla Glue wanted to go beyond SKU costing and understand each customer’s cost-to-serve. As Gorilla Glue worked through implementation, it found that the ERP system, as configured and without investment in related data management and visualization capabilities, wouldn’t deliver on these requirements at go-live. To meet the project’s ultimate goal of better and more informed decision-making at the customer level, Gorilla Glue needed a quick solution that would provide the required visibility into product groups, customer accounts, and manufacturing, warehousing, and logistical costs.
The solution
Gorilla Glue contacted us and asked to provide a whiteboarding session to its C-suite regarding key decisions on costing methodology within its newly acquired ERP system. Based on the thoroughness and precision of the whiteboarding session, Gorilla Glue subsequently engaged our team to provide support with calculating costing, labor, and overhead rates and implementing this data into its ERP system. We developed a sustainable and pragmatic model that provided the comprehensive manufacturing cost data Gorilla Glue needed to make more informed operational decisions.
Several months later, Gorilla Glue asked our team to help establish cost-to-serve metrics for various consumer retailers. We brought in our costing, technology, and CPG industry experts to conduct interdepartmental interviews with the Gorilla Glue team to ensure that the desired outcome was understood and cross-functional. We developed a prescriptive approach that provided recommendations for improvement and built a prototype dashboard featuring data visualizations that broke down cost-to-serve into four categories: cost accounting, warehouse management, freight and transportation, and material costs. To successfully execute this project, it was necessary to quickly expand existing and establish new working relationships across the Gorilla Glue organization and facilitate effective dialogue and decision-making across the various stakeholder groups, including accounting, finance, costing, technology, sales and marketing, and various aspects of operations.
