Videos
Nestlé's Faisal Haroon on Why Manufacturing Needs a New Operating Model
Recorded at the World Economic Forum’s Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chains Forum 2026, this video was produced in collaboration with the World Economic Forum’s Lighthouse Operating System Academy.
Insights
- Manufacturing is shifting from decades of reliability and waste reduction toward speed, resilience, and agility, and that shift requires new operating models.
- Frontline workers today juggle many separate applications, and a single AI platform can consolidate them into one place to ask for the best way to work.
- AI initiatives earn business backing when leaders frame them around growth and free cash, a case teams often lose by leading with productivity KPIs.
Why does manufacturing need a new operating model, and what does building one actually take? Faisal Haroon, Global Head of Manufacturing Management at Nestlé, points to three requirements. The first is top-management sponsorship, which makes the effort business relevant and sends the right signal across the organization. The second is end-to-end thinking, since no single function can succeed on its own anymore. The third is purposeful use of data and AI to turn that connected view into daily reality. Faisal adds a caveat: the technology must keep people at the center. Get those right, he argues, and the agility the business is chasing becomes reachable.
Faisal Haroon:
Manufacturing is going through a big change. During the last couple of decades, we were very focused on bringing reliability in manufacturing. So everyone was busy adopting some of the capabilities to eliminate waste in the value stream. But now, if you look at what our consumers and customers are looking for, it's not just the reliability of our operations. It's much more than that. It's about the speed. It's about resilience. It's about agility. And to cater that, we need new capabilities. And the new operating models are emerging because of the same reason that they are going to help us to bring those capabilities in our manufacturing settings. So that's why it's very important that we adapt those new capabilities to make sure that we can satisfy our consumer and customer's future needs and can stay successful.
Faisal Haroon:
There are three main success factors, I would say. The first of all, the top management involvement and their sponsorship is going to be extremely important because this is where you make it business relevant and also to make sure that there's a right message going through the organization in terms of support that everyone needs in an organization to make it a reality. The second one is about having an end-to-end thinking because today we cannot survive in the ecosystem in isolation or, in an organization, a certain function cannot survive on their own. We all have to work together. And now this also links to the third point which is about digital and data and also AI, because to have this end-to-end mindset is not good enough, right? We need to make it a reality, and here the digital, data and AI is going to play a very important role. The only thing I would say for this third point is that we have to make it very purposeful and we need to keep people in mind while we are using these new technologies to help us to achieve resilience, speed, and agility.
Faisal Haroon:
Today our frontline employees, they have so many applications that they have to manage. One thing they are learning today is what to do in which application. This is so complicated, but through AI, you are going to be combining all of this under one platform. For frontline employees, they just need to enter one simple application and can ask any question they would like to have and to make sure that they can really have the right way of working and the most optimal way of working. So AI is transformational. It's going to combine things, it's going to bring all the information or the, I would say, the corporate intelligence together to help employees at all levels.
Faisal Haroon:
We need to think about business, right? Because if we just think about operations, we will be very much KPI driven and we might be working for reliability KPIs or productivity KPIs. And this is not that attractive enough for business. What is more attractive for business is when we talk about growth and give them the opportunity to have more free cash, so the business can invest to grow. And I think that's important. So if you don't talk about the business KPIs and help business through these capabilities to grow, I think it's going to be a difficult journey. It might be not very purposeful.
