Kraft Heinz’s India GCC to increase headcount to 2000 by year’s end

Commenting that the Gujarat government had the best ITeS policy in the country today, she said, “The subsidies you get by setting up in a place like Ahmedabad are lucrative for organisations

FMCG giant Kraft Heinz India looks to grow its global capability centre (GCC) in a year by increasing its headcount to around 2,000 from 400. The company’s first and only GCC was set up in Ahmedabad in 2023.

“We will hire for tech roles like data scientists, advanced analytics, machine learning, and GenAI. We will also grow in FP&A — core FP&A, analysis and business insights of the finance part, and functions like order to cash and procure to pay. Essentially, we want to create a finance hub in the GCC and expand in IT operations and marketing insights, marketing intelligence, business intelligence,” Nayeema Kouser, Director of GBS Global Capabilities Centre, Kraft Heinz India, told businessline.

Strategic location

Kouser said the GCC was strategically set up in Ahmedabad, a tier II city. “We noticed that 53 per cent of the global GCCs in the industry are based out of Bengaluru, so the city is saturated and there is a massive talent war. The attrition percentage of GCCs in Bengaluru is roughly 20 per cent and goes up to 35 percent in specific industries,” she said, adding that tier II cities like Pune, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Hyderabad had talent availability. “Our GCCs’ attrition rate is as low as 5 per cent, and we attract talent from across 26 states,” she said.

Commenting that the Gujarat government had the best ITeS policy in the country today, she said, “The subsidies you get by setting up in a place like Ahmedabad are lucrative for organisations.”

Core strengths

Some core competencies managed out of the Indian GCC are global supply chain and logistics, procurement, global capabilities like advanced analytics, tax mining, automation COE, global internal controls, and over 20 plus functions for Kraft Heinz as a global business.

The GCC already delivers BAU, business KPIs, and metrics from an operational excellence standpoint but the vision is to transform it into a value-creation strategic location.

“The focus is to take it up a notch and drive value creation, be it the EBITDA value, cash flow generation, or core P&L savings. We’re taking all the right steps to get there,” she said.

The Indian GCC has also launched a few GenAI models. “Some proof of concepts have promised massive business value in terms of savings and we have started discussions with the business to launch them globally. We invented the technology after identifying a business problem,” said Kouser.

One problem the organisation dealt with was reducing wastage in its factory line for ketchup. Using GenAI, the company could detect wastage and improved the yield percentage across 15,000 SKUs.

Other use cases include detecting drifts from standard product recipes.

“We evaluated the business driver behind those variations, and what business practices to change to improve the yield percentage. So the entire focus is to improve KPI using GenAI as a technology.”