Inside the Kellogg’s Spin-Off: What the Historic Split Meant for Tech Teams

Post-Spin and WK Kellogg

WK Kellogg’s Rex shared insight into what it’s been like for the cereal company to operate a smaller, leaner organization rather than trying to replicate the operations of the much larger Kellanova. 

By moving into the cloud, they’ve been able to better prioritize their business needs and opportunities, and they’ve essentially created multiple data centers in AWS to run the $3 billion business, he said.  

As part of the spin, their “Separate & Unplug” strategy includes seven transitional service agreement (TSA) workstreams. This involves their distribution network; order-to-delivery integration; real estate; SAP and integrated apps; non-SAP apps and foundations; marketing data and technology; and data, insights, and analytics. 

Once separated, they then took a hard look at three pockets of work: foundations, applications, and data and analytics. 

See also: WK Kellogg reports benefits from its new marketing model 

Efforts in foundations centered upon such challenges as separating their own network, building their own collaboration and security platforms, and determining how to drive the separation of all plants’ applications. 

Among the early impactful decisions included building their first HR system in their own environment, eliminating the need to depend on Kellanova to drive payroll or run employee records. 

They also separated SAP, which enables them to operate in Kellanova’s system but provides time to run their transitional service agreements until they can build and migrate them over during their next phase. This next phase, which Rex referred to as “Day Two,” will occur in February 2025.    

WK Kellogg has also used the moment to look at the realities of data and reporting. While they were running thousands of reports, due diligence revealed they were only using about 150. Armed with this knowledge, they’ve begun discussing what a rationalization process can look like for the post-February Day Three. 

Future Synergies

One meaningful win as a new company has included better unification of their trade promotion management and integrated business planning sides of the house. Even with this greater visibility into their TPM efforts, they’re still only scratching the surface of their new systems, according to Rex. 

Looking ahead, they’ll focus on driving awareness back into their sales teams about trade efforts to better integrate the commercial and supply chain teams. 

“We want to drive that commercial plan where if something’s being promoted or innovated, we need to make sure that we’re talking across the aisle with supply chain,” he said. “So we’re going back and forth collectively, but also making sure that our retail team … has a seat at the table as well.” 

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