meet laurent.
engineering our future.

Laurent Cardinali is our Vice President, Global Engineering. Leading our community of more than 600 engineers around the world, he supports some of our biggest projects to make sure we keep producing quality products for global customers at the lowest cost.
Here he tells us about the challenges of creating world class engineering in such a large, fast-moving organization.

Touching every brand

Global Engineering is at the heart of Mondelēz International, dealing with the whole business and covering every brand. This means we not only focus on day-to-day engineering, but my teams also lead a number of initiatives that support the end-to-end integrated supply chain.

In other words, we’re responsible for keeping the whole supply chain running smoothly without any glitches, as well as looking at how new technologies and processes could improve the way we work.

This involves working with a variety of other teams. Of course, we work very closely with all the Supply Chain areas and the R&D teams. But we also provide a lot of support for Sales and Marketing, helping them to develop new business cases. For example, we recently worked with R&D, Sales and Marketing to develop our packaging superiority, so we could get the best price point architecture for all our channels.

It’s all about people

We have an amazing engineering community at Mondelēz International and the most exciting part of my job is getting out to as many of our global factories and regional HQs as possible to meet them. I’m interested to get their feedback, so we can look at constantly improving how we do things. These are incredibly valuable meetings and I’m always happy to address their questions and talk through any concerns they might have. Although, with over 600 of them spread around the world, it’s difficult to meet them all!

In such a fast-moving business our main challenge as engineers is to keep adapting to changing requirements as the company transforms itself. In the future, I can see Mondelēz International growing either organically or through acquisition. Our engineers will influence and enable this growth by developing faster, more efficient solutions, delivering best-in-class projects and implementing bold technical innovations.

We’re already developing an approach to achieve this, called our World Class Engineering journey. This is designed to help our engineers adapt quickly, so we can become the best engineering community in any FMCG or Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company.

Doing things differently

Innovation is critical for our company to grow and survive. In engineering, working with the R&D teams, we’re leading innovations in products and technology. This enables Mondelēz International to produce new foods in the most efficient way.

This has been a key part of my role since I joined the company in 2014. As well as growing and developing our engineering community, I was also given the challenge of developing best-in-class technical standards, such as our Lines of the Future.

It’s about looking at the best and most effective ways of delivering the satisfaction that our customers and consumers want. That’s why we’re always working on the latest innovations, such as Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, to assess how these new tools could radically change and improve our supply chain in the future.

Looking ahead

Throughout my career, my professional goals have always remained the same – to keep learning every day, keep solving exciting challenges and keep having fun!

I’m certainly learning a lot at the moment. Working with the Integrated Supply Chain team I’m getting a lot of excellent coaching and it’s helping me to understand how to become a world-class supply chain team.

As for my future career. I’ve always worked hand-in-hand with Research, Development, Quality & Innovation (RDQI) and Procurement and I’m sure I could bring a lot to these teams. So, maybe I could look at a role in these areas.

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