From legacy systems to AI: How CPG leaders modernize revenue management
Five lessons from Nestle, Land O'Lakes, and Tyson Foods on building future-ready revenue management organizations
CPG organizations know they need to modernize revenue management to build more connected commercial operations and create a stronger foundation for profitable growth. As many begin replacing decades-old TPM systems and preparing for an AI-enabled future, the question is no longer whether to transform, but how to do it successfully.
To explore what that journey looks like in practice at the 2025 Promotion Optimization Institute Fall Summit in Dallas, moderator Ben Peart, North America Sales Director at XTEL, brought together three senior leaders from some of the consumer goods industry’s most recognizable brands: Danielle Koles, Director of the TPM Excellence Hub at Nestlé North America, Scott Johnson, RGM Lead at Land O’Lakes, and Kevin Bujarski, IT Senior Leader at Tyson Foods.
While each organization is at a different stage of its modernization journey, several common themes emerged around what it takes to move beyond legacy systems and build for the future. Their experiences offer practical lessons for embarking on their own revenue management transformation.
Key Takeaways:
Strategy over system swap: modernize TPM for the long run.
Early buy-in, clear owners: involve many, decide with few.
Data first, then AI:
standardize early to scale.
1. Modernize with a long-term strategy, not just a system replacement
Replacing a legacy trade promotion management (TPM) system is no small undertaking. Scott Johnson knows this firsthand. Land O’Lakes had run the same TPM system for 30 years, and Scott deliberately wanted to act before a looming ERP overhaul rather than layer two massive projects on top of each other. “I personally wanted to go [ahead with overhauling our TPM system] before that happened,” he explained. “I know what a challenge a TPM project can be and how detailed it is.”
Crucially, the selection wasn’t just about replacing a tool. The team looked at complete suites, weighing not only TPM functionality, but also where they wanted to go in the Revenue Growth Management (RGM) space, so the decision supported a longer-term journey rather than just an immediate fix.
It was, as Scott put it, “a combination of tools, people, and where we want to go into the future,” a reminder that a technology transformation is never just a system swap; it’s a strategic evolution.
2. Build broad buy-in early, but create clear decision ownership
Nestlé’s Danielle Koles described an implementation wide enough to consolidate eight separate systems into one platform across multiple operating companies. With that many businesses to reconcile, the design phase at times put up to 150 people in the room.
That scale paid dividends in buy-in across the organization.
“It built the community around us so that as we continued on that journey, we did know the right people to get in the room to make the right decisions,” Danielle reflected. But she was equally clear about the limits: “Making decisions with 150 people in a room is not always conducive.” The discipline, she explained, lies in knowing when to open the room for input and when to pull back to “a smaller group” for the big decisions.
The tone was set at kickoff with simple instructions to set aside departmental and operating-company loyalties: “You are no longer this operating company or that operating company, and you are also no longer this function or that function. You are just here to figure out what the best way is to do things for Nestlé.”
3. Expect challenges and establish strong governance from the start
Every panelist agreed there is no such thing as flawless implementation. What matters is preparing for the inevitable and having the governance to navigate it.
Danielle’s advice to anyone starting was blunt: “Just accept that now. If any of you are at the beginning of your journey, just know you will have issues.” The right mindset, she argued, reframes that difficulty as a chance to improve rather than a setback: “Change is hard, but change breeds opportunity.”
That mindset is what makes governance effective: it keeps teams aligned on who decides, how issues get escalated, and how the business and vendor course-correct together.
And when problems do arise, the answer isn’t the best software but the relationship behind it: “You could have the best system in the world, but if you don’t have the right partnership and the right governance to help you take it forward with the organization or make the decisions to fix what you need to fix, then it’s not going to work.”
The vendor relationship surfaced repeatedly as the decisive factor. Kevin shared a candid lesson: Tyson initially did not retain XTEL for post-launch support and felt the consequences. Re-engaging and asking for XTEL’s help throughout the implementation process kept XTEL’s “skin in the game.” According to Kevin, XTEL was there “to make sure that what wasn’t perfect when we launched can continue to get better, and we can see better adoption that way as well.”
Danielle drew a distinction worth internalizing, one that reframes governance as a feature, not friction. At Nestlé, the philosophy is “collaboration over consensus, and I think that’s so important. You don’t always have to agree with each other. You just need to understand each other.”
4. Data is the foundation for everything that comes next
For Kevin Bujarski at Tyson Foods, a low-margin business, the guiding metric is singular. “Efficiency is our KPI,” he said, noting that “making sure that we put our trade spend where it works the most efficiently is absolutely the guiding principle for how we got to where we are today with XTEL.”
Underpinning all of it is data.
Land O’Lakes invested in a three-month data alignment effort before the core build even began, an early version of what XTEL now calls ADAM, its AI-powered data mapping and cleansing capability. It’s a sequencing choice Ben Peart returned to repeatedly throughout the panel: “data is the foundation of everything.”
5. AI should help people spend less time in systems and more time creating value
Looking forward, all three leaders are focused on agentic AI and, importantly, on getting the agents to work together rather than in isolation. Kevin pointed to connecting them across systems: “If I’m asking my TPM agent something, it also needs to know something about SAP and needs to know something about marketing: a framework and an architecture where those agents can talk to each other [is essential].”
For Danielle, the payoff is freeing people to do what only people can do: “We want our users in the system as little as possible, so they’re out selling and strategizing,” and using AI “to make not only our business better, but their business better.”
Ben Peart tied it back to fundamentals, underscoring that none of this works without the groundwork laid first: “Without having that data foundation, without having a system in place with standardization, process, governance, and control, those agents aren’t going to be able to help you.” It’s exactly that vision XTEL is delivering today, building its AI agentic framework in partnership with Microsoft and Copilot.
Closing Thoughts
Across three very different organizations, the playbook was consistent: get the data right early, build broad buy-in during design, govern relentlessly, expect failure and learn fast, and treat your technology provider as a true partner.
Danielle’s parting line captures it best. In the middle of a complex transformation, “your focus needs more focus.”