Profile: Miao Song, Global CIO of Mars Petcare, Mars Inc.

Miao Song has always had a passion for optimizing technology, challenging the status quo and driving innovation in her work. For the past two years, those passions have been aligned during a global digital transformation across Mars Inc.’s entire pet care business. Under her leadership, the organization has embraced new ways of thinking in the ecosystem to drive culture change, deployed new digital platforms and furthered digital skills across the globe.Song, a graduate of Peking University with both a bachelor of science degree in information management and an MBA in business, began her career in information technology at Nestle China. After five years, she became the head of IT for Shell China before taking on regional and global IT roles for the gas company. In 2014, she joined Johnson & Johnson as CIO and vice president of IT in the Asia Pacific region, before moving in January 2018 to Mars as global chief information officer for the Petcare division based in Belgium – the role she holds today.Perhaps her work was never more crucial than this year. The transformation efforts to accelerate digital capabilities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic focused on getting the products that people and their pets rely on delivered to their homes while keeping 3,000 veterinary hospitals open.The company launched direct-to-consumer online sales and home-delivery capability in only 15 days at the start of the pandemic and gained significant sales revenue in the first few weeks. Additionally, tele-medicine solutions helped pet owners connect with doctors remotely. “This ensured our continuous connection with pets and pet owners anytime and everywhere,” Song says. Within two months, the team had conducted more than 1,600 virtual consultation sessions and enjoyed resulting revenue growth.Song also spearheaded an acceleration in the use of data and analytics to help gain visibility into supply chain, inventory and operations and predict short-term demand in select markets. “We’re now using artificial intelligence across more than 100 projects,” she notes. “We’re also tracking associate data in connection with COVID-19 to accurately collect, analyze and learn from associate health data globally.”The digital channels and customer experiences she and her team developed emphasize design-thinking principles and track consumer trends by using social listening and other user-centric methods, so the more than 15,000 Mars employees can understand unmet consumer needs and pinpoint effective solutions.“Companies that do this quickly, by leveraging new channels and new capabilities, will build the agile culture needed to best serve consumers, customers and communities today and tomorrow,” Song says. “We want to ensure we challenge each other by keeping our end-user at the heart of decision-making.” New automation is allowing machines to complete repetitive tasks so the company’s associates can “put their hearts and minds into delivering on our innovation ambitions,” she adds.

Profile: Miao Song, Global CIO of Mars Petcare, Mars Inc.

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