As one of the largest food and agriculture companies in the world, Cargill is constantly evolving how it goes to market. A few years ago, the company made a bold shift — moving from product-line selling to a cross-product, regional sales model. It was a radical transformation, and PROS proved to be the right partner to support it.
In this customer interview, Pete Lefebvre, Principal, Architecture at Cargill, reflects on the decade-long partnership with PROS and how the platform’s flexibility, scalability, and ease of use helped Cargill adapt and grow. From building a unified data model to rolling out consistent quoting and pricing experiences across regions, PROS has played a central role in helping Cargill improve efficiency, drive adoption, and execute on its digital strategy — while meeting the growing expectations of the business.
Video Highlights
- 0:35 – Cargill has partnered with PROS for over a decade, during which time you’ve seen significant innovation and transformation. Can you share what that journey has been like from your perspective, and what you believe have been the key factors in sustaining such a long-term, successful partnership?
- 1:29 – As a global organization with a wide range of technology vendors, what differentiates PROS from others in your tech stack?
- 1:57 – From your perspective, what are the ‘must-haves’ in a solution and in a vendor?
- 2:46 – What are the outcomes you’ve been able to achieve with PROS? How have those outcomes generated value for Cargill as an organization?
- 3:50 – Looking ahead at 2025, as a Digital leader in your organization, what are you most excited about?
- 4:30 – Looking across the various business units supported by Cargill Digital, how have the insights from past deployments influenced or shaped your strategy for future rollouts?
- 5:14 – Of all the deployments you and the Cargill Digital team have led in partnership with PROS, where have you seen the strongest business impact and what strategic choices do you think contributed most to those results?
- 5:55 – Do you have any advice on how to approach change management for a new CPQ customer who is implementing PROS for the first time?
Full Transcript
So I’m Pete Lefebvre. I’m a principal architect, in our strategic pricing space in digital technology and data, formerly IT.
I’ve been at Cargill for about, twelve years in various technical roles.
Cargill is a a large, food and agricultural company. My role is specifically in our food business, supporting our pricing technologies including PROS.
I would say, the partnership has been, evolving over time.
We’ve started, you know, over ten years ago with specific solutions for specific businesses.
Cargill itself has changed, quite a bit over the last decade or so, and, we’re continuing to to evolve and transform going forward.
I’d say one, one key element of the partnership with PROS has been our our ability to evolve together and and and, you know, sort of ebb and flow as our needs have changed. And and that’s been, super positive, just the ability to adapt as our needs change.
I would say the domain knowledge.
So in the pricing space at Cargill, it’s a fairly new discipline, strategic pricing, just, I guess, relative to to other spaces.
PROS has really helped us mature that that practice both from a technology perspective and also just, bringing sort of an outside in perspective.
So it’s the typical things that you look for in enterprise software, right? Resiliency, security. There’s a there’s a number of foundational aspects that are, our requirements, you know, from from the ground up. So we look for those. Obviously, innovation, ability to to interact with other elements of our ecosystem. So interoperability is is big.
And then it it has to work and it has to has to be something that our customers, our clients, internally and and externally, externally who are exposed to it, enjoy using and and using efficient efficiently. So a good user experience.
Yeah. So about five years ago, we made a decision to continue to invest, in the PROS platform in our food business. And one of the key elements to that was supporting, a shift in how we go to market across our portfolio. Previously, we had sales teams aligned to specific product lines and those product lines came together. And and so there was a need to to be able to, to sell and, and quote across and price across our product lines.
The, the PROS platform and the, the ability to provide consistency across, a regional portfolio of products while offering flexibility in terms of how we price specific to those, those products or customers in certain channels, was a key element of continuing to invest in PROS.
There’s continued investment in the pricing space and and not just in technology, but in our organization. It’s a key focus, in the commercial space and and for our food business at Carrillo in general. So, a lot of opportunity, a lot of momentum, good and bad. Expectations are high because of that.
And, you know, we’re going to continue to need to to do what we’ve done successfully with PROS, but but do more. So we’re going to be asked to do more. And, that’s it. It’s an exciting, opportunity to have.
We did a lot of work upfront to understand what are some of the foundational principles to to support the the regional, cross selling and cross quoting objective.
Part of that was establishing a common data model to support the solution.
And that’s proved very successful as we’ve continued to iterate and and roll out across, different regions across different businesses, allows us to leverage, you know, what we’ve done before and and continue to scale and adapt, as additional business needs, come across.
I think we’re we’re still understanding, how to measure, how how we can become more efficient in terms of how we’re we’re rolling out the technology.
In terms of the business use of of the solution, we see high adoption and, we see consistently across the businesses that we’re rolling out to, that they’re gaining efficiency in terms of how they’re interacting with their customers, how they’re getting quotes out the door. And so far, that’s been a big positive for for the businesses that we support.
Change management is huge, and engaging the right folks from, from our business organization in the space. It’s a priority.
You know, there’s investment and a lot a lot of good momentum. I would say take the time to to establish some of those foundational principles that you can ground your program in. And also take take some time to identify what are some key data elements, data sources, ownership, because data is everything when it comes to, our ability to roll out technical solutions with speed.