Henkel Adhesive Technologies: The Digital Transformation Journey

Digital transformation is changing the rules of business, be it for delivering effective customer experiences, focusing operations on things customers value, building platforms and partnerships to accelerate/scale, or innovating at the intersection of experience and operations. It has become essential for all businesses. Start-ups and global corporations need to understand what digital transformation means and what different options imply in terms of investment in digital infrastructure and transforming business strategies in an increasingly data-driven environment. The case offers an operational implementation focus on digital transformation (complementing the organizational change view). Its key message is “digital transformation is a business project”. To emphasize this point, we introduce the data-dashboard-decision (3D) framework. At the design phase, it identifies the desired business outcomes, then translates them into the business decisions required to deliver those outcomes. These in turn must be supported by an informative dashboard – one that turns data into information, visualizing what was not visible before, and hence must be fed data at the right level of detail and the right frequency.

The case study provides a concrete example in which to anchor a discussion on digital transformation. For students, it provides the business context and asks them for an implementation roadmap. For MBAs, this can be given as an assignment prior to the class. For an executive audience, ask participants to break into working groups and report back with a proposed roadmap. Discussion concludes with a recap of Henkel’s digital transformation journey, along with a perspective for the road ahead, to emphasize the following teaching objectives: -Digital transformation must consider organizational inertia. -Digital transformation is an enabler for timely access to clean (master) data. -Digital transformation is an enabler for sustainability initiatives  the license to operate.