How Blackwoods handled its CIO’s health crisis in the midst of a digital transformation

As the tech team at workplace safety goods business Blackwoods steeled themselves against the initial onslaught of COVID-19 in early 2020, little did they know the additional curve ball about to be served to them. The long-established brand, a subsidiary of Wesfarmers, which also owns the Bunnings and Officeworks brands, has more than 50 stores across Australia.

While scrambling to pull together a revised digital strategy that would enable work from home, remote shopping, click and collect, and ensure a major digital transformation program and complete ERP upgrade project stayed on track, their CIO, Claudio Salinas, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a form of blood cancer.

Salinas recalls the experience as the most shocking and traumatic of his life. “Your world changes. You re-evaluate. You start to really understand what’s important because they’re the things you focus on.”

Getting better was his first priority, of course. “Second, in the event that I wasn’t going to make it through, was ensuring my family would be OK,” he tells CIO Australia. “Difficult conversations” were had with Claudio’s wife and two daughters, aged 15 and 17 at the time of his diagnosis. Compounding the shock was the fact he had always been vigilant with his health, getting regular checkups and six-monthly blood tests. Within three days of receiving the news, Salinas was in hospital receiving his first bout of chemotherapy. Having spent six months in hospital, and undergone 13 chemotherapy treatments, Salinas was informed in December 2020 that his leukemia had gone into remission.

The IT teams picks up Blackwoods’s major digital transformation program

But in June 2020, the news of Salinas’s diagnosis couldn’t have come at a worse time for the tech team at Blackwoods. They were grappling with how to respond to the unprecedented crisis brought by COVID-19 restrictions. The challenges of completely overhauling sales and delivery systems and processes, as well as enabling the entire workforce (2,200 in total) to function from home (supported by deployment of Microsoft 356 and Teams, Citrix, and various cybersecurity tools), all loomed large.

That major digital transformation program spanned a large-scale migration to Microsoft Azure, deployment of SAP’s Hybris e-commerce and digital marketing platform, and consolidation of five middleware platforms into a single cloud instance. Salinas and his team were also working to replace a 35-year old Cobol-based ERP and 16 core business applications with Microsoft Dynamics 365, and financial operations via the Microsoft Azure cloud, spanning finance, advanced warehousing and distribution, product information management, and CRM. The ambitious project was not easy. The final component was the build and implementation of business-operations self-service capabilities, which included Microsoft’s BI Data Services and Power Platform services supporting basic production of basic internal apps and automation.