How Celanese makes people central to its digital transformation

Celanese operates more than 50 large manufacturing plants across 27 countries, and has made several significant acquisitions in recent years, including Dupont’s $11 billion mobility and materials (M&M) business. At the same time, the company is undergoing a massive digital transformation. Sameer Purao, who joined Celanese as CIO and CDO in 2021, is keeping the team and company focused by making change management a core competency of his team, and ensuring a focus on value, agility, and purpose.

What is the business transformation underway at Celanese?

We’re leading a digital transformation focused on three pillars: the customer experience, manufacturing, and supply chain. We partner with our customers to provide a solution across markets ranging from automotive, electronics, apparel, medical and pharma, and more. We’re now providing customers an AI-driven digital platform with specific solutions built around product-grade selection for a wide range of applications. This robust AI platform streamlines communication outside of phones and emails, creating a uniquely tailored experience.

We’re also digitalizing the entire process so customers can see data specs and technical sheets, order intake and samples, and track. Of course, live employees remain available to help customers as needed. We’re currently 35% complete toward automating the entire order process with a goal of reaching 90% in the next 18 months.

How are you transforming manufacturing and supply chain?

We have 52 manufacturing plants globally, some of which have been in place for more than 100 years. Some are large, spread over more than two square miles, and they run on manual processes that require significant time on data entry and data collection across several non-integrated systems. So we’re turning them into smart plants, self-optimized and autonomous. We started three years ago and have completed our first digital plant and are now working on the second one.

Our approach is end-to-end transformation, which includes installing a 5G network fence-to-fence, as well as developing an integrated data platform by securely connecting multiple systems to drive several use cases.

We’ve rolled out the foundational version of digital manufacturing to all the plants, which is a single platform data lake with contextualization. All the equipment at the plants, including the P&IDs and drawings, are contextualized in this data lake. We invested six months with 10 people fully dedicated to this for one plant. Our program isn’t to replace people but to empower them to be more productive because we strongly believe the value is driven not from technology but from people.

We’ll eventually digitalize our largest plants, and the value we gain from the first one will drive the investments in the others as we expand our use cases. And we’ve also just launched our digital supply chain this year, so it’s not yet as mature as the digital manufacturing or customer journey, but it’s the third pillar of our digital transformation.

We didn’t want to launch all three at once because it would be too much work, so we staged the journey. We started on digital manufacturing three years ago, then the digital customer journey two years ago, and now we’re starting on supply chain and sustainability.

What approach are you taking to ensure ROI on these investments?

We take a use-case focus to innovation, so we’re not implementing a digital twin here or some IoT there. By defining our transformation roadmap at the use-case level, we can effectively track our value and decide on prioritization.

We’re very close to having a self-funding model where the amount of investment we need to sustain digital manufacturing will be less than the value we create every year. We’re about 70% there, which means we’re creating value that amounts to 70% of what we’re investing.

When people measure value, they sometimes talk about time saved or efficiency. That’s not how we measure value. The value in our world must directly contribute to the bottom line.

How are you growing inorganically?

Over the last few years, we acquired two huge businesses from DuPont and ExxonMobil, which added more than 120 sites, 1,020 applications, and a 26-year-old SAP system to complement our own 18-year-old system. We were right in the middle of our digital transformation when we were tasked to integrate these huge acquisitions, and in a record time of 16 months, we completed it, which also included an S/4HANA upgrade.

What’s your approach to building a new mindset for transformation?

I’ve always understood that people, not systems, create value. Our legacy culture was focused on continuous improvements to processes and reducing costs. That was the right approach when we needed to do more for less, and where digital was a new word. We sprinkled a little digital innovation here and there, but due to high technology costs, we didn’t have change management nor realize value at scale because we weren’t driving any true transformation.

When we decided to transform, we wanted to see a big change in our operating model over the next four years, not next month or quarter. This required a major mindset change for our team, so we put people at the center of the strategy. Considering the magnitude of change from inorganic acquisitions coupled with digital transformations, our CEO asked both our CHRO and me to drive the culture change within the organization. While I’ve been driving change throughout my career, this was my first time to serve as an appointed change leader for a large global company. I had to learn a lot in a short amount of time.

We decided that change, agility, and value would be key to put people at the center of the transformation. One of the first things we did was build an enterprise change management group, which our CHRO and I decided to put in IT, since we were driving so much of the transformation. With agility, we make bold decisions quickly and pivot when needed. This allows us to move fast and create a sustainable momentum.

Our digital program is about driving value, not implementing fancy technology like robots, twins, and drones. We focus on driving revenue, productivity, yield, reliability, and safety, and we measure through monthly operational KPIs.

What are some pragmatic ways you’re building this target culture?

I tell my team they need to constantly talk about the why of what we’re doing. When companies moved thousands of employees to remote work during COVID, they typically didn’t have change management teams telling everyone how to create a remote working environment. Everyone worked together because their why — personal safety —  was so strong. But when you don’t have a strong why, the how and the what don’t matter.

Why we’re doing digital manufacturing is much more than it contributing to the bottom line. It’s about survival. Our children and grandchildren grew up with technology that allows them flexibility, so it’s difficult to get our next generation to work in a legacy-based environment. We must be digital, and we must put people at the center of our strategy. We had a lot of employees in our manufacturing plants volunteering to be on this digital team and we have plants requesting to be next in line. People are fighting for and embracing this change, which is why we’re confident we’re on a path to sustained and successful transformation.