The common denominator of successful transformation

Good afternoon and welcome to our session on the common denominator of successful transformation. My name is Jana Werner. I lead the AWS Enterprise Transformation team for AWS M for Europe, Middle East and Africa. I work with the executive teams and transformation leaders of our strategic customers to help them derisk their transformations and accelerate time to value.

We've structured the session today for you in two parts:

At the start, in the first half, I will be talking about what made Amazon successful on their own journey from a bookseller to a global organization that can innovate at speed and scale. And I will share the success patterns we have seen from supporting hundreds of customers so that you can hopefully apply these to your own transformations.

In the second half of the session, I have the absolute pleasure of welcoming Ard van Jar Wee to the stage - CEO of Brand Essentials. And I hope he will share his secret source on how he's leading a successful transformation for the largest chemicals distributor in the world.

Let's get us started with some questions and I hope I can see you with this bright light:

Who here is currently or has been going through some form of transformation? Alright, we're definitely in the right room then. Awesome.

Second question, who is managing to interlock their technology changes and directly deliver and translate them into creating business value? And it's ok not to raise your hands because this is very, very hard and few of our customers manage to do that.

And here comes the killer question: Who here is able to transform across and scale this across the organization and create sustainable impact on the top or bottom line of the organization? Excellent. You should absolutely talk to the people who've got their hands up after this session.

So let's jump in. The reason we get less and less hands up is because transformations are inherently complex and really, really hard. And this is the group therapy part of the session in case you're wondering - everything links to everything. It impacts how you organize yourselves, who you hire, how you hire, how you manage performance, your technology, your culture and everything else. So no wonder that we found in a new McKinsey study from this year that only half of transformations actually meet their performance objectives.

And if you look a year into transformation, 44% of customers are able to sustain their transformation targets. If you look ahead three years, that number shrinks to only 12% - 12% of companies in the study were able to sustain their performance gains for more than three years. So sustainable, scaled transformation is super, super hard.

Here we've brought some of the anti-patterns we see again and again - why transformations run into such challenges. These are just some of our favorite examples:

• Technology in search of business value - I worked with the CIO of an automotive company. His team created a data lake and then he said to me, "Yanna, I really struggle to get the business excited about this." So struggling to get value from the tech.

• Similarly, and probably more topical than ever today is we have a lot of customers understandably getting really excited about generative AI - the technology aspects of it. So we help and ask the questions, what's the problem you're trying to solve with this? And then generative AI might be the answer but not always.

• Second is this example of transforming through operating models - we see a lot of big bang, top down, imposed operating model changes. And then this assumption that operating model change done equals transformation done.

• As the awesome John Smart said in that vein, I've worked with a financial services customer, they trained hundreds of people in agile, but of course, their time to value didn't improve. And actually even worse, the colleagues came back into a traditional organizational setting where they weren't able to apply what they learned and were frustrated and left - at least the good ones - and the others kept struggling through that.

These are just some examples. A third one I'll add is the classic waterfall programs - they take up resources for a long time. Meanwhile, business demand changes and for an aerospace customer I worked with, this ended up meaning that they had a shadow IT budget that was 1.5 times the size of their IT budget because the business went ahead. And we all of course know the famous "watermelon reporting" of these programs - outside green, inside red.

What all these have in common is that they tend to create faster caterpillars, but they usually don't create this beautiful butterfly that the transformation promises. And the reason for that is that these approaches are largely academic. What isn't academic are customers. And we find that the most successful transformations are driven by customer value. This is the common denominator of success. It takes transformations from being inward focused, siloed and academic to being focused on solving real-world customer problems.

Our founder, Jeff Bezos says customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied. And that means this can create a focus point for a constant driving, constant change through your organization for your customers. And indeed, we find that the most successful companies - the ones who are really able to iteratively understand their customers' needs and react to them - tend to outperform their competition. They tend to on average spend 40% of their time on more meaningful work. They're twice as likely to outperform on non-financial measures and tend to outperform on financial metrics as well, of course.

But in today's time, customer centricity isn't just about top line growth. It isn't about new markets and products. We also find that customer centric companies are able to create efficiencies by working backwards from a customer focus.

So how do you then put customer centricity at the heart of your transformation? We've structured this into six themes - and that is how we support our customers and how we also think about this at Amazon. Let me talk you through them:

1. Having a clear and simple purpose that is meaningful and speaks to hearts and minds. Of course, Amazon's purpose is to be the most customer centric company on earth. And that demonstrates another great attribute of a good purpose - it frames our responses beyond the immediate remit of our role, whether we work in Prime or AWS. This sounds really simple, but it's actually estimated that half of transformations fail because of such clear lack of alignment that a good purpose can create.

2. Add to that outcomes - they need to be measurable, specific and relevant. Lots of the customers I work with say "I want to double my EBITA" - great. Now let's break this down and get specific into things like "I want to reduce my supply chain outages to zero by month X" - that's actionable. And while you're at it, make the progress on customer metrics the yardstick for your success. So things like time to value.

This first theme helps to address a challenge we see over and over again with customers - and that is the inability to prioritize. Everything is a priority, so nothing is a priority. People are overworked and we know it doesn't help productivity to try and do too many things at the same time. In fact, my amazing colleague, Philip Ruhm said to me the other day, the word "priorities" in plural with an s did not exist until the 1900s. There was only ever a priority. Great food for thought.

Let's add to this the next theme - this is about culture and organization. Companies that are able to really put customers at their heart need to be able to operate at high velocity. Indeed, our founder says that high velocity, high responsiveness, agility - call it whatever works in your context - is the only sustainable competitive advantage. Anything else can be replicated by someone else.

We encapsulate this high velocity in what we call our Day 1 culture. And let me dive into that for a second. The purpose of Amazon's Day 1 culture is to preserve the mentality and vitality of a small organization. So this is about being able to make decisions fast. This is about being able to rapidly iterate and innovate. It's about creating space for curiosity and learning and being able to adopt new trends like AI rapidly.

Often things are skewed against such customer centricity and speed when organizations are trying to transform. There are antiquated policies, leadership behaviors and things like proxies. A great example for a proxy is when the process becomes the thing itself - so the "I followed the process" - that's a definite sign of a Day 2 culture.

On the left here, you see our success markers for a Day 1 culture - we bring all of these to the transformations we support our customers with and I invite you to take these with you.

The second part of this high velocity is of course in addition to culture - how we organize ourselves and how we help our customers organize themselves in the transformation. We work in small teams that are small enough to be fed by two pizzas. We call them two pizza teams. Though my Italian colleague would very much argue what kind of pizzas those are! But basically it's teams that are reduced to single digits. They operate like little startups with small dependencies. And the reason for that is that the number of links between people tends to start posing a challenge - if you have 6 people in a team, you have 15 links between them to manage. Double that to 12 and the number of links shoots up to 66. At 50 people...

You have 1000 225 links to manage. And I'm happy to give you the formula for this. Um after the talk, if you're curious to calculate for your own organizations, um basically the cost of this collaboration and coordinations, snowballs, bureaucracy, laws, productivity and ultimately leads to day two culture.

So we create teams that are autonomous and really close to their customers. And those are teams that aren't just technologies, they have representatives in it from every part of the of the customer journey. So your regulatory teams, your finance teams, procurement, et cetera.

Next of the six elements are mechanisms. Mechanism is an amazonian term. It's a process that reinforces and improves itself so that it can scale or this allows us to scale beyond the direct line of sight of our leaders, we have many different mechanisms, technology mechanisms, mechanisms of how we set and operationalize our strategy. And our most famous one probably is how we innovate and it's called working backwards.

I wanna dive into that because i talked about transformations going from academic to solving real world problems and that's what working backwards allows us to do any solution we create, we start with by saying by thinking about and immersing ourselves into what are the customers needs? At what time of day are they functional needs? Are they emotional needs and we're guided by these working backwards questions.

You see up here, many, many of our innovations are small things where we improve things. So when we think of innovation, we don't have to think about something that's absolutely disruptive. That's rare. I do wanna um share a bit more about the one you see in the background here, which is disruptive because it explains how um working backwards is different. It's called amazon go.

A lot of retailers have realized that the checkout experience for customers creates friction and isn't pleasant. It's stressful. You have to wait, you have to queue. People are actually worried whether their payment methods will work nervous kids with them, et cetera. So a lot of retailers have created handheld scanners, self checkouts, apps on your phone through working backwards.

Combined with our day one culture aws was able to entirely eliminate the checkout experience with um machine vision, machine learning, computer vision, machine learning. We were able to simply let people walk out and this really demonstrate trades that innovation for us is an attitude towards solving customer problems, right?

So next element here is about obviously becoming a data driven organization. And eva will talk about this in much detail and is doing an incredible job um driving that through um brands transformation. So i won't talk much detail about it. All i'll say is this is about democratizing data and 95% of the challenges to do that aren't technical, they are cultural, they are about learning and they are about being able to let everybody in your organization make data driven decisions.

Add to that the fifth element, how fast are you able to adopt advanced technologies? I'm closely linked to that your business and technology architecture. Many of the tech and business processes were designed and conceived in a time when the agility that cloud provides wasn't available yet. So it's important to look at how brittle is this in traditional orgs. How do you can, how can you decouple? How quickly can you adopt new technology change your processes? All of these together help us to put customer centricity at the heart of transformation and in fact, how we operate at amazon.

Great. Now, how do you apply them? How do you infuse your transformation with that? Here's the approach we take, we start by defining and prioritizing initiatives that solve customer problems. We do that through working backwards, we create a backlog of initiatives and as they solve customer problems, ultimately, we also look at how this translates into organizational value.

Then we pick one or two of these initiatives, not the top one or two priority in your organization because that will get far too much scrutiny, but maybe the second or third priority or fourth priority because they still get enough resources but not all the scrutiny that doesn't allow things to flourish and to try and experiment with something different and we deliver them.

So we deliver something that's small fast to do. We try and prioritize um for example, initiatives. So we can apply out of the box accelerators from aws. And as we deliver, we start creating and changing in these dimensions, purposefully against delivery.

So what i mean by that is we would create the first one or 22 pizza teams in service of this first delivery. We don't do an entire product operating model implementation. We migrate and modernize exactly what we need for the for the solution of this problem, we pull out the data we need from the silos, et cetera.

So deliver these fast and to this delivery, we bring all the teams that need to be part of um doing this in your organization. So your compliance team, your um your uh design teams, your procurement teams, et cetera, your your service, operation teams. And as we work side by side with these teams in an experience based way and do this in a different way in our day one culture and in these um six dimensions, they see intrinsically what isn't working and where the blockers are to the organization to work this way.

And we can create a backlog of blockers that we can start working on. And the great thing about this approach is that it means transformation can come from within people, realize what isn't working, we can help bring it forward and start solving it instead of transformation being done to someone, we then of course, create our backlog of bloggers, we reprioritize what we want to deliver next because we have learned something we define our success metrics and we find the patterns that have worked and we create a mechanism around this.

So we repeat and accelerate the mechanisms around prioritizing around the backlog and around delivering fast. And as you do that, you can keep building on the six dimensions that you progress and you create velocity. And as that happens, you start changing the organization's fabric. So that's the theory.

Now, brand are an organization who are doing this fantastically and applying a lot of these elements in practice. I have the absolute pleasure of welcoming the ceo of brand essentials to the state, former chief transformation officer and mastermind and architect of brand tag's transformation. Please help me welcome iva van jwa.

Hi, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much. So, um maybe a little bit about myself. So, i mean, i started in breach in 2020 we actually found a company that was um very locally organized but also not only from a business perspective, but also from a technology perspective, phenomenal company. And maybe before i go any further, i'll let you show you a little bit on what brand is and the reach that we have

Innovation and quality, passion and sustainability. 150 years of experience and a sense of what's next. We are brent tech. We care for every aspect of daily life because we share the most comprehensive portfolio of chemical products, ingredients, knowledge and services with our partners.

We purchase our products from all suppliers in the industry and we set the highest standards for quality and safety worldwide. We offer everything from essential products to individually tailored solutions and always the latest knowledge. Our two divisions br tag essentials and brent tag specialties are perfectly positioned to fulfill the needs of the various industries in the market.

Brent tag essentials connects our expertise with chemical products with innovative capabilities and supply reliability. At brent tag specialties, our focus is on application consulting, connecting innovations and ideas that are deeply rooted in our profound industry expertise, both develop and deliver sustainable solutions.

This ideal combination makes us unique and this is our dna within our networks. We work with our partners, advancing together day by day and creating value for everybody. We shape the future of our industry and we are aware of our responsibility to protect all of us and our precious environment to promote equal rights and empower talents, to grow with understanding and leadership.

We bring it all together, we are run tech. So i hope they gave you a little bit of a feel for what brent is. We literally spent more than 70 countries. And one of the things when we embarked on this journey, we started, we took a step back and we said, you know, what is our company? Really? On the one hand, we've been delivering products for over 150 years. But we said, actually, there's more because once we started to look at that picture, we started to see that we had access to an unrivaled amount of data. Nobody in our industry had more access to what our customers wanted, what our suppliers wanted over 3 million shipments annually in the b two b industry is quite significant, more than 30 million of transactions.

And so we said to ourselves, if we want to really expand our business model from just being product focused and running the supply chain to actually making our company really a data company at its core. How can we unlock all that data? How can we actually get our supply chain data to support our sustainability goals, working together with our partners? But also how can we play all those insights? And i will add to this here, obviously, working with our customers. We are at the forefront of pretty much every innovation, product innovation in the world. How can we take all those innovations and play them back into the supply chain to actually help our suppliers to accelerate their innovation and accelerate their go to markets on new products? That's a pure date again.

And so that's how we, how did we start? We started with the ambition of um of the vision for our customers. And we said to ourselves, for our customers, we want to be the easiest to do business with, for our supply partners. We want to be seamlessly connected and for our employees, we simply want to be the best place to work. But we also said, given that we are fundamentally a supply chain company. We want to establish the most agile and connected supply chain to address today's challenges, for example, in the area of sustainability.

And so how did we do this? Firstly, on our journey to become the easiest to do business with? We actually developed a number of use cases. We thought big, we started small in order to scale fast. So one of our solutions was actually if we want to be seamlessly connected with our customers, we need to build an omni channel platform. We need to make sure that all of our processors are seamlessly connected and all of our data, no matter what channel our customers are interacting to are actually stored on the central clouds of rule. And i will come back to that later on when it comes to our supply chain.

We want to have all the data that we are able to use internally to run the most optimal supply chain, but also play it back to our partners. Simple things that we have gotten accustomed to like our customers, like consumers on track and trace towards our customers, but also managing the entire upstream parts of our supply chain. And finally, we wanted to be able to really engage our customers on the application development. Because you can imagine, for example, a customer calls us up and they want to develop the next vegan burger.

They would go to one of our sales representatives and they would ask, "Ok, well, I want to have a vegan burger." And our labs would be working together with them to, to create a vegan burger that has the right juiciness, the right texture, the right flavor profile. But obviously, there's there's some time involved. So how can we actually speed up those development cycles? And that was also part of the ambition that we had.

But we also realized that this was more than just data and digital transformation. We needed to embed all of these processes very firmly into the organization. So in parallel to this, we launched what we called an excellence program, we used a very classical lean methodology to drive actually process improvements and to build up local capabilities to be able to embed the digital change actually in our local operations. And I'll come back to that later on as well.

And just a couple of fun facts. Working backwards, we actually redesigned a couple of our processes. And we realized actually that for a lot of those customer processes, we could reduce probably 80% of processing steps along the way, could we could seriously speed up order processing on moving it actually to omni channel and actually drive actually our customers into those channels that they would really prefer to work with versus actually forcing them down one single path.

But we also started to leverage generative AI and I'm sure that many of you have picked up a number of use cases today where you say, "Well, that's pretty cool. I didn't know." But let me give you at least one more that I think you should really consider. We leverage the large language model capabilities of the clouds to actually ingest all of our emails. You can imagine in B2B world, there are millions of emails flying around around the status of orders, the technical specifications, a number of follow ups, quality constraints, all of the regulatory stuff that our teams need to work on the sustainability scope, three type of emissions of data.

So there are a lot of things involved in actually processing an order in our industry, millions and millions of emails that are floating around in our company with our customers, engaging with our customer service staff, our sales and account managers. But by ingesting all of those emails into our clouds, we are able to pre populate and fill the standards that we build up in our commercial platform.

So just imagine you type an email, you want to order this in this product and this in this quantity, it gets automatically uh processed through the cloud through our large language models into actually our order applications. And if it's complete, it will be automatically processed. If not, the customer service representative will still be there to actually assist you for now. But just this very simple step took away more than 40% of processing time on an email, multiple items with millions of emails. And you just think about what the benefit that would bring firstly to customers and frustration because they don't have to ping back and forth with our people. So we are much faster and much better customer service. And we see that back in our MPs, but also from an efficiency perspective and a value perspective, it's an incredible use case of what you can achieve.

But it's just the starting point because just imagine that you are able to capture all those touch points through very simple medium called email. But now we start to apply the next parts of generative AI. And I think today at Reinvents AWS announced AWS. So how would you, how would that work? Ok. Some data is missing, there will be already the chat bots based on the next generative AI that will actually be able to ping the customer automatically say, "Well, dear customer, actually, we have all of this information. But can you please confirm the delivery location wasn't very clear?" Or "Dear customer? We actually see that you have in this delivery time, but our delivery to promise we are not going to be able to make it. Are you ok with this in this time delay?"

And those type of use cases, we will start to see in an accelerated way and it's so critical to have built those foundations to be able to leverage the benefits of those use cases.

And how did we do it? Very simple? We asked ourselves a very simple question and said, "Ok, how are we going to put those large language models to use to serve our customers for the better for the better?" We worked backwards, we had a very small team and we leveraged the data mesh that we set up in our platform to be able to accelerate all of this. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later on because the data platform was really the second pillar of our foundation because we said with all this amount of data that we have, it is great that we can work on the front end applications that I just discussed. But how do we now really unlock the value of the data overall?

Firstly, through data driven insights. And we ask ourselves the question, what is the most simple use case we could start to deploy? And some of our people said, "Well, you know, we got to see all these interactions. And so in theory, we should know much better than our customers what they're going to order next."

So we actually have the algorithms help us to predict what they're going to order next. When they will order it, how much they will order it, which products they will order. And I hear you think he was, it's a, it's a very simple use case and maybe it is, we actually found out it's quite difficult to predict of all those hundreds of thousands of customers by human brain exactly what they are going to order.

And so we launched these products at the back end of 2020 2022. Now, one year in, we have delivered more than 1 million AI based relevant recommendations to our sales people. And our MPs has gone seriously up because our salespeople weren't exactly there when our customers needed it to be.

And also here, this was just starting point because the next thing that we did, we said, "You know, if we know exactly when our customer is going to order, we also know if they're not ordering, what's the risk of turn?" And then we said, "Ok, if we know the risk of churn, can we identify what is the risk of churn?" So are there price indications, margin indications, demand indications?

But we also spun it the other way around to say, "Ok, well, if we know what we are going to order, we know also what others are going to order." And so again, we created this entire cloud of data driven solutions that we are helping our people to actually have irrelevant conversations with our customers.

And also there tremendous impacts of AI and the the data platform. One of the learnings that we have is we completely underestimated the impact of the second part of this page data driven insights. As we build our cloud platform, obviously, we set it up directly for all the machine learning algorithms, the scalability of those algorithms. But we also looked at BI business intelligence. But this very simple thing providing self serve access to the richness of data that was sitting in our clouds. Actually, I only start to appreciate right now because I have one of my most senior leaders reporting into me, come, come back to me and said, "You know, Eva, you know, we love this transformation, we're going on, but I just went to our, our sites, one of our sites, uh one of our 600 sites here in uh globally in, in Louisiana. And what they have built based on the insights is a truly distinctive, best practice."

So we are capturing all those ways of steering the company, bringing it up to global levels and driving the way of how we are having these discussions.

Finally, very important on the page is as you are setting up your data platform, think about the foundations. Um if you really want to leverage all of the greatness of generative AI, I'm sure you're living through it, make sure you set up your data mesh properly, make sure you thought about your ingest roadmaps, make sure that you thought about actually your data hierarchies. And I can honestly say three years ago in bent, we were not ready right now. We are much better equipped to take the advantage of where we need to go with everything coming at us.

And the impact it has the third pillar is that we said, well, actually coming from an incredibly heterogeneous structure, we want to get to a global scalable technology platform. We started with monolithic on premise local ERPs. I'm sure that some of you will recognize that picture what we actually said as part of the future architecture. We want to put the data platform at the core of what we are doing. We want to be able to leverage our skill. There are some very simple perimeters, cloud first API first and security embedded in everything that we do. And that's why we partnered with AWS for the data platform very early on in our journey.

But we also had a modular architecture. So we said, "You know, if we want to be as flexible and we want to actually move ahead." We created an architecture that put the P into its really its leanest form, pure transactional processing, all of the front end processes. We put into our commercial platform, really connecting everything from our sourcing teams to our sales teams, our customer service teams, our lab teams, our supply chain teams, all working in that application.

And the great thing is once you have that transactional backbone of rule, you have the cloud platform with the data mesh and actually the connectivity driven by our commercial platforms. It's amazing what you can start to achieve and the speed you can start to make.

But we also realize as an enabler, we need to build capabilities, capabilities and talents for digital data, as well as processes. So we make a pledge, we needed to upskill our people. So we said actually by the end of 2026 we wanted to train more than 10,000 of our people on actually being working in a data driven way, training them on new processes, but also really training them on adopting new technologies like generative AI.

We just made a generative AI training a mandatory piece for all of our people in R&D. So starting with the board all the way down to the lowest level in the organization really on how are we going to deploy it because we feel it is an instrumental part of how we should operate. And we believe that our people need to feel comfortable with how to use the technology and progress.

As mentioned before, we also invested in process capabilities through black belts and green belts. And although the concepts you may say, "Well, actually the Toyota production system was done years ago," it is actually becoming very current because you need to have process capabilities, sitting close to your local operations to be able to scale. And we will talk more about that slightly later on.

So a big pledge to really drive those capabilities over rule, not just in the digital data and technology space, but also very much focused on all of the other employees no matter which function they are working through in the company.

And finally, we said, "You know, if we want to have this delivered, we need to deliver value, we need to deliver value to our customers or suppliers." But ultimately, it actually also needs to add value to our bottom line. And we had a very simple principle, we had already some transformation experience. So how to get our business owners really leading those initiatives, how we would track the value delivery. So we had a system built up to track the value delivery on an individual initiative basis. And we had an entire network of change agents, hundreds of change agents that we could tap into to spread the messages overall.

But we really realized that we needed something more for this transformation. And so we adopted the principle of thinking big, starting small scaling fast. So in every region in the world, we have a lighthouse and that lighthouse is set up in a way of always being at the forefront of everything we develop, call them the guinea pig, call them the lucky ones. Um but actually whatever we do, we first tested there together with those leaders, we make sure that whatever we do, we really are able to launch it very fast, we learn and once it's ready, we skill and it sounds like a very simple principle, but it's incredibly difficult because you're asking a very small team to not only develop the product and get it live, but also to start to think about. Ok, what does it take? Well, great, you can actually make a PV, great, you can do a pilot. What we want to achieve is actually that thinking big statement overall and that has been quite a learning journey as we went about in other parts that we had since the principle, how do you build a culture of trust and openness? Because in the transformation of this scale and this magnitude things are going to go wrong. A product might not work, the business guys might not be entirely aligned with the IT folks. There may be a difference on how you are going to skill, data models between the technology teams and the data scientists of rule.

And there are so many conflicts that you actually come about. So how do you create a constructive open culture that addresses it?

And so we introduced the concept of the pink elephants. Now, most of you know the elephants in the room, it's a big thing that everybody knows is an issue but nobody wants to talk about. And so what we did is said, you know, we're going to have a pink elephant moment in every board meeting and actually starting in my board meetings, we have a slot open, open item where we're just going to address, watch the pink elephant in the room.

And it sounds very gimmicky. And when actually teams are starting, it feels very awkward because all of a sudden you have to talk about the big thing that nobody wants to talk about. So how do you get it done? But as we agree, that was actually one of the core success factors for us being able to skill that transformation of rules.

So big ment to create an open environment and you can do it at any level in the organization. But think about building in a pink elephant moment.

The final part that has been quite instrumental of us reaching the speeds that we are talking about is a couple of things. It is actually around end to end deployment. Most companies are very focused on product development. Most companies are very focused on launch but actually not many companies are really focused on seeing the value through after launch that what you typically see in a lot of a lot of these launches, a big uptick, big drop in terms of adoption and then it creates a lot of effort to get it on.

So we actually already started with the deployments very early on in the journey. We have dedicated teams that are thinking through? Ok. Well, great. Have we developed the products? But how do we build the capabilities in a line to adopt it? How do we actually run the testing procedures? Not just from a technology basis, but actually from a business adoption basis? And then how do we make sure that we track and follow through the adoption of everything that we launch?

So we have this roadmap, we have hundreds and hundreds of value drops as we call them that we're monitoring that we are following through where we actually have structured training programs involved at the skill and speed that we need to make. Because a product for in our book is only successful if it is being used and if it is generating value for our customers, our suppliers or our employees, and then on the right hand side of the page, you actually see a very interesting dynamic because he said, you know, we don't want to structure this program from a value creation perspective with huge upfront investments and maybe a questionable return.

And many of you and i think we talked about waterfall earlier in the presentation, there is a huge risk if you have these huge programs with only value delivery really at the end. And the question is, will it come? But what we actually did through actually structuring actually the use case approach and putting a lot of the data driven innovations, data driven products forwards, we found a way to generate benefits, actually pretty much from day one, the customer growth engine and remember the most simple use case the organization could come up with is being used across the globe, massive adoption numbers as we speak, you are being used daily and actually generating millions and millions and millions of impacts by itself already funding some of the more fundamental stuff we need to be doing later on.

And so actually by doing that, you get a much flatter investment profile, you make it much more attractive, but also importantly, um with building momentum in the organization, you are very early on demonstrating impacts for your employees, incredibly important.

So in summary, i hope i have shown you a little bit what brent is the incredible journey that we have embarked on the different dimensions of how we've done it, focusing on our customer based processes to become easiest to do business with our scalable data platform overall and how we're unlocking the value of the data.

And so with that jana, i guess over to you, thank you so much. You really make transformation look easy, right? Um i'm uh i'm sure it hasn't always been straightforward and easy. You've been on a journey for about 1.5 years now, what are the greatest challenges you've encountered during that time? And were there moments where you really had to take a moment and pivot or do some interventions to get back on track or to change something, a couple of uh couple of couple of learnings.

Um in transformations like this, it is very difficult to keep focus. And so we started to think really big and we had a very focused agenda. But obviously, as you start to launch a program, there are lots of people that also think they have an interesting idea that actually may not fit or contribute to the north star.

And so one of the learnings that we have had is really focusing on the path forward and making it very simple. If you want to actually make this transformation succeed, don't make it too complicated. Go back to the use case that we talked about. What's the most simple thing we can come up with, launch it, make it work. And from there on build it out, the second learning that we had is how do we get the teams working together?

I mean, it is very complicated in an organization, particularly a global skill organization of getting something that is actually working. But actually it is also then you are able to skill. For example, we had a little bit of a disconnect between our data teams and our technology teams. Initially, we have amazing data scientists and data engineers who are building amazing products. But somewhere the tech time of those teams was a little bit off with the technology teams that actually then ultimately needed to maintain skill and run it over rule.

And so we found lots of those learnings where you say afterwards. Ok. Well, it is quite obvious that you need to bring those teams together in single teams, the two pizza teams. But that was actually a learning that we had to go through.

And finally, I think over investment in capability, building a transformation like this means that a lot of people need to really change. And it started actually with the board, my colleagues in the board overall, how do we get them on board? How do we make them comfortable with all of that new technology? And we spent significant time, we re engineered the entire governance of the organization to be able to pull off this transformation every month.

Together with all my colleagues on the board, we spend three hours going through the entire product portfolio, the design choices we make on master data management, the technology choices we make on, for example, the cloud platform and actually playing back to use cases in the pilots. But because we gave that so much attention, it started to really live in the organization because the next level also wants to be engaged.

And we gave them a role in really steering the contents and the priorities. And so all the next level business leaders were truly owning actually where we are going to. And then obviously, we had a huge part of the government for lighthouses that, that actually were able to have quite a bit of influence. on how we would scale this overall brilliant.

Um i'm curious, um a lot of our customers are really great at defining their transformations at 240,000 ft and they can create wonderful powerpoints and road maps. But then struggle to get this really on the road and really mobilize an organization and get into value delivery, what's going and especially with, you know, all these antibodies we see against transformation, the politics, the hierarchies, the bureaucracy, the frozen middle. What is the end of your ways that you managed to get into mobilization and delivery and get people excited and brought in?

The reality is is that people actually fundamentally want change, they see it in their private lives, all the great things that technology could bring and they are actually deeply frustrated that most companies in the world, at least the more classical companies are not delivering that to allow them to serve their customers and suppliers in a much better way.

And so tapping into that human energy of what this actually could bring and how this could really help our people to be better for our customers and suppliers. But in our case, the energizer we really need, but you need to talk over and over and over, you need to repeat that message.

And so for us, the tech line is becoming the easiest to do business with. It is almost a humanization of that program. You have nicely summarized our six dimensions here with the purpose and the customer centricity.

Last question. Um what are your personal learnings and, and what are the things you would give? Um anyone here in the audience to take away for their transformations.

So my number one suggestion would be be bold, be fair bulls because with the technology options that are out there today, most companies can do a lot more than what they think they can do. And for me, it's always very simple. I mean, we always say we always talk about that. The change is too big. But the reality is if your company is here and this is a state of the art. The difference from moving here to here is a big change and the organization will say it's a really big change.

But the difference from moving from here all the way to the state of the art is also a really big change and so be bold be vision driven. Um and as leaders and as colleagues be also curious, ask the question, what could this bring, how could this really deliver value to your customers? And how could we actually leapfrog all those stages of all those companies that have done the same thing over the last 20 years? And actually in one single go because the great thing, technology is ready for it. The question is, are you and are your organizations?

Thank you for sharing your story with us and hopefully that has given a lot of inspiration on what's possible. I would like to leave everybody with three very short things. So I'll grab this quickly just to recap.

Um i think a key point here is to think about that. Digital transformation is not a technology, it's not an model change, it's not a waterfall program. It's a different way of thinking and this is about not doing the existing things better. It's about doing different things differently because you can't iterate your way from a candle to a light bulb and doing it differently for us means really putting customer value and customer centricity at the heart of your transformation using the six elements we managed and creating high velocity organizations and the last point.

And then that transformation is a continuous iterative process. So this is about prioritizing against customer value. You can turn this into a mechanism and transform and develop your capabilities as you deliver customer value. And that's really it. There's more resources here available. If you're curious um to meet with experts like myself, like my awesome colleague, tres, who's sitting somewhere in the audience part of our program, please feel free to catch him after this talk. There are some ebooks and publications to look at if you like and i hope can spare five minutes. I'm sure there'll be lots of questions after this as well.

So thank you so much for coming to this talk. Thank you for listening. Thank you for a fantastic collaboration and for coming and joining us and sharing your story. Thanks a lot. Have a wonderful rest of your day with hopefully lots of cocktail receptions and mixers and parties and the rest of re invent. Thank you a lot. Please give us feedback. We um data driven company. So we love your feedback on the talk. Thanks a lot.