With a workforce of more than 2,000 and an annual turnover of €665 million in fiscal year 2022, Spanish multinational Persán has been developing, manufacturing and marketing products for home and personal care for more than 80 years. With Sevillian roots and the DNA of a family company, Persán predominately distributes its products throughout Europe, but also in the US, Africa, and Oceania.
An internationalization plan began in 2005, although it wasn’t until 2019 when the company’s digital transformation process took hold, with factories in France and Poland being incorporated. “Our expansion process began when we went from a business model supported by our own brand to an international model through three large business lines: the own brand (Flota, San or Puntomatic), the MDD distribution brand, and contract manufacturing, or manufacturing prestigious brands, from third parties,” says Persán CIO Jesús Cabet.
The ‘One Billion’ project
In 2021, with the French factory incorporated, and then in 2023 with the launch of the new one in Poland, an ambitious transformation project came into play called “One Billion,” whose objective is to eventually reach €1 billion in turnover, and serve as a catalyst to carry out a complete transformation, turning the organization into a unique multinational with multi-factory, multi-product, and multi-client production processes, says Cabet. “And with this, also having the ability to sell anywhere in the world and produce any product in any of its factories, thus obtaining competitive advantages,” he says.
Since joining the company in 2021, Cabet understood that to direct this process, and before even talking about digital transformation, there must be talk about broader transformation. “You can’t digitally transform a company that isn’t transforming both people and processes,” he says. The big challenge of a global organization like Persán is that change in the technological field requires an evolved company mindset. “This follows a global strategy in which processes are more transversal, with global best practices and indicators that provide information for the entire organization,” he adds.
One of the first projects that Persán started in this new project was the digital workplace, implementing a common work environment for all employees in any geographical location, where access speed to information, mobility, and collaboration would be enhanced in virtual real time. “The use of cloud solutions — very transversal solutions through partners and suppliers that are global — allows us to get to that point.”
So, for example, through mobile first solutions, One Billion has made it possible to give employee access to company systems anywhere, any time, and with devices that can be mobile or desktop. “All document management, communications management, and company collaboration have changed radically under this model,” he says.
From there, other transformational projects were started, such as Persán Rapid App Development, which has allowed fast developments through global platforms, practically with low code, allowing Cabet and his team to satisfy many needs of transversal processes in a simple and fast way. Then there’s Persán Data Factory, which encompasses the organization’s data-driven and AI strategies and ambitions.
For all this to succeed, it’s necessary to have global and robust processes with people who govern them. “You can’t build a data-driven company with technology alone,” he says. “You have to ensure processes are transversal, that the areas work together, and that all teams function under a common governance model. Technology without processes isn’t worth much.”
The challenge of transformation for CIOs
For Cabet, the primary challenge to transform a company centers on people. “For many years, technology has surpassed the speed of change in organizational structures and is no longer a brake on their transformation,” he says. “Years ago, technology could be missing or not adapted to the specificity of the organization. Now it’s the opposite. It’s the organization that has to be trained and updated in the use and evolution of technology.”
Also, with the growth of cloud and SaaS solutions, all technology is available for any type of company, he adds, so everyone’s able to access tech that was unthinkable years ago. Therefore, a main challenge in digital transformation lies in updating approaches to HR. “To embrace transformation, the technological model has to be supported by processes and all people,” he says. “The magic is being able to create a symbiosis between state-of-the-art technology and the know-how that each area of the organization treasures about its activity. You can do much more with oriented people than any piece of an ERP with teams that aren’t process oriented.”
In this context, the role of the CIO is crucial. According to Cabet, the position of current CIOs goes far beyond technology. “We have to be facilitators of processes from an understanding of the business,” he says. “I have to help the organization improve its performance in all areas, and technology, although fundamental, is the last part of the transformation process. I have to dedicate as much time to understanding the technological evolution and the fit in Persán as to the set of activities that allows me to put myself in the shoes of the different areas of the organization, translating the needs they convey to me into technology and processes, and understanding where we’re going, and how technology will be able to accompany us.”
Industry 5.0
Digitization in manufacturing systems for decades generated the concept of Industry 4.0, which is still valid, and addresses the challenges of manufacturing through connectivity and data analysis to help companies obtain competitive advantages. It is, in short, a manufacturing model where the industry and IT are integrated to create smart factories. However, there’s been an evolution of this concept recently, giving rise to Industry 5.0, whose main novelty is the incorporation of sustainability, resilience, and the human being as central elements, says Cabet.
Although Industry 5.0 is still in its infancy, it represents a very clear evolution of managing not only assets, but HR, talent, and other variables. After the new factories were incorporated under a multinational model, Persán is now carrying out a multitude of projects that are part of the Industry 4.0 and 5.0 concepts, and sustainability, talent management, and resilience are considered essential elements to automation, robotics, big data and AI projects, says Cabet. “This is key for the future of the company, and these global projects help us carry out integrated management of all assets,” he says.
For Cabet, Industry 5.0 transformation projects aren’t simple nor short-term, so there has to be strong commitment from management with clear support from tactical teams. Therefore, Persán is in the global framework of Industry 5.0 where there are advanced plans to transform the factories themselves, taking the company toward a plug-and-play model, or a standard framework to integrate its factories so they can be governed and operated with the same criteria and processes.
Examples include improving quality controls through AI models, which allow Cabet to predict the behavior of production lines, fine-tune quality controls, and equip them with predictive information on the production processes, which enriches the controls with extra information.
This aspect directly affects the improvement of product quality, time to market, and substantially increases execution of processes with greater added value. Also, such predictive models using AI allow Persán to accelerate the validation and analysis of formulas used in every product.
Data to reach common ground
Managing Persán and its production processes from an operational standpoint, and evolving toward predictive and prescriptive models, is one of the organization’s great challenges. Use of data analytics, knowing what’s happening in real time, and extracting that data and then mixing it with other systems to carry out predictive analyzes has also become a strategic imperative.
According to Cabet, one of the most important accelerators of the current industry is the elimination of barriers between IT and OT. “We have to converge both worlds, where great OT partners coexist with great IT partners, and where the range of solutions is increasing.”
For him, what’s being achieved at Persán is removing the dividing line between a company’s own production and management systems. “Being able to integrate all the knowledge of the organization represents a competitive advantage,” he says. “It allows us to make decisions where we not only look at the past using data, but we get ahead in our decision-making by applying AI models to predict and prescribe actions.”
CIO, Data Management, Data Quality, Digital Transformation, Human Resources, IT Leadership, Quality Assurance