PAPERmaking! FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF PAPER TECHNOLOGY Volume 2, Number 2, 2016
Creating an IT team from scratch required another herculean effort. The company’s approach, according to Solenis Chief Information Officer Charles Wallace, was to keep the IT function small. “We looked for high-energy people who could see through the confusion, visualise an end state and then fight their way to it,” he says. “We also decided that, while we wanted to own the IT strategies, we wanted to take advantage of managed services for key capabilities. This approach has enabled us to get a lot done — initiate the digitisation of business processes, consolidate our enterprise resource planning platform to a single instance of SAP, assess and mitigate security threats – but has also enabled us to look toward the future so we can help the company grow.” Blueprint for Success Growth, more than anything else, defines the still-coalescing Solenis. Building a sustainable business that is 100 percent committed to helping its customers succeed is an idea that permeates the culture and drives all of the key strategic decisions. “Growth is our number-one priority,” Jeff Fulgham observes. “We need consistent top-line revenue growth, and to get it, our strategy must have several legs. Mergers and acquisitions are important – we've closed five deals in the last two years and we have a rich pipeline of deals in the works. Aggressive growth in emerging markets is also critical. And, of course, innovation – bringing new products to the market – has always been a high priority.” What’s different today is how Solenis innovates. Coming from so many legacy companies, the organisation didn’t have a clear approach for early-stage innovation. Some teams embraced one methodology, while others went in different directions. Also, there wasn’t always a clear focus on customer needs. As a result, the business launched a number of products that received only lackluster attention from the market. To re-energise its innovation strategy, Solenis adopted the Blueprinting framework and software, developed by the AIM Institute, and appointed Melinda Burn, Global Director, Strategic Marketing and Innovation, to lead the company’s effort. “Blueprinting takes the voice of the customer and makes it quantifiable,” Burn explains. “It’s a two-phased approach that starts with Discovery Interviews to identify actionable problems, followed by Preference Interviews to discover market satisfaction gaps – problems that are felt across the market for which there are no solutions.” Over the last eight months, Solenis has engaged a significant number of its customers across all key segments, standardising its approach to early-stage innovation while filling its pipeline with market-defined product development opportunities. At the same time, the company has looked closely at new product introductions – how to launch more effectively and how to evaluate NPI performance in the market. “We’re really trying to understand our tracking process,” Burn says. “For example, we’re looking at both the percentage of products classified as NPIs – less than five years old – as well as the percentage of revenue coming from NPIs.” The focus on innovation is paying off. Solenis has recently introduced a number of products, technologies and services that have had significant impact – for customers and the company. On the water and process side of the business, as Vice President of Marketing, IWT, Jeff Ballew points out, the focus has been on execution. “We have a number of products – antiscalants, rheology modifiers, biocides – that are exciting.” For example, the launch of new Polystabil™ scale inhibitors and Performax™ cooling water treatments have helped enterprises in a variety of industries improve operations, reduce downtime and still adhere to increasingly severe regulatory guidelines for chemical usage.
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Article 7 – Solenis
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