Faurecia digital transformation (C)

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In 2022, Apple lost US$1.5 billion in Black Friday sales due to iPhone supply constraints. One in three retail stores across the US and Europe experienced stockouts of the new iPhone 14 Pro. China sales were down more than 30% year on year. Apple’s stock had dropped 29% in 2022. China’s zero-Covid policy resulted in massive lockdowns that made factory working conditions unbearable. In the second half of 2022, many Chinese workers quit their jobs at Apple’s Foxconn facilities. The Russia-Ukraine war that started in February 2022 and the ensuing Western sanctions spurred an unprecedented global energy crisis and double-digit inflation. Now that supply chain disruptions, component shortages and rising geopolitical tensions had become a reality, Apple had to decide on a transformation, knowing that the transition presented difficult trade-offs and would take years to complete: (1) Which elements to change in the company’s global value chain? How to approach change without hurting manufacturing continuity, product quality, revenue and profitability? (2) Should Apple further drive its vertical integration in the design of chips, semiconductors, screens and assembly? Or should it adopt the Android phone manufacturers’ model and develop a broader base of suppliers?

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The case series is an experiential exercise in virtual collaboration based on the commercial printing industry. Teams are located in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. One team is mandated to oversee the production of two prototype printers, while the other two teams are responsible for producing the new flexographic and rotogravure protypes. The teams are given strict deadlines, budgets and operating constraints. The C case assigns the Italian team responsibility for manufacturing the rotogravure prototype.

The case series is an experiential exercise in virtual collaboration based on the commercial printing industry. Teams are located in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. One team is mandated to oversee the production of two prototype printers, while the other two teams are responsible for producing the new flexographic and rotogravure protypes. The teams are given strict deadlines, budgets and operating constraints. The B case assigns the German team responsibility for manufacturing the flexographic prototype..

The case series is an experiential exercise in virtual collaboration based on the commercial printing industry. Teams are located in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. One team is mandated to oversee the production of two prototype printers, while the other two teams are responsible for producing the new flexographic and rotogravure protypes. The teams are given strict deadlines, budgets and operating constraints. The A case mandates the Swiss team with overall responsibility for managing the production of the two prototypes.

Henkel, a 145-year-old family business, had unintentionally started its digital transformation journey in 2013. Only a few years later it had reached such a level of digital maturity that digital became a decisive element of the company’s strategic framework and one of the key drivers to achieve growth. In less than ten years, Henkel received international recognition as a global leader in using Industry 4.0 technologies to transform factories, value chains and business models. The first part looks at how this journey started, what it had to do to reach this impressive level of digital competence and to make the journey self-sustaining. Can Henkel also build on the success of this digital transformation to make its products carbon-neutral during production and consumption? This is the question that will be explored during the second part. Henkel had made good progress to reduce its own operational CO2 emissions, but realized that this represented less than 5% of the total. Two-thirds occurred during consumption and one-third during the production of raw materials. Making a 50,000+ workforce and operations digitally savvy is one thing, but reducing carbon-emissions at stages of the process over which Henkel had no direct control is something else. The dilemma facing Henkel was where it should focus on to reduce its overall CO2 emissions. Should it continue to prioritize making its own production sites carbon-free, in the knowledge that this represents only a fraction of the total emissions, or should it prioritize making its products carbon-free in the other parts of the value chain where the impact on our planet is higher? Prioritizing the latter would make sense, but what could Henkel actually do to change the attitudes and behaviors of thousands of suppliers and hundreds of millions of consumers?

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