CIO Strategy: Kimberly-Clark’s Digital Transformation

Consumer products icon Kimberly-Clark’s CIO launched a digital transformation at the highest strategic levels. Here’s her game plan.

Google, Amazon and other big technology companies may have blazed the digitization trail, but the steady stream of companies that have followed have shown that enterprises must go down this trail in order to stay relevant in the future. That holds true whether you are a 5-year-old company or a nearly 150-year-old company.

Consumer products company Kimberly-Clark is on the older side of that span. Founded in 1872, the company is known for mostly paper-based products, including Kleenex facial tissues, Scott toilet paper, and Huggies disposable diapers. How do you shift a company like this one, with a total of about 43,000 employees, to a digital culture?

Suja Chandrasekaran joined the company as CIO in May 2016 to tackle that mission, bringing previous experience as a senior vice president, global chief technology officer, and chief data officer at Walmart Stores, Inc.

“We are not just bimodal, not just Agile, not just doing a couple of dashboards or visualizations,” she said during a presentation at the recent Gartner Symposium. “We are doing a scaled digital transformation.”

There are several components to Kimberly-Clark’s digital transformation strategy, which is in progress and not yet complete. Chandrasekaran said that the company, like many companies out there, is buy-build-subscribe.

“Framing a game plan was crucial for us because I did not want us to just deploy a bunch of stuff,” such as off-the-shelf platforms — Workday or Salesforce or Oracle or SAP — that are integrated via interfaces.  

“It doesn’t take us to the world of digital. It’s not going to lay the foundations. It’s not going to drive value,” she said. “It’s going to take us back to the order-taking mindset.”

Instead, Chandrasekaran said the strategy was to frame the platform concept in simple teams. For instance, core platforms are customer-facing platforms or employee-facing platforms. The company will still use vendor-provided software, but that will become part of the Kimberly-Clark platform that provides a journey-based user experience that offers standardization and automation, according to Chandrasekaran.

Another key component to the digital transformation is disruption and disintermediation, Chandrasekaran said.

“If there’s something that can be disintermediated, it will be disintermediated,” she said. Startups will come and do it. Someone will come in and digitize it. “So how do we disrupt ourselves?”

Chandrasekaran said that Kimberly-Clark has codified its digital enablers. To start, the company came up with 14 total, but that was too much for the teams to digest, so they prioritized it to four plus one — Agile, Automation, API, Artificial Intelligence, and Unified Cloud.

Data, measurement, and metrics are key parts to making these initiatives successful.

“We codify and measure everything.