In this webinar, Enver Yücesan, Professor of Operations Management and The Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank Chaired Professor in International Management at INSEAD, speaks with Nick Miesen, co-author of the “Henkel Adhesive Technologies: The Digital Transformation Journey” case. They discuss how to define a roadmap, choose the right use cases and align digital investments with business goals. The central challenge they explore is one digitally ambitious organisations face – not which technologies to adopt, but how to choose between them when budgets are finite and the options are almost infinite.

Miesen is clear that digital transformation starts with people. His first move at Henkel was not to deploy technology but to hire the right team. That same logic extended throughout the organisation. Every business case had to identify a key user – someone who would own the system locally, take responsibility for its adoption and train others around them. Without that human infrastructure in place, Miesen argues, even a technically successful deployment will fail to deliver value. 

They also discuss the framework Miesen developed to match digital investment with the complexity and value potential of each site, including the "app store" model, which allows production sites to plug into a shared data backbone and select the use cases relevant to them. Miesen goes on to explain the measurement challenges that plagued early deployment, including the difficulty of isolating digital's contribution to savings when dozens of other initiatives were running simultaneously, and the problem of agreeing upfront on what success would look like. At Henkel, these definitions were sometimes only clarified after the fact, which made it harder to prove value and build the internal credibility the programme needed.

Miesen’s core takeaway applies well beyond manufacturing: focus on proving value in a few sites to build organisational buy-in before expanding further. Clean, standardised data is the foundation on which everything else depends, including AI, and no amount of sophisticated tooling can compensate for getting that foundation wrong.