Nike Going Digital

Sporting goods company Nike has built its business on innovation. According to CEO Mark Parker,
“We’re an innovation company, Innovation and design is at the epicentre of all we do. That
innovation focus goes beyond Nike’s products to include the way it engages with customers and even
the way it manages internal operations. And digital technology is making new kinds of innovation
possible. Online customers can order personalized shoes in hundreds of color combinations. Digital
tools have made product design and manufacturing faster and more efficient than ever before.
Additional digital capabilities have helped Nike to improve visibility and performance in its
operations, increasing efficiency, reducing waste, and enhancing corporate social responsibility in the
company’ global supply chain.

Social media enable Nike to be an integral part of the conversation around major sports, sporting
events, and sporting apparel. And Nike’s digital products, such as the Fuel Band, allow athletes to
track their workouts, share their performance online, and even receive advice from digital “coaches.”
Meanwhile, both social media and digital products provide Nike with rich data on customers, their
activities, and their preferences.

These innovations arise in different parts of the company as managers constantly seek new ways to
improve. According to CEO Parker, “I always like to say that we focus on our potential and the
distance between where we are and our potential, not the distance between us and our competition.
That’s where a leader should be. And as you focus on that space, you’re gonna create some
incredible things.”

Yet in 2010, Nike leadership decided to invest in something different. They created a new business
unit, called Nike Digital Sport, to build new digital products and reimagine how Nike could engage
with customers across its categories. Marketers, designers, and engineers work together to develop
and launch products under the Nike+ banner. The unit also helps other parts of Nike develop their
digital efforts. Its “innovation kitchen” produces new designs and techniques ranging from marketing
to manufacturing. Its accelerator program is building the firm’s digital ecosystem. Analysts mine
mountains of data, gathered from Nike’s digital products and marketing efforts, to get ever closer to
customers around the world.

According to Nike’s global digital brand and innovation director, Jesse Stolak, “The goal hasn’t
changed since the beginning of Nike—we want to connect with athletes to inspire and enable them
to be better.” No longer just a seller of products, Nike is becoming part of its customers’ lives.
 Digital Transformation at Asian Paints

Asian Paints is India’s largest paint company and Asia’s third-largest paint company, with revenue of
$1.8 billion. It has been able to globalize and maintain fast growth, more than 15 percent annually
for a decade, while increasing efficiency, transforming customer experience, and reducing its
environmental impact Having built a digital advantage serving India’s billion-person economy, Asian
Paints has expanded to seventeen countries around the world.

None of this would have been possible without successive waves of digital transformation over the
past decade.

According to CIO and head of strategy Manish Choksi, a challenge of the company has been “to drive
efficiency and growth in a business spread over 120 locations, which deals directly with twenty
thousand to thirty thousand retailers.” The leadership sat down and worked tirelessly to create a
digital vision and a roadmap on how to achieve it. It called for complete mindset change and break
from the past. Getting rid of fear of failure has helped the company stay relevant in a dynamic
business environment. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough how hard it is for a 75- year- old
company to be agile. But Asian Paints has demonstrated just as persuasively that it’s possible to be
become agile by focusing on people, processes, culture, and technology.

Asian Paints is creating a compelling digital vision and driving appropriate synergies to build digital
platforms that foster customer focus innovation. Digital will transform us from being a brick-and-
mortar business into a click-and mortar business. We are marrying digital technology with the
physical network we have built over past 75 years to service our customers. Investments in the data
mining platform are being leveraged to gain insights into a wide variety of business problems in
logistics, people analytics, and material sourcing. Asian Paints has harnessed the cloud model to
facilitate its business operations. Choksi and his team have successfully conducted PoCs in emerging
technologies like IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Conversational chat bots, Natural language translation
etc.

This has set the stage for a series of transformations. Centralizing the routine customer order-taking
process into a single corporate call center increased efficiency and customer service.

The firm’s salespeople then transformed from clipboard-carrying order takers to always-connected
relationship managers. New automated plants produced higher product quality and environmental
safety than labor-intensive plants did. Expanding into services—selling painted walls instead of cans
of paint—provided benefits beyond new revenues. Providing the service ensured that high-end
products were applied properly, thereby improving customer satisfaction, and helped the firm get
closer to end consumers that it didn’t typically meet.

As Asian Paints’ website affirms, digital transformation will continue into the future: “The road ahead
is to integrate all our stakeholders including suppliers, employees and customers and create an
extended enterprise.”