i n a s s o ci a t i o n w i t h
Raise your
glasses
Raise your glasses Written by Nell Walker Produced by Matthew Pepper
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Essilor is the largest producer of ophthalmic lenses in the world, and a technological transformation is streamlining its global network
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ssilor, the world’s leading manufacturer and distributor of ophthalmic lenses, has a history stretching back some 170 years. The group was born in 1972 from a merger of two illustrious and inventive French companies – Essel and Silor, both of which were operating independently for many decades. Since the merger, Essilor has grown steadily through innovations and partnerships. It has developed many innovative ideas and is recognised for progressive lenses, photochromic lenses, antireflective coatings, and many other categories in the industry. Today, more than one billion people wear Essilor lenses globally. One of the fastest growing regions for Essilor is AMERA (AsiaPacific, Middle East, Russia and
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Africa) where the population is very large and economies growing fast. In this region there are many unmet visual needs for the consumers, and Essilor is uniquely positioned to offer products and services to meet those needs. To deliver these products and services faster and in a cost effective way to the vast population of this region, Essilor is undergoing a digital transformation of its business processes under the guidance of its AMERA Chief Information Officer, Sekhar Ray, and supported by all the business and functional teams. IT challenges The scope of the venture is vast,
and as such, naturally challenging, with a mixture of developed and emerging markets. The challenge is in ensuring that the solutions
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have the right balance for plans to apply some of the same scalability and cost. “One solution synergies to his new territories, doesn’t fit for all, but if every entity bringing them up-to-date and has a different solution, then cost strengthening the company’s could be very high” Ray states. position as the global leader. “In some countries, orders are With digitalisation, Essilor sees hand-delivered by someone on a lot of opportunities to streamline a moped bringing it to one of the up and down the value chain. labs, while in Japan we get very One example is faster time high percentage of our orders to market of its products. By electronically. removing manual and Essilor is deploying duplicate processes, solutions that are and using digital fit for a small entity prototyping and in Africa, but can 3D simulation, the also be scaled up company is bringing for a large entity down the time frame in Australia. The significantly. This Number of company is focused gives additional time employees at Essilor on reusability.” to realise revenue Ray previously rather than waiting for led a similar initiative as the CIO products to launch, and from the of Essilor America. During his five customer’s perspective, they get years there, Essilor underwent access to new products sooner. a transformation program to Digitalisation also allows Essilor simplify and modernise its to differentiate greatly from analytics, manufacturing, backcompetitors by offering lenses that office, and customer ordering are personalised according to the systems. He is in the third year customer’s own eyes and face. The of a multi-year road map, and company’s production machines
61,000
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“We are deploying solutions that are fit for a small entity in Africa, but can also be scaled up for a large entity in Australia. We’re focused on reusability”
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now calculate the optimised design for each consumer, before the lens is digitally surfaced with point-by-point technology. This also allows late differentiation. Another example is that rather than using a static rule to decide delivery time, it can be predicted and tracked individually for each order using big data analytics based on machine data. Digitalising has started to break down silos and made Essilor more
aware of the value of information. One of the challenges was to develop an information strategy that balances the needs for enterprise-level harmonisation, while retaining necessary flexibility to offer local differentiation. The company is providing a private cloud with a shared business application platform for hundreds of business entities, which are today running local systems, often with different definitions of data.
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The platform To build such a platform, Ray’s IT
management team has carefully architected and selected fitfor-purpose technologies and IT partners which can support such a transformative journey. One example was finding a network provider which could cover a vast geography and also be competitive. “IT today is less about holding on to your infrastructure and more about leveraging the digital revolution strategically,” says Ray. “Tata Communications’ global next generation hybrid network solution is acting as a foundation to accelerate digital transformation for Essilor, empowering us to meet new market challenges.” Kathy Park, General Manager for Essilor’s Asean Business Unit, comments further on the company’s CRM: “This platform gives us an opportunity to manage customer relationships with data and create more value. Today, sales force analytics remains a big untapped opportunity
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within Essilor, and we can utilize a lot more data analytics as we develop a standardised platform that can be a lot more responsive to the changing needs of the customer in real-time.” “Our business model and partnerships are unique compared to other organisations,” adds Narasimhan Narayanan, CFO for AMERA Region. “We maintain flexibility in the front end while driving standardisation and simplification in the back end to ensure consistency and effectiveness. The flows we have across multiple manufacturing sites and labs are very complex, but we control this through our IT roadmap.” Research and development Essilor spends up to 200 M€
annually on R&D, which is the biggest budget by far in its industry. There are five R&D centres around the world, including three for Innovation and Technologies (CI&T) located in Paris, Dallas, and Singapore.
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ESSILOR
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H E A LT H C A R E
“IT today is less about holding on to your infrastructure and more about leveraging the digital revolution strategically” The latter enables R&D to stay connected with the three main regional market needs and innovate accordingly. For example, in Singapore, as in many Asian countries, the growth of myopia – especially in children – is a big concern. Essilor has partnerships with local universities to study the phenomenon, with trial groups in which we perform consumer experiments, as well as consumer research which is conducted by R&D and marketing teams. Product ideas come out of these processes, based on the real needs of people in the field. From an IT perspective, the company has to make sure that its researchers, its marketers, and other employees can collaborate freely. Someone having an innovative idea in one market should be able to communicate and collaborate
with their counterparts anywhere in the world. Digitalisation is important there too. Future growth Essilor has grown enormously
over the past decades, but there is still a great deal of room to grow. The ophthalmic lens business is fuelled by current unmet vision needs: 2.5 billion people don’t get the vision correction they need due to lack of awareness and lack of access to professionals, as well as major demographic trends. Among these trends are an aging population needing correction from presbyopia and other age-related sight issues; growth of myopia among the younger population; growing middle class in emerging market having more and more access to vision correction products; and an ever-increasing need by
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everyone to be protected from the sun’s harmful UV light or a digital screen’s blue light. Fortunately for Ray and his company, people will always need better vision to improve their daily lives. “Everybody in their lifetime will become a customer of Essilor, because everybody needs glasses at some point. The customer base is huge, and a lot of people will need multiple products. They will need prescription glasses, sunglasses, reading glass and now glasses for using a computer, smartphone, or any other digital device. “The demand will continue to grow, and IT’s job is to stay ahead of the curve and provide the business the necessary information strategy, and the systems to cope with the growth. The company is moving from having a traditional distribution supply chain to becoming more about digital ways of supplying products and services to its customers.” Changes are picking up pace:
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sites after sites are getting connected to the business application platform. As a site connects it gets the benefit of a common product master enabling sourcing of the product from anywhere in the entire Essilor network; an integrated ordering with manufacturing and backoffice processes; customer touch points for online ordering and sharing real-time order status information though mobile application; and transparent and drill-down analytics about business performance. Ray concludes: “This is really the first step. But it allows us to build on it to better understand and connect with our customers and partners and create more values.”
Sekhar Ray CIO Sekhar has been working with Essilor for eight years, having joined its American business in 2008 as the CIO in Dallas. He took up an expat assignment with the company and went to Singapore in the autumn of 2013. Prior to joining Essilor, Ray held a number of IT executive management positions and led IT transformation for Cadbury Schweppes, Dell, and Citibank globally. He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India and holds a BS degree in Computer Science. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Singapore.
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147 rue de Paris Charenton le Pont FRANCE 94227 t + 33 1 49 77 45 02 Corporate-communication@essilor.com www.essilor.com