Catching Up With Randy Benz, VP & CIO, Energizer
This month, CGT Executive Editor Kara Romanow sits down with Randy Benz, vice president and chief information officer for Energizer, to find out how he complements product and global market growth initiatives with well-thought out information technology investments. Plus, find out what challenges him,
what inspires him and how he rewards himself after a hard day's work.
What keeps you up at night?
Sorting through all of the things that we could do with information technology and finding the few things that we should do to generate value for our shareholders. We are not in the information technology business; we are in the business of satisfying our customers and consumers with great battery, lighting, blade and razor products. The investments that we make in information technology compete directly with investments that we make in our products and market growth. I take that tradeoff seriously.
As CIOs, we've somewhat fallen into a trap over the years of letting solution providers define our "problems" instead of starting with a clear understanding of the real business opportunity. We've also fallen victim to letting the fear of getting left behind on new technology override common sense decision making. I think the role of the CIO has to be more than being the champion of the next "latest and greatest, revolutionary technology." So, I spend of lot of time trying to sort through available technology and asking some hard questions. Which are "hype" and which are real? Which ones are most relevant for a company like ours? Is there value to be leveraged in being on the leading edge with the technology, or should we wait until the technology matures? Which vendors are winning and which ones are losing? The answers to these questions are rarely black and white and are never easy to find.
What challenges does Energizer confront as a global company in which half of the business is conducted outside the Americas?
Leveraging the high cost of process development across a widely disparate geographic footprint is difficult. You can't "Americanize" the rest of the world and believe that everything that works well with large U.S. retailers will translate well to markets that are dominated by smaller, traditional retailers. You have to be willing to listen, adapt and right size your systems and processes to match the needs of local markets. But if you do listen carefully, you will find that some of the practices in place in other markets actually scale up very well to meet needs in the United States. That, I think, is one of the unexpected benefits that I've seen as we've moved from local to regional and now to global IT efforts. To the extent that we can, we're trying to utilize the talents of our regional people while leaving them where they are. It makes for a tremendous communication challenge working across many time zones. You have to make a conscious, ongoing effort to communicate to compensate for the lack of the informal communication that occurs when people are co-located. Technologies such as e-mail and team collaboration tools help, but they don't eliminate the need for occasional human interaction. That takes some combination of travel and late-night teleconferences. It's exhausting, but can be incredibly rewarding when you realize that some of the best people in your IT organization are not in your headquarters organization.
What challenges did you face during the merger and acquisition process?
I've seen challenges at three different levels. The initial challenge is to simply get the new business up and running on your own systems to replace any capabilities that were provided by the previous parent company. Of course, how hard that is depends on the degree to which the newly acquired business was dependent on the old parent in the first place and that may vary significantly from one region to another.
Once you have the new business simply up and running, you have the second challenge in some markets of integrating operations and systems with your existing operations. The third challenge is bridging the cultural differences between the two businesses that often reflect in the sophistication of tools, service expectations and the degree to which IT is viewed as a strategic element of business execution versus a cost of doing business. Over time, as you move to harmonize process and systems between operations, these cultural differences can be very significant.
what inspires him and how he rewards himself after a hard day's work.
What keeps you up at night?
Sorting through all of the things that we could do with information technology and finding the few things that we should do to generate value for our shareholders. We are not in the information technology business; we are in the business of satisfying our customers and consumers with great battery, lighting, blade and razor products. The investments that we make in information technology compete directly with investments that we make in our products and market growth. I take that tradeoff seriously.
As CIOs, we've somewhat fallen into a trap over the years of letting solution providers define our "problems" instead of starting with a clear understanding of the real business opportunity. We've also fallen victim to letting the fear of getting left behind on new technology override common sense decision making. I think the role of the CIO has to be more than being the champion of the next "latest and greatest, revolutionary technology." So, I spend of lot of time trying to sort through available technology and asking some hard questions. Which are "hype" and which are real? Which ones are most relevant for a company like ours? Is there value to be leveraged in being on the leading edge with the technology, or should we wait until the technology matures? Which vendors are winning and which ones are losing? The answers to these questions are rarely black and white and are never easy to find.
What challenges does Energizer confront as a global company in which half of the business is conducted outside the Americas?
Leveraging the high cost of process development across a widely disparate geographic footprint is difficult. You can't "Americanize" the rest of the world and believe that everything that works well with large U.S. retailers will translate well to markets that are dominated by smaller, traditional retailers. You have to be willing to listen, adapt and right size your systems and processes to match the needs of local markets. But if you do listen carefully, you will find that some of the practices in place in other markets actually scale up very well to meet needs in the United States. That, I think, is one of the unexpected benefits that I've seen as we've moved from local to regional and now to global IT efforts. To the extent that we can, we're trying to utilize the talents of our regional people while leaving them where they are. It makes for a tremendous communication challenge working across many time zones. You have to make a conscious, ongoing effort to communicate to compensate for the lack of the informal communication that occurs when people are co-located. Technologies such as e-mail and team collaboration tools help, but they don't eliminate the need for occasional human interaction. That takes some combination of travel and late-night teleconferences. It's exhausting, but can be incredibly rewarding when you realize that some of the best people in your IT organization are not in your headquarters organization.
What challenges did you face during the merger and acquisition process?
I've seen challenges at three different levels. The initial challenge is to simply get the new business up and running on your own systems to replace any capabilities that were provided by the previous parent company. Of course, how hard that is depends on the degree to which the newly acquired business was dependent on the old parent in the first place and that may vary significantly from one region to another.
Once you have the new business simply up and running, you have the second challenge in some markets of integrating operations and systems with your existing operations. The third challenge is bridging the cultural differences between the two businesses that often reflect in the sophistication of tools, service expectations and the degree to which IT is viewed as a strategic element of business execution versus a cost of doing business. Over time, as you move to harmonize process and systems between operations, these cultural differences can be very significant.