Executive Chair, Sulzer Ltd (Sulzer AG)
12_DigitalSkills, 22.10.2018 - Dr. Suzanne Thoma
CEO BKW Arbeitswelt 4.0 ‣ Web: http://www.ehb.swiss ‣ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ehb.iffp.iuffp.sfivet ‣ Twitter: ...
About Suzanne Thoma
Dr. Suzanne Thoma, executive president of the Sulzer Group, discussed her career and the company's strategic transformation in a September 2024 podcast. She stated that Sulzer conducted a deep strategic analysis, recognizing that technologies were evolving rapidly and that its markets might not exist in 10 or 20 years. Thoma also advised young people, particularly women, to consider studying engineering or science, encouraging them not to be discouraged by less than top marks, and to look for careers that allow for growth. In a 2018 speech on digital skills, Thoma cautioned against neglecting fundamentals like writing, arithmetic, reading, and systems thinking amid digitalization. She also noted that while enthusiasm for technological applications is unbounded, taking responsibility and being accountable can be a more difficult subject. In August 2018, Thoma reported strong half-year results for BKW, stating that the company's strategy was working and that it was well positioned in growth markets, while also noting continued challenges from falling electricity prices.
Transcript (28 segments)
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Suzanne Thoma0:04
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe these colleagues from Bavaria would say that even in a small canton, you can still buy electricity from BKW. We won't be exiting this business from one day to the next, but of course this business is also changing strongly and being heavily digitalized.
It looks quite different now, and at the same time, this is one of those businesses that, due to many circumstances including digitalization, has had its material basis of existence — if not lost — then at least severely shaken. That's why a company like BKW considers what else it can do to be useful and to maintain its reason for existence.
This is how the transformation process is actually unfolding in our company, where roughly 85 percent of employees now work in the services business. The BKW — as has already been mentioned — is a company that for 25 years has tried not to be called 'Bayerische Kraftwerke' anymore, and yet it still is.
You can see it everywhere. The Power of Change — yes, that exists in our society — but there is also the power of assistance, which may become a topic if we truly carry digitalization through to the end. BKW is a company headquartered in Bern, internationally active. You can see here the Swiss map showing where our firms and transmission lines are, and on the other side, the expansion toward Europe.
The essential aspect regarding digitalization in this transformation process is that we increasingly no longer see ourselves as a hierarchical company. This is remarkable because we come from an extremely rigid corporate culture where ranks, titles, and areas of responsibility played a very large role. At the same time, there were silos within the company — Division A was a completely different world from Division B.
The energy business, the grid business — ideally they would talk to each other only once every three months, and when they did, it was through the bosses rather than directly between the people involved. We have transformed this company into a network where there will still be structures — we won't end up as a disorganized heap — but these structures will be more flexible, less hierarchy-oriented, and above all aligned with the company's purpose: providing products and services for the customer.
Now, we're not quite there yet, not at all. We've made a good start, and I'd like to present a series of small projects that represent this path into the future for our company. Here is a simple one — I'll skip through the slides quickly because of time constraints.
This is a new workspace called Work 365, not 4.0, 365. What it enables is that across BKW's entire international network, we can collaborate on documents with different versions in project groups. These are created on Work 365 and remain there until the project is completed. Across the entire network, people are encouraged to collaborate together.
At the same time, this system can guarantee audit-proof and legally compliant archiving. This is a huge step for us. The idea that someone at Viktoriaplatz can now simply connect with someone in Norway is essential. But it's also essential to handle this with a sense of responsibility, because it's not about consuming digital things — as we heard earlier — but about using them productively.
It's great to be able to talk with a colleague in Norway, but ultimately it must be aligned with the benefit to the company. The benefit may not be immediate today or tomorrow, but in the long term it definitely will be.
This brings us to a very important element in the daily life of a company like BKW. All the technological possibilities we have — this is just one of many — require much more responsibility from employees. Much more willingness to take responsibility for one's own working time, for the use of expensive resources in the company, and for the rest that one has when one doesn't prioritize it.
And we've now found, interestingly, that the enthusiasm for technological applications is virtually unlimited for most things. But enthusiasm for taking responsibility and being accountable — despite the Brave New World of digitalization — perhaps more than ever, this is a more difficult topic, and we haven't fully figured out how to get through it.
So, changing, being creative, having many possibilities available also raises the question: what level of responsibility does an employee have? Because you can no longer regulate it through competence rules — at BKW we used to have 40-page regulations. You have to regulate it in a different way.
In mostly executive roles, where you essentially just have to follow the rules — those will be less clearly defined in the future, because you're giving employees much more leverage than before. In a network with fewer hierarchies, everyone is personally responsible. Spoken positively, everyone has the great opportunity to make a real difference for the company.
Let me give you another example that I find very fascinating from the digital world: this is an example from building technology. It's about creating digital twins of buildings. You plan a building all the way to completion and try to incorporate all the internal infrastructure — not the furniture, but all the supply systems — into the planning.
The hope is that when the building is actually constructed, far fewer problems will occur. We all know how it is — when you have an apartment repaired or renovated, or build a house, so much time and sometimes money is lost because coordination didn't happen or planning wasn't optimal. With the creation of a digital twin, you try to avoid that.
This also means — as we've heard before — that colleagues from the most diverse disciplines, which used to be strictly separated, must work closely together. The old thinking of 'whoever plans doesn't build' is outdated. With digital twins, academics and craftspeople in planning and construction must work much more closely together.
This means finding a common language and agreeing on certain principles with people you previously had little contact with. That's also a very typical requirement of a digital transformation process at BKW and many other companies.
You may have noticed that I've focused, especially after the very good presentations, on cultural change. Cultural change is fundamental, also in a company like BKW, if we want to utilize digitalization well.
The path we've chosen is to handle digitalization very pragmatically. Where we really see a chance for improvement, for new business, for greater efficiency — there we tackle it with the tools available today. This means we have at most — but actually not — a large overarching digitalization strategy, because we ultimately don't know what will exist in ten years and what instruments and methods will be available.
We try to lead everyone step by step into this digital world — our young people in training, but we're all in training; when did we ever stop? The digital world encompasses many facets of the old world. When we saw 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, it struck me: it's not about leaving one behind and moving to phase 2, and then leaving that behind. It's about integrating the competencies and skills learned in these different phases and continuing to develop them.
I'm trying to illustrate this with this slide. We're heading toward a society where, except for a few specialists, most people have been content to simply operate technology. That's easy, and it will keep getting easier because technology will become more user-friendly.
Today, this headline — I didn't read the article — computers in the classroom. Operating technology and pressing a few buttons, you can learn that relatively quickly. But those are the jobs that will have little value added in the future, the jobs that won't be well paid because anyone can do them and there aren't many ways to differentiate, except with normal human qualities like reliability, commitment, and engagement.
The next step goes a bit further — actually using the technology that is made available. That's a step forward, but it's still a situation where the technology determines things. We learn to use it in a more qualified way. That will also be a type of job that is more qualified, at least in the transitional phase.
In contrast, where it will really get interesting for society as a whole is when we learn to work with these technologies in a way that they help and support us in our tasks — without putting our thinking and working into too-tight handcuffs. And I'm convinced that to master technology, you also need to understand the normal 3D world well.
It's always a combination between the technology in our business — between the technologies and the plants, for example in hydropower plants and Energiewerk AG — and the Bernese power plants. To be able to run hydropower plants optimally, to know when electricity costs a certain amount on the market, to know when to do maintenance and why not — we have that data today from sensors and algorithms, from digitalization.
But really understanding what these data mean and deploying the equipment correctly still requires very long experience specific to that field. I really want to urge that in the midst of all this digitalization, we don't forget the basics: writing, arithmetic, reading, and thinking — thinking in cycles and thinking in systems.
I'm convinced that if technology is going to bring something good to our society — and that is the hope — then it is this competence that threads through future development like a red line, wrapping around the various technological developments. Thank you very much.