HENKEL

Persil's company has just embraced the digital revolution and Industry 4.0
The multinational Henkel is a German company founded in 1876 that built a success story based on different business areas. With more than 53,000 employees in more than 80 countries, 85% of which outside Germany, is currently the leader of three business units: adhesives, which represent 47% of the business, with sales of 9,387 million euros; beauty products, including hair coloring, skin care and oral hygiene, with 19% of business and a value of 3,868 million euros; and household and laundry detergents, responsible for 33% of sales, generating revenues of 6,651 million euros.And you may have never heard of Henkel, but almost certainly you've tried some of its best known products. The company claims to have invented the world's first detergent, Persil, then expanded to cosmetics, where it also claims to have contributed to the first shampoo (through the acquisition of another German company). Although your main business in Portugal is detergents, you may have already used your Pattex glues and seals, for example.
The adhesives business is the strongest company in terms of both its presence in the consumer area and industry. Henkel challenges people to look at any banal object and think that somewhere, it has glue, possibly with a touch of the company: computers, mobile phones, cars, airplanes, everything uses glues and adhesives. A normal car spends an average of 20 kilos of glue, which makes one think. In automobiles, adhesives are able to absorb energy when there are accidents, cushioning and spreading the impact by the metal units.
Henkel assumes that it maintains the entrepreneurial spirit of startup with which it was founded 140 years ago, and thus continues to invest with 3% of sales in research and development. SAPO was invited by the company to witness its new corporate strategy, to be implemented by 2020, around its main business areas, but looking to expand to other segments.
It was enough to observe the area of ​​the headquarters of the company in Dusseldorf to realize the investment made over the decades, and especially in recent years. Henkel is powered by a fully autonomous power station independent of the city, with an efficiency ratio of 85% (the normal round between 40 to 50%), and has gained recognition in sustainability. The area of ​​the huge campus is 1.5 kilometers square with an internal railway line with connection to the exterior. Its factories and warehouses, and even independent companies housed in its interior, extend through an area that takes 45 minutes to walk from north to south, according to the information of the guide of our bus visit.The company has built a gigantic general store and in recent years has invested 37 million euros to automate it, resulting in drones and autonomous forklifts. There are 24 on-campus charging stations scattered around the campus to power the circulating electric vehicles. Although the description creates an idea of ​​a gigantic factory, full of chimneys to spread smoke in the sky, the scenario is exactly the opposite, with the areas full of green zones, leisure areas, shops, offices and even the first building of the company which was transformed into a museum. All the other buildings we visited were modern, and inside it filled with technological ideas that motivated the presence of about 50 journalists from more than 30 countries in the world.

Henkel embraces digital acceleration
Despite the company's long history, it was not the mechanisms or innovations present at its premises that motivated Henkel's invitation, but rather how digital acceleration could contribute to the next step in the evolution of its business.
The first visit was to Henkel's beauty center and aesthetic Lighthouse treatment. In this space, the company demonstrated its vision for the "future" hairdressers, finding an ecosystem between the devices always connected online to the range of products available. In this case, hair coloring will be embraced by the scanning, and a technology has been created that allows to anticipate the result of a change of "look" in the hairstyle. The idea is to use the system powered by machine learning to identify which products or services are best for customers' hair.
The company is building a database for all possible colorings by analyzing the hairs of people around the world, because as we have been told, the capillary structure is distinct, taking into account factors such as the typical temperature of the region. When a person decides to change the color, the data collected by the artificial intelligence of the natural hair are crossed with the different types of coloration, creating an algorithm with a projection in real time of the result. The reading is made by a device, which analyzes hair at the molecular level, from its root to its tips. The SAPO testified, the prototype in the demonstration had a colored led that changed to the tone of the digitized hair. The device will only be available to professionals connected to the hairdressing business and will work through a smartphone application.As explained to Henkel, the system will make it easier for customers to find the right hair paints for themselves, among the hundreds of variations of products available, as well as provide additional information on the app and the packaging of the chemicals. In the future, people will be able to take a picture of their hair, which will be read by the application, which returns the information of the product to be applied. The company says that the application already has positive results in the 98%, and can still identify if the hair is damaged or if its color is not natural.

3D printing bet
3D printers are a new investment area for the company, not the handsets, which will be handled by partners such as HP and Carbon, but at the level of the materials used in the projects. The company, which for 30 years created acrylics for the first solutions, believes that there is an opportunity to introduce new materials based on silicone and polyurethane resins, with different colors and strengths, for example. Henkel noted that many of today's printing solutions fail in finishing because polishing layers or treatments are required to withstand high temperatures, fire, chemicals and other specific conditions.The company believes that through industry elements 4.0 and IoT it is possible to use digital information in physical products, printed in 3D. Giving the example of how today's shoes are not characterized, that there are only variations of size, but through 3D printers, people can enter a store and customize their model through printed materials.Another example of how 3D printing can influence the industry is in a bottling line for a factory. The brackets and frame are constructed for bottles of a certain size or shape. If there is a marketing campaign that needs to change the look of the bottle, it will take a lot of time and money to build the machinery around production. With 3D printing, adjustments are made to the software, the printing is applied and the next day it is again producing, with reduced costs in the change, explains Henkel.
In addition to the materials, the company wants to invest in printing software, creating solutions to help engineers create the parts more easily. 
Henkel has been probing the market for two years, trying to figure out where to act, talking to customers. In fact, one of the company's strategies in every business is in its ability to listen to people with whom it works, customers, suppliers and partners, creating extensive databases with Big Data data.The area of ​​automobiles is where it will also seek to gain market, especially to develop solutions for the battery holders. The cars of the "future", the autonomous vehicles, will have dozens of computers and hundreds of radars and optical sensors. According to the company this will generate anything like six kilometers of cables to interconnect the devices. By finding material solutions to make the construction lighter, the vehicles will have greater autonomy. For now the company says that the carbon fiber, used in 3D printing, is the best solution. On the other hand, it is necessary to find ways of cooling the vehicles, using thermal conducting materials. For the batteries it intends to sell the conductors and advanced materials of sealing in order to optimize its autonomy. In the company's thinking is the cost of 7 euros of sealing materials and stickers, but an electric and stand-alone car reach 107 euros per unit, and is an opportunity you want to bet.

The Future of Digital Lab and Industry 4.0
Henkel wants to use Big Data's nearly 20 years of information stored by the R & D department to accelerate production without making mistakes of the past. In addition to the crowdsourcing systems it conducts, to gather customer information, it seeks to automate various processes and mechanisms that were done by people through its digital laboratory. The idea is to take the basic tasks out of the hands of the scientists, letting them work on what they were formed for.Receiving information from 130 factories, more than 70,000 products available in its catalog and 130,000 customers, and 11 million consumers, these are collected in Big Data packages that are analyzed. The company reports that more than 500 million pieces of information are collected daily from materials, machines, processes, logistics, planning and customers, and as such, everything is recorded so that, as explained, "if you can get product quality information , even before it was built. " In the past, when doing something right, the process was repeated to infinity, but the company believes that factors such as humidity, temperature and quality of raw materials is variable, so it is necessary to use artificial intelligence to understand the manufacturing conditions to get the best products.One of the technologies you are using in your smart plants is virtual planning. Whether it is to modify the layout of the machinery or build a root factory, or even to simulate the way people work, virtual reality is used, with a system called Powerwall. The factory area and the machines are replicated in detail for the virtual reality application, which SAPO had the opportunity to experiment with, and quickly consider if it is possible to replace a motor of a machine within the space where it is inserted, for example. You save time and money designing and thinking about these details, the company says.
Although these solutions are primarily available for domestic consumption, Henkel intends to sell the analytical services and its experience with Big Data, to solve the spaces of companies and factories.
According to Michael Merget, operations leader, this virtual reality solution still allows your team to be around the world without actually being there. Do you need information or clarification of technical questions at a point in the world? Just plug in the virtual reality system and interact with the on-site employees remotely. "Imagine the construction of a new factory in Mexico. We only need the manpower that is in place to build it, because if the help of a hydraulics technician is needed, we intervene remotely, "he explained.
During our "passage" by Henkel, we visited the company's Global Experience Center. It is a physical space where presentations of products and news are made to its customers and partners. Here we also teach how marketers should act, from the use of products, or how to act in different countries where the company has business.Experience Room features a movie theater with a 180 degree screen where the new products and marketing productions in cinematographic environment pass. The experience is engaging, using clever tricks such as freeing the smell of the fragrances of the products that are on the screen. In our case, we smell a new detergent to clean toilets.The innovations presented are just the beginning of the digital transformation that Henkel is experiencing. By 2020 all processes and products will be available, preparing the company centenary for the future where more and more are heard of machine learning, artificial intelligence, Big Data or Internet of Things. And speaking of IoT, was also presented the first intelligent mosquito repellent diffuser, which acts through the weather or during the "high eras" of insects ...






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