“Our new centralized research and development organization will boost our ability to develop products and business models for improving customers’ water efficiency,” says Johan Grön, Executive Vice President of R&D and Technology at Kemira.
Johan Grön started as Executive Vice President of R&D and Technology at Kemira in July 2008. In one year, he has led a reform in the company’s global R&D operations, centralizing them into five centers instead of the former 17.
“The network is almost complete. We have also harmonized our processes and procedures to offer a good framework for group-wide, effective innovation activities. The next step is to create growth in the new products and business models related to water efficiency,” says Grön, describing the company’s future plans.
Specific Strengths in each center
Kemira’s research centers are located in Espoo, Finland; Leverkusen, Germany; Atlanta, Georgia, United States; and Shanghai, China. The fifth center is planned for opening in São Paulo, Brazil, next year. Grön says each center has a defined area of expertise. The centers also provide local support for technical customer service and manufacturing.
“We concentrate competence on regions where the market and customers’ needs are. For example, Leverkusen focuses specifically on research into recyclable fibers since they are an important raw material for paper manufacturing in Central Europe.”
Global product selection aligned with local conditions
The R&D center for APAC in Shanghai was opened in April 2008. “Thus far, the most important role for the center has been to support our local customers,” says Grön. “In the future, the operations will increasingly cover the specific issues of Asia and the Pacific region. Raw materials, water, and customer needs are different there than, for example, in Europe.”
Modifying Kemira’s global product selection to meet local needs is part of the other centers’ operations as well. On the other hand, the centers provide information and feedback on the specific needs of each market for the global product development network on an ongoing basis.
“In China, for example, paper manufacturing is growing, but the country is not self-sufficient in wood raw material for producing pulp,” Grön explains. “This creates more interest in using straw and other non-woodbased raw materials. This is something product development must take into consideration.”
Extensive synergy in water
According to Grön, the benefits of the new operational model are clear. Research and development operations are now in line with Kemira’s strategy, which focuses on developing products and concepts for water-efficient production and that, at the same time, seeks synergy gains between different parts of the company.
Grön underlines that Kemira’s customer segments all have in common significant water use in the manufacturing processes, and the challenges this creates.
“Water is a limited resource everywhere in the world, so processes must be developed to make reuse of water as efficient as possible. This, in turn, creates challenges since organic and inorganic substances that accumulate during reuse must be processed in a way that prevents them from causing problems.”
According to Grön, on-going competence development is needed in reuse and recycling. Among the current topics is improving the treatment of sludge.
“In principle, reusing water increases the amount of sludge. When processed correctly, the ingredients of sludge can be used efficiently: re-usable ingredients can be harnessed first, and what remains can be used in energy production.”
Seeing the big picture helps understand customer
R&D is often viewed as the development of individual products. In the future, the operations will also concentrate on systems that are made up of several products and expertise.
“Individual products must be good, but R&D operations must take into account Kemira’s entire product and service portfolio. We must be able to utilize our extensive portfolio to offer customers solutions for all of their needs. More and more customer companies want to reduce the number of suppliers and only work with a few select partners.”
According to Grön, understanding the customers’ needs requires seeing the big picture that encompasses more than just one’s own industry. For example, developing more effective industrial processes requires not only improved chemicals but also development of equipment and automation.
Cooperation boosts viable ideas
The task of research and development operations is to bring commercially successful solutions to market. However, characteristic to R&D is that only a few of the numerous ideas ever reach the stage of a commercially profitable product. “
In R&D, it is important to sieve through a large number of development projects to find the viable ones as early as possible in the process and get them up to speed. This is facilitated by the R&D steering processes in which the representatives of sales, manufacturing and marketing are involved closer than ever at an early stage.”
“Cooperation between different parts of the organization is particularly important when entire business models are being created instead of individual products,” Grön notes.
Text: Matti Remes
Read the full article in Kemira’s stakeholder magazine Waterlink 3/2009