The Chair of Honeywell on Bringing an Industrial Business into the Digital Age

The author, Honeywell’s CEO until June 2023, writes: “There’s zero chance that we would have made it through Covid, inflation, the upswing in geopolitical risk—all the challenges we faced over the past several years—had we not developed a transparent and coherent digital strategy.”

In this article he describes the company’s multifaceted transformation from a diversified industrial conglomerate into an integrated company. Internally, the goal was to improve productivity, transparency, and agility with centralized data to guide business decisions. Externally, it was to harness all the information generated by systems Honeywell sold in order to offer clients a whole new kind of value: a means to track emissions, save energy, improve safety, and more.

First the company had to simplify and reorganize its infrastructure, going from 150-plus enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) to 10, from 1,700 websites to fewer than 100, and from 2,700 applications to fewer than 1,000. Next it had to define master data for products, employees, customers, and many other things. Then it developed a strategy for putting all that data to work. By running the monthly meetings and the operating reviews himself, Adamczyk sent a message to everyone: “I care about this transformation personally, and we’re committed to this path.”