Industry Insight is a series of conversations with leaders in industrial operations, where we explore emerging trends in technology, opportunities and challenges shaping the digital landscape, and the impact on business and people.
“Transformation is not a lone journey. You need best people connected with innovation ecosystems to talk with new players and get refreshed on new ideas and evolutions.”
Roberto Mansur
Head of Technology
Suzano
Digitalization has been on the C-Suite agenda for some time now. Factors such as potential economic downturn and global uncertainty have amplified the urgency of industrial sector to become more agile, more intelligent, and more productive. Digitalization has become a strategic priority for organizations creating new opportunities and revenue streams for all stakeholders.
With such rapid growth and variety of capabilities in the market, how can industrial operations leverage advancements in digital technology to create value for business, people and customers?
Industry Insight Quarterly
“If innovation is off-the-shelf, it’s not innovation anymore. Innovation is something that’s transformative and something that’s new” : A talk with Suzano’s Roberto Mansur
April 12, 2024 – Interview
By Ali Elahimehr
The Head of Technology of the world’s largest pulp manufacturer shares his views about the digital journey over the past five years, the importance of creating alignment between technology and business, and the challenges and strategies in executing digital transformation initiatives.
When Roberto Mansur took the helm of technology at Suzano five years ago, few could have predicted that the digital program would grow into a team of 60 professionals with an aspiration to deliver $1B value across the organization; from the forest operations, to pulp mills and company’s global customers.
Industry Insight: Could you begin, Roberto telling us a little bit about Suzano, yourself, and your role in the company?
Roberto Mansur: Suzano is the largest pulp producer in the world. We have innovation in our roots for more than 100 years. My role at Suzano is the lead of tech team, which includes data science, data engineering, Dev team, robot process automation and analytics and BI. We’ve been in a long journey over the last five years. We started the digitalization program, and our main goal is really to identify opportunities in the business to apply technology to improve our operational excellence and in all over our value chain, starting from the clonal seedling to the delivery of the final product to the customers. We started small, but we have an inspiration to bring more than a billion in value for Suzano with our initiatives.
Industry Insight: Could you tell us about the digital journey over the past five years? How did you get to this point and how were you able to obtain your organizational support to build such a comprehensive program around your digital transformation?
Roberto Mansur: We started small with a few resources five years ago and I was the number one in the tech team. I felt like a general with no soldiers, but today we are 60 professionals focused on digitalization across Suzano. From the forest to our clients, our strategy was to identify best opportunities in the areas that were eager to apply tech to change their business. we started with the forest team as they were eager to jump on the digital. We have huge opportunities with the sponsorship of center executives. Digital transformation is not only about technology, but it includes process and people. Of course we use cloud first, machine learning optimization software engineering data lakes, but that includes only about 1/3 of our efforts.
“our main goal is to identify opportunities in the business to apply technology to improve our operational excellence and in all over our value chain, starting from the clonal seedling to the delivery of the final product to the customers”
Industry Insight: could you tell us what are some of the primary drivers of this program in your organization and how do you balance technology initiatives against people and the process change that you have across your organization?
Roberto Mansur: It’s all about the problem and the opportunities. The technology team needs to really dive deep into the business. Our data scientists must understand about business decisions, and the business must acknowledge that they have a problem. Often, this is the hardest part. We have had in the past some initiatives for which the team was sure about impact of a possible technology solution, but the business could not see the opportunity as they had to focus on the daily operations or the silo operations. Transformation is also about evangelizing your organization which will take time; During this process you must deliver quick wins and show the possibility of change.
In summary, transformation is a fight in two fronts: One to deliver the obvious benefits with quick wins and the other is to create the culture and engage the areas; of course we can begin with awareness, but after awareness, we need to engage business areas to change and transform them.
Industry Insight: We’re also seeing non-traditional players injecting new ideas and technologies into the ecosystem of people, process, and technology. Innovation is happening at a much faster clock speed than ever before. With respect to identification of those opportunities or those technologies that could benefit, what role does innovation play?
Roberto Mansur: Transformation is not a sprint, It’s not a short run, but it’s a long journey. You need people connected with the innovation ecosystem to talk with new players and get refreshed on the ideas and evolutions. It’s not a lonely journey. you cannot rely on just a few vendors because if innovation is off-the-shelf, it is not the innovation anymore. Innovation is something that it’s transforming and it’s something that’s new. It’s imperative that we work with refreshing your vendors and trying to understand the other sectors and the other type of industries. Also to create a team that have the discipline to execute, have people in your team that have this execution bias and people that come from the business and have network and will listen in strategic forums in your meetings. There are two types of people in your digital team that are essential for driving success: people that will be listened to by the business and people that are listening outside your industry and get insights from what is happening with tech. So it’s a balance.
“The technology team needs to really dive deep into the business. Our data scientists must understand about business decisions, and the business must acknowledge that they have a problem. Often, this is the hardest part”
Industry Insight: We talked about identification of opportunities. You also touched on execution. Would you be able to share any insights on what has been some of the successful strategies and some of the ones that have been challenged with focus on execution? What factors have contributed to each?
Roberto Mansur: The successful strategy in this game is to have good people, the best people on board. Inside resource and outside your organization (the partners); you may not find unicorns that master everything. It’s a game that requires complementary skills, you will need to have a high bar that includes understanding the process, the issues that you have in your industry, the algorithms that should be implemented, the product owner with communication skills; people who understand the big picture.
“There are two types of people in your digital team that are essential for driving success: people that will be listened to by the business and people that are listening outside your industry and get insights from what is happening in technology”
Data engineers that understand the limitation of the data and your pipeline. Knowing this is fundamental for the success. You should hire and coach your team to create this culture of collaboration excellence; I’m not talking only about the internal team; I’m talking also about the partners together in this journey. The challenging part is that you are dealing with a live organization. You have turnovers, key sponsors and key users that may have left the company or changed areas of responsibility.
The traditional project model with a start and end does not fit anymore. This is not working. We use the product strategy that help and guide us through the life cycle of a product (digital or data) inside our organization that it’s connected and have their own KPI. Products have KPIs that are correlated with a business KPIs. This strategy helps a lot to map the value that we’re bringing for our organization.
Even executing this strategy does not guarantee that the solution will not drift, and the operation will not roll out and run just this as before you implemented a specific solution. I believe the biggest disadvantage of the most digital technologies is that it is easy to roll back to the old way; operation can do the old way if you create optimization for your mill, so it’s very easy to not use it. So, we really must enforce the importance of business KPIs that technology can improve.
Industry Insight: That’s a very smart approach. For some of the organizations that might not necessarily be an early adopter of digital capabilities (following organizations), but they realized the importance of putting digital at the forefront of their strategic imperatives, there is a substantial cost of investment associated with first learnings. How could you see those companies being able to succeed without having to start from scratch? Do you believe that building the foundational elements should be first, or do you think that taking a solution-first approach might be more strategic specifically for companies that just want to start that journey?
Roberto Mansur: If you start your journey with an expensive foundation, you will fail. You really must select the best use cases that will bring value for the company and start from there. Of course I’m talking about MVP. It is important to start with the meat or the business KPIs. Getting the sponsorship from the executives is also important. I’m not talking about a huge investment, but we are going to need some investment. Define your execution strategy, i.e., in-source, out-source, and related to the paint points that you are facing. Show the improvements on the important KPIs. Implementing user agile is essential since you need to deliver a fast MVP and start to iterate to further improve. After the first, second, or third product that you create, you will not have a problem with budget investment in your infrastructure. It will also allow you to create some space for risk initiatives. This will take some time to achieve, but worth and it’s hard to find shortcuts because as I mentioned, it’s all about culture. On one hand, you will have to deliver wins, but also to create your culture. The first step includes starting with an important use case to demonstrate value for your organization.
“If you start your journey with an expensive foundation, you will fail. You really must select the best use cases that will bring value for the company and start from there”
Industry Insight: Which capabilities do you think will be best suited to have them develop internally and which ones would be better fit for outsourcing?
Roberto Mansur: The challenge is to make your organization think Digital. That’s the hardest skill to find in the business. I’m not here speaking about the tech team, the culture that the company has. There is no way to outsource your culture. You must create it. You must change it. You must transform and evolve it from what you have. I believe, the word journey really expresses what it will be. You must work your organization as a whole. not only tech team, but I’m also talking about real business. Fortunately, you don’t need to wait to create this culture change to start. But you will need in parallel to start nurturing this digital culture. In the tech space, I believe organizations must analyze what is strategic for them to start to create and co-create inside. It’s hard to find a strategic initiative that is off-the-shelf outside your organization; because if it’s strategic for you, maybe it is something that it only you must have or at least you have to achieve to get it before others. If it is off-the-shelf, then it’s a commodity. My advice is to really be smart and find opportunities to accelerate with partners and find space also for internal development and experimentation.
“If it is off-the-shelf, then it’s a commodity. My advice is to be smart and find opportunities to accelerate with partners and find space also for internal development and experimentation”
Industry Insight: That is a very impactful approach. Could you tell us about capabilities in data analytics and machine learning? What are some of the business areas that are most realizing value from data and machine learning more specifically?
Roberto Mansur: Data science chapter is in the center of our digital strategy. It’s an area that we are leveraging to drive all the business decisions; From the forests to the delivery of product to our customers. Data science is the core of the main products that we are creating in Suzano over the past five years. In our case, the first area that realized a huge impact in the business was the forest operations; mainly on the planning part and the logistics and then supply chain. The forest operations was the first area due to the gap between what we were doing and what was available in the market. It was huge.
Industry Insight: That sounds very exciting. How about some of the applications?
Today, we talk about smart people with introduction of digital coaches and remote worker enablement. We also hear a lot about smart equipment with automation, and robotics. There are also exciting opportunities with smart operations such as process optimization. Which one of these applications have you found to be more relevant and valuable in our industry and specific pain points in the forest products sector?
Roberto Mansur: IoT and sensor are critical for decision-making because you first need to measure to have some KPIs to make decisions. So IoT is an area we are exploring closely. Especially in the forest operations. Process automation is also an avenue of value and simplification inside the company, mainly in the back office. It is an area we are speeding up. Smart controls on the mill floor should be the new normal in terms of operating our mills. Smart camera is also an area we see a lot of potential to become new sensors that you have in the plant. Cameras will generate much more data which need to be stored in data lakes with some required investment. I see these as the main technologies or enablers in our industry.
“I believe Gen AI will become the new UX UI for manufacturing systems. From integrating existing controls and algorithms to providing a natural language as an interface. I see smart agents acting as a human operator to change a set point after running optimization algorithm to find opportunity to improve productivity”
Industry Insight: I cannot conclude without mentioning Generative AI. What do you envision as the potential of Gen AI in industrial manufacturing? What do you see as the opportunities moving forward?
Roberto Mansur: AI is over helmet of the possibilities of the business. To find out what is a waste of time and what we aggregate to the business will be our future job. There are so many possibilities. I believe Gen AI will become the new UX UI for manufacturing systems. From integrating existing controls and algorithms to providing a natural language as an interface. I see smart agents acting as a human operator to change a set point after running optimization algorithm to find opportunity to improve productivity. Such interface can also extend into maintenance where teams can have a complete diagnosis of equipment, getting information from vibration systems, temperature sensors and others, and looking for vendor manual and checking SAP to determine if there is a spare part for a for you. I believe Gen AI will really be a kind of a robot process automation with asteroids and have potential on the operation and industry space.
Industry Insight: I would like to thank you for sharing all the insight with Compass Analytics. We really appreciate that.
Roberto Mansur: Thanks for having me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Roberto Mansur is Head of Technology at Suzano. Ali Elahimehr is a principal and co-founder at Compass Analytics.
Comments and opinions expressed by interviewees are their own and do not represent or reflect the opinions, policies, or positions of Compass Analytics Company or have its endorsement.
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