Working Smarter for competitive advantage
CEMEX make bold move in digital innovation and technology to create competitive advantage
CEMEX have announced material progress in their Working Smarter digital transformation initiative, through which the company is leveraging a combination of digital technologies, operative models, and innovation from leading service suppliers to reshape its business management services.
Working Smarter – a pillar in CEMEX’s digital strategy alongside CEMEX Go, the industry’s first digital global platform – aims to capture current and future opportunities to enhance business management services worldwide, ranging from finance and accounting back office, information technology, and human resources to commercial back- and middle-office services.
The initiative will bring all worldwide locations together into a unified CEMEX experience, supported by data analytics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive technologies to enrich the employee experience.
‘Our digital strategy has already brought us very close relationships with our customers, as evidenced by our record-high Net Promoter Score index of 68 for 2021”, said Fernando A. González, chief executive officer of CEMEX.
‘Working Smarter takes us one step further as the digital leader of the construction materials industry, not only in customer experience, but now also in our business-management processes.’
As part of this initiative, CEMEX have redesigned their shared services operating model, implementing virtual delivery centres that leverage a remote workforce, tapping into high-quality talent pools independent of their location. Remote work is made possible by CEMEX’s advanced collaboration and service management platforms, protected by strong cybersecurity.
To accelerate innovation, CEMEX have now signed separate multi-year contracts, ranging from five to seven years and totalling US$500 million, with six leading service providers in the fields of finance and accounting, information technology, and human resources.
By replacing current expenditures with the new suppliers’ services at an optimized cost, CEMEX say they are effectively continuing to reduce the company’s operating expenses.
IBM will bring increased agility and flexibility to CEMEX’s finance and accounting operations as well as in their back-office commercial services. They will combine the use of multiple global delivery centres with increased automation, advanced analytics, and applied cognitive technologies, and will also provide advanced IT security services and technology to help secure CEMEX digital infrastructure and strengthen the company’s cyber resilience.
HCL Technologies together with NEORIS, a digital accelerator subsidiary of CEMEX, will enable end-to-end transformation in business and IT, leveraging hybrid cloud platforms and strengthening CEMEX’s application landscape with state-of-the-art automation for enhanced service levels.
Axians will provide CEMEX with end-to-end network management and transformation services, including the global deployment of SD-WAN technology to add routing intelligence, resilience, and flexibility to support the network-intensive environment of interconnected real-time operations.
Tata Consultancy Services, with their advanced HR platforms, analytics, and automation services, will provide digital workplace solutions and collaboration frameworks to enhance the employee and workforce experience.
ServiceNow’s market-leading digital transformation platform will enable CEMEX to seamlessly orchestrate service delivery between both internal and external service delivery organizations, reducing processing times and providing employees with a superior digital experience.
Avasant, a digital and sourcing strategy firm, will take responsibility for ongoing management of the partner relationships with their January 2022 acquisition of CEMEX’s global vendor-management operations in Monterrey, Mexico.
In planning and carrying out the Working Smarter initiative, CEMEX have also partnered with Avasant to select and establish the relationships with the strategic service providers.
CEMEX say they expect to announce additional strategic relationships in the coming months to expand the current scope and complete the deployment of their digital strategy.
It is estimated that the combination of these next-generation service contracts and the company’s internal delivery transformation should materially contribute towards the US$100 million annual savings goal CEMEX have set once implementation is complete.
CEMEX’s chief financial officer, Maher Al-Haffar, said: ‘Beyond the deeply transformational impact to how we manage our business and the competitive advantage it creates for the company, the Working Smarter initiative will be very accretive, with an expected four-fold return on investment.’
