decker ceo discuss company
Stanley Black & Decker CEO discusses company's A.I. journey
You know, I would start when I'm just starting with the digital transformation, if you think back to 2015, you know the world was talking about like every manufacturing company, you know, every non tech company was starting to understand that this was going to happen and we were either going to be conversant and proficient or we were going to be left in the dust and that's we felt that way about IOT, about aI machine learning and you know these things kind of came out so fast and became much more central to the mission, you know, and the sustainability of the company. So we kind of tackle digital as one big series of sub topics if you will, and Created a center of excellence with about 50 200 people at different times down in Atlanta and we had a segment for IOT and one for machine learning and data and analytics and that kind of grew over over the years and now we have hundreds of people working in these different areas, incorporating them into business models, but it's it's been a very progressive methodical effort over the last five or six years um and talk about some of you know what you have been tackling with, you know the ai that you were using machine learning, like what were some of the parts of the business that you were directing that towards? Well we we came upon 2017 and then 18 and 19 and we had some really significant headwinds from a business point of view that we're exogenous in nature, but we had tariffs, we had foreign exchange dollar strengthening and some early signs of inflation and those three things added up to a billion dollars Of margin impact, you know, in that in that time frame and we were going up against like 300 and 400 million a year of this, of this kind of headwind. And we were thinking well we've done all the traditional things from a value creation and the cost take out that we would normally have done over the years. And we got the idea that let's harness the energy of this digital transformation center and directed at all the value pools of the company and we said let's go find a billion dollars, you know, maybe like 100 250 a year to offset some of these things.