Growth in the era of “digital Darwinism”: the SAPIO case

The legacy of a family business, deeply rooted in the city of Monza (Italy) since the 1920s: at SAPIO diversification and customer orientation are hardwired into the company’s DNA. To consolidate the success of the industrial gas business, the founders of SAPIO realized they had to scout out new areas for growth. In the 1990s and the 2000s, they turned their attention to healthcare services for hospitals, to home care and then to biotechnology and building biobanks. In addition to all this, servitization programs such as collecting digital feedback from customers or creating digital customer profiles, were already up and running in the Group’s companies. Then came the 2008 economic crisis, which called for extra effort, not only in terms of a reorganization of the company structure, but also a deep rethinking of the company identity.

2010 can be seen as the turning point in the SAPIO story, marked by Mario Paterlini joining the company as CEO, and by the start of a phase of additional diversification and internationalization of corporate strategies. The acquisition of the web portal Pazienti.it and the startup Dialog Ausili reinforced the company’s position in the Business to Customer (B2C) sector, ensuring a further evolution into the digital space. At that time, SAPIO’s results were solid and profits bounced back up to optimum levels. (From 2010 to 2016 total turnover grew by 2.9% annually.) But this rapid growth triggered a serious disconnect between top management and the rest of the company. As an internal survey showed, employees didn’t feel very engaged in company programs or very close to leadership, despite tangible business results. A low level of internal communications also emerged.

This prompted SAPIO to adopt digital tools not only to respond to the need to foster internal communication between the different organizational levels, but to reactivate external communications with partners, patients, and customers as well. To deploy and guide the new digital strategy, a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) was hired. Aside from coming up with new business models, this executive was tasked with improving the customer experience by reinforcing customer interaction, simplifying the internal processes of communication and collaboration, disseminating a digital culture throughout all levels of the organization.

In the first trimester of 2018, four key initiatives were launched: Workplace, a digital platform for SAPIO’s internal team for sharing knowledge and disseminating information among collaborators; Sapiothon, the first internal event where the ideas that emerge in the company are recognized and rewarded; SonnoService, a digital project to create a new website dedicated to sleep, to spread knowledge on the topic and to offer customers the chance to book a polysomnograph test and other exams; LinkedIn, where the company’s first profile will be created. A number of other digital initiatives were promoted inside the industrial plants (newly equipped with software for machinery maintenance), and also in the sectors of logistics and augmented reality.

Another initiative by SAPIO was NExT, which served to encourage employees, customers and partners to embrace the digital world, to extract value from deployed projects, and to become one of the leading international players in the se ctor. This ambitious program consisted of a series of 11 initiatives: from enhancing the industrial Go-to-Market model to shore up customer relationships, to the Net Promoter Score to redesign the customer feedback system; from increasing penetration in the market of new healthcare services and other B2C segments linked to Home Care, to revamping the Healthcare Go-to-Market model. In addition to all these projects, the Group wanted to build an organization that makes it possible to pursue additional internationalization, to boost process productivity, and to expand exploration of the production and sale of biomethane, with easier access to new industrial gas markets. Finally, a special team was set up to steer the M&A strategy, to exploit hydrogen for industrial applications, to develop a “test and learn” approach to healthcare, and expand implementation of Biorep, a company in the Group that provides outsourcing services to universities and hospitals for collecting and stocking biological resources.

• Digital transformation is a complex process to be handled with extreme care. There are glaring examples of millions of dollars spent on developing digital products and infrastructures, followed by dark times as far as performance and dissent with shareholders and employees.
• When top management shares a digital vision, this is the key to successful digital transformation programs, along with the determination to communicate and disseminate this evolution throughout the organization. The idea here is to model a true “digital work environment” on every level of the company.
• By nature, a digital transformation revolves around a number of different company projects, and KPIs must be established for each one. What’s more, this transformation will almost always bring about destabilizing, disruptive internal changes which must be dealt with wisely, possibly by taking on new roles in the organization.