HENKEL ADHESIVE TECHNOLOGIES
For Mirko, the moment was also personal. The customer service experience transformation was a foundation, a programme that had successfully delivered, but also shown where the next challenge and focus was.“ To be integrated means for us to share data, to make qualified decisions and to deliver the best customer experience,” he says.
“ Customer service is always at the forefront for us; we have a direct link to our customers every day. To give them the best, fastest and most accurate answers across planning, logistics, order and delivery, we need integration, access to data across the chain and the ability to make the most effective decisions.”
The answer, the team agreed, wasn’ t to be found in driving functions and teams further in silos or on a regional basis. Instead, it was about connecting them across technology, processes and culture.
Delivering integration Integration isn’ t an unfamiliar word in the modern corporate world, either in supply chain circles or any key business function. At Henkel Adhesive Technologies, the leadership team is deliberate about what it means in practice, and equally clear about what makes it difficult to achieve. Isabelle von Babo, Vice President Supply Chain Europe for Henkel Adhesive Technologies, leads an organisation spanning customer service, supply chain planning and logistics, which puts her at the intersection of precisely the kind of cross-functional complexity that
“ We realised there was a big gap between how we perceived how good we were, and how our customers perceived us. It was a decisive moment in our supply chain transformation”
Bjoern Kirchner Corporate Vice President Global Supply Chain Henkel Adhesive Technologies
integration is designed to address.“ The world has become so much faster, and things are immediately connected,” she says.“ Taking one decision today immediately has an impact somewhere else in the organisation seconds later. We have to be integrated because we need to be connected at any time to really make sure we take the right decisions that maximise our customer’ s experience of partnering with us.” That connectedness requires two things, and the entire leadership team is consistent on defining both: mindset and data. And of the two, mindset comes first.
92 July 2026