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Fletcher Building CIO’s blueprint to digitally transform

As CIO of a large multi-national corporation, Joe Locandro is implementing an ambitious transformation agenda that serves both as a unifying platform for the company and a launchpad for dynamic digital innovation.

“You can never drive the car looking through the rearview mirror,” says Joe Locandro, CIO of Fletcher Building, one of Australasia's largest building materials supplier. “As CIO, you have to keep looking ahead and feel comfortable in backing yourself. That’s the difference between being CIO and an IT manager—one is responsible for getting things done, the other for a vision and making a difference.”

Fletcher Building is an $NZ8 billion organization made up of more than 30 companies that range from manufacturing, mining aggregates, road making, and more, and when it was time to digitally transform and better enable a data-driven and platforms-based business, Locandro’s forward-thinking philosophy was integral in the company’s efforts to succeed.

Creating the right platform

In the year he’s been CIO, Locandro has moved quickly to simplify and streamline the IT set-up around such a complex business. “If you think about the last century, companies were built point to point,” he says. “You end up with a spaghetti tree built out of mergers and acquisitions and it becomes costly. Most companies will put in SAP and a version for each country and then customize it. We’re doing one global instance moving from 17 instances to one. Furthermore, we’re busy moving from 750 Edge systems to 350.”

Fletcher Building’s visionary adoption of a cutting-edge ERP platform is on track to revolutionize its digital infrastructure and serve as a launchpad for innovation across the group. The Digital@Fletchers program consolidates these 17 unique ERP instances and approximately 350 interfacing satellite systems into a single, unified ERP core. This harmonized approach, with 80% commonality and 20% local configuration, simplifies upgrades while significantly reducing costs.

The transformational power of this unified ERP arrangement also allows businesses within the Fletcher Group to build on a solid foundation, driving synergies and fostering innovation. By streamlining processes and eliminating almost half of the satellite systems, the new ERP landscape empowers Fletcher companies to focus on developing novel solutions and accelerating growth using the new ERP Core system.

“When it comes to a platform-based business, you can plug and play and get synergies so the whole group can take advantage of your customized e-commerce platform, data and analytics platform, and safety platform,” he says. “That’s why we’re moving into a platforms-based business, and as we do new mergers and acquisitions, we plug them into the system. We run a federated model, and as a group IT function, we determine what is core, what is standard, and then we allow the businesses the freedom to innovate on top of them. We get the synergies of scale, and the flexibility and agility of innovation.”