Digital transformation at Belron: 'Innovation is not about new technologies, it's about changing behaviour'

IT head Ben Naylor explains how the windscreen repair firm has changed to meet the public's expections

Belron Group, best known in the UK for its franchise Autoglass, does one thing and one thing only. It repairs and replaces car windows. As such, having something like a mission statement might seem almost laughably grandiose, and the mission statement itself, "to be the world's natural choice for vehicle glass repair and replacement", a little obvious. But, says Ben Naylor, regional IT technology manager at Belron International, having a clear mission statement really can help to focus minds.

Belron is a large company with 26,500 employees in 34 different countries. Having a clear mission statement and simple business model means that best practices can be shared quickly and easily across the organisation, and while different nations might take different routes to achieving the firm's goals, at least everyone is clear about where it is going.

For Naylor, becoming the world's natural choice means a relentless focus on digital and mobile. This means building "outstanding" partnerships, and using innovative technology wherever possible.

"We now look at everything through the digital lens, we have a digital focus on every new business initiative we do. Why? Because the public with their new devices don't want to interact with us the same was as they did five years ago," he told the audience at yesterday's Computing Data Centre Summit.

However, rushing to adopt the latest technologies is not sufficient. An early move to cloud to support digital initiatives failed because the company tried to simply replicate its on-premises data centre on IaaS. This turned out to be more expensive and unable to cope with the rate of growth of traffic because the connectivity infrastructure between on-site and cloud operations was not capable of delivering, without a major upgrade.

"Innovation is not about new technologies, it's about changing behaviour," says Naylor.

For the IT team changing behaviour has meant that anything that is not core to the company's mission is outsourced or moved to cloud.

"After our first failure with cloud we had to challenge ourselves," says Naylor. "Did we want to be the experts at running data centres, did we want to be the heroes that come in at 2am and put out fires, or did we want to be the people that best understood our business?"

The answer was, of course, the latter. This meant that in the day-to-day running of the organisation, as much IT as possible is put out to strategic partners. This has not meant a loss of technical expertise in-house as the technicians now work with these partners to help them build new technologies. But IT is now focused on growth and innovation rather than on the operational side, although, Naylor adds, IT maintains full visibility into the way the IT is run. Inevitably, however, this has led to some changes in the skills deployed.

"I now have more business analysts and service managers and less niche technical experts in storage and virtualisation," Naylor says.

The focus on innovation and the ability to experiment by firing up instances in the cloud ("Done is better than perfect" and "Fail fast, fail cheap" are two more of Naylor's mantras) has led to some unexpected successes. In Germany, for example, the company found a way to reduce the file size of the five hi-res photos they must take of every incident and store the compressed images in the cloud. This now costs about €20,000 annually rather than the €200,000 previously charged by a third-party.

"IT is now monitoring everything, including costs," Naylor says.

Meanwhile in the UK, the Autoglass franchise is almost 100 per cent mobile.

"We have no branches, we have no depots, we have 'hot-boxes' where our fitters pick up their glass in the morning," says Naylor.

In the UK, the company has a logical separation between cloud (AWS) and on-premises when it comes to data and applications.

"We've removed hybrid from our thinking," Naylor says, referring to the first failed venture, which was an attempt at this model. However, in other countries, such as Germany, where sensitive insurance and credit card data must be stored by the company, strict regulations mean that hybrid is the approach that has been adopted.

"There is not one answer. Innovation is about changing behaviour, not about the technology. Ultimately it's about fitting the right model to the right requirement," Naylor says.

This article was amended to include the German photography example. A previously cited innovation in Brasil has yet to be completely realised yet.