“Turning into a digital client items firm is our ambition,” says Atul Bhardwaj, Chief Digital and Expertise Officer of The Lego Group, in a not totally predictable assertion assertion — coming from the world’s most beneficial producer of bodily toys.
“We’ll all the time be anchored within the bodily — simply to be clear — however digital wants to come back in and increase that bodily construct course of,” Bhardwaj clarifies. “Our enterprise has scaled rather a lot within the final two years; we have to be sure that our platforms and our techniques additionally scale.”
The Lego Group’s earnings for 2021 noticed income develop 27% year-on-year (to $8 billion), whereas client gross sales grew 22%. CEO Niels B. Christiansen said in September that Lego’s sturdy monetary efficiency would permit the corporate to speed up investments in digitalisation.
“The Lego Group is making a major strategic funding in digital transformation; it’s a multi-billion DKK (Danish krone) funding,” confirms Bhardwaj. “We’re trebling the dimensions of our digital groups and accelerating our presence and our capabilities right here [in Copenhagen], but it surely’s all a part of a wider digital agenda.”
Having led digital transformation for MediaMarkt and Tesco earlier than being employed by the Lego Group 18 months in the past, Atul Bhardwaj is aware of a factor or two about turning what he calls turning a “conventional IT workforce” right into a “digital expertise workforce”.
When requested whether or not he thinks the pandemic was the actual driver of Lego’s progress over the previous couple of years, he’s adamant its success is pushed by nice narratives created round nice merchandise.
“There’s numerous pleasure round our construct experiences,” Bhardwaj insists, which begs the query: how is the magic of Lego’s IRL consumer expertise being successfully augmented by digital merchandise, largely constructed for adults?
Lego’s video gamified tackle the Star Wars franchise.
“Whenever you construct digital merchandise, you suppose first about who you’re constructing these merchandise for,” says Bhardwaj, “We’re asking ourselves: ‘What are the digital wants of every of our key consumer teams?’ We need to be product-led, engineering-led, and architecture-led in all the pieces we do; so, we’re introducing the idea of digital merchandise to the Lego ecosystem.
“And we’re doing this for all of our consumer teams,” explains Bhardwaj, occurring to stipulate the 4 key consumer segments his digital transformation efforts are targeted on: “shoppers, buyers, companions, and colleagues”.
As a result of Lego’s client group contains each children and adults, they’re constructing separate “engagement platforms” for every viewers. One of many aims of those platforms is to gamify and assist “co-building” between household and mates. Naturally, these new codecs current numerous challenges Lego’s digital groups are tasked with fixing: “How will we be certain that children can interact with us digitally, in a protected method? And the way will we construct nice communities for adults – a few of whom are very skilled, and a few of whom are new to constructing?”
When requested for a pair examples of digital transformation tasks being prioritized at Lego’s new “digital hub” in Copenhagen, Bhardwaj says, “The tough factor is for me to select only one or two.”
With the consumer-centered cellular app that took Legos constructing manuals on-line already on 9.7 million downloads, Bhardwaj is now targeted on making a “seamless” online-offline expertise for buyers: “How will we deliver collectively the expertise you’ve got on lego.com with the expertise you’ve got in our shops? What does that appear to be?”
From a associate perspective, Bhardwaj is tasked with digitizing and automating Lego’s B2B interactions at scale, which implies considerably upgrading the expertise for resellers by revamping orders and monitoring by way of “Associate Portal” webshops.
Likewise, for the colleagues consumer phase (referring to the individuals working in Lego’s workplaces and factories world wide), Bhardwaj says the main focus is on automating “as a lot as doable”.
“We’re shifting to the cloud. We’re constructing fashionable APIs in order that our techniques can discuss to one another in a extra fashionable method; and we’re additionally changing all of our networking in all of our websites the world over – fairly actually laying out new cables to resume all of our infrastructure,” Bhardwaj says. “Quite a lot of fascinating issues to resolve. It’s a difficult and thrilling time to kick-off a profession in digital transformation at Lego.”
Featured picture: The gaming room at Denmark HQ. Credit score: Matt Bates.
