How IT does business at Eastman

When Aldo Noseda became CIO at chemical manufacturer Eastman five years ago, he immediately began working with other leaders in the company to bring a new category of services to the market that complemented its physical products. “Before Eastman, I worked for Monsanto, where I had a similar journey,” he says. “Monsanto sold agriculture products and we started a digital division to sell advisory services to farmers. So the idea was already being floated when Eastman made me the offer to become CIO.”

A new service layer would be created to boost product sales and increase loyalty by helping customers use Eastman products, which are inherently complex. Moreover, the new service layer could be sold as a subscription to provide an entirely new revenue stream. On top of that, selling a service would be a whole new way of doing business since, until then, Eastman had mostly sold physical products.

“When Aldo came to Eastman, he helped build a diverse team including people with different business backgrounds,” says Kate Horan, who is now digital strategy and products manager for Eastman’s Performance Films business. “The way this was built as a start-up within the IT department was critical to its success at Eastman. We now have three services on the market and a fourth on its way.”

Solving customer problems

The most mature of the three services is called Core, which helps dealers in the automotive aftermarket industry install paint protection products and window film products more accurately and efficiently. Core provides patterns of vehicle parts—for example, bumpers, fenders, or mirrors—for specific makes and models. An installer can use editing features to customize the patterns and then place the pattern onto a digital cutting board, where it can be cut out and installed on the vehicle.

“The objective is to nest the patterns as efficiently as possible to save customers time and material for when they’re cutting out film to apply to a vehicle,” says Horan. “We have nesting algorithms to help with that. This helps end installers perform their job, which is both an art and a science. We try to help them install the film quicker and more efficiently.”

Nesting is an idea borrowed from the clothing industry, where the challenge is to pack a set of irregular shapes onto as small a strip of material as possible. AI and sophisticated numerical analysis algorithms are used to minimize material waste, which adds up to big money when large volumes are involved. Computer aided design (CAD) tools, which are often used to model the irregular shapes, can feed the models to the nesting algorithms. A small industry has sprung up not only around providing the best technology, but also around offering the best business offerings, like on-premises applications versus subscription-based cloud services, for example.