Deb Fronczak, former Chief Procurement Officer at 3M, joins Ali to share a practical, inside view of what it really takes to drive digital and AI transformation in complex chemical organizations. Across more than 30 years at 3M, Deb held senior roles in manufacturing operations, engineering and technology — experience that put her at the center of major enterprise-wide initiatives, from ERP changes to early digital and AI adoption. She now brings that perspective to multiple boards across the chemicals, manufacturing, and coatings sectors.
Deb joins us to discuss:
What separates digital and AI projects that scale from those that stall in “pilot mode”
Why successful transformation depends on aligned leadership, clear strategy, and embedded technical expertise
How CEOs can balance near-term ROI pressures with long-term capability building
Where digital and AI can deliver meaningful impact today — across customer interaction, workflow automation, R&D, and technical service
Video Transcript
Ali Amin-Javaheri: Hello and welcome everyone. I’m your host, Ali, CEO, and co-founder of Knowde. Today’s guest is Deb Fronczak. Her career spans 32 years of diverse experiences in manufacturing, operations, engineering, technology, and most recently as Chief Procurement Officer, all with 3M.
Deb continues to work. She’s currently sitting on the board of several companies, including a chemical manufacturer, a company in manufacturing, and another one in the coating space. You’ve certainly kept busy. Deb. Maybe before we jump into today’s conversation, share a little bit more about your background.
Deb Fronczak: Sounds good. Thanks Ali. As you described, a long career at 3M in manufacturing and supply chain. But one of the things I’d highlight is embedded in there, a lot of experiences around transformation. Whether it was in process technology, digital and AI, ERRP changes, things that companies have to deal with on a regular basis that involve huge amounts of change management and interaction cross-functionally with other leaders.
So it’s been a great career. And yes, in retirement I am supporting some boards and working, of course, with Knowde and even a little private equity to stay fresh with what’s going on around the marketplace.
Ali: There’s certainly a lot going on. I think you exited an operating role in the industry right at the right time in ’21.
Deb: Yeah.
Ali: If you were still in an operating role at a major chem co today, what do you think your top priorities would be?
Deb: I think some of these don’t change at all, but you have to think about market and customer interaction and the marketplaces, navigating end markets, dealing with things like regulatory sustainability and product performance. And then, how do you grow and differentiate yourself? So customer and market is always there.
I think in today’s age, especially as we’re seeing changes in demand in the chemical industry, you have to be looking at optimization. How do you navigate cost pressures? How do you navigate cash and deliver on the bottom line? And in that area, how do you drive a resilient supply chain?
And then lastly, I think it’s about technology. Not only the R&D technology around products, but how do you look at digital and AI and all the things that are changing in the marketplace to accelerate the first two priorities, but also accelerate in the R&D space.
Ali: You’ve certainly seen a handful of transformation projects. I’m sure you led a lot of these initiatives in your prior roles. In your view, what separates projects that end up scaling versus those that get stuck in pilot land?
Deb: Yeah. I think with any type of project, you have to be looking at the CEO and the executive leadership for strong support. You need to have a clear strategy, a clear vision.
As I mentioned earlier, you have to be able to deal with change management. Oftentimes, especially when you’re thinking about digital transformation, there’s a culture change and a significant change for the people that are involved. And I think where some companies fail is they focus on the technology and not the people and the culture.
Also, I think another failure point is if you just think that you’re going to address everything at once, you go too big across the enterprise versus taking a focus piloted approach where you can get some quick hits.
And then lastly, outside of those types of things, projects fail if you don’t have good data. Now, if you have siloed data that you can’t access, it’s not formatted in the right way—trying to apply transformation without good data impacts your decision-making. It impacts your analytics, it impacts the implementation and can very quickly stall the initiative and force you to go back and fix the data before you can even move forward.
Ali: A lot of times that problem is certainly overlooked. People see the shiny object and they just want that, and they don’t realize all the foundational things that need to be in play. I liked your comment around people and culture and what you said around that sometimes people get too anchored on the technology rather than the problem they’re trying to solve.
And I can’t agree with that enough. Especially in the world that we’re living in right now, there are so many buzzwords and it is hard to keep up with all the acronyms and all this sort of stuff and I hear a lot of executives saying, let’s just go chase that trend and then implement it.
And it’s okay, but what problem are we trying to solve? Because at the end of the day, if it’s not tied to an executive initiative that’s funded and people really care about, that is how you get stuck in pilot land.
Deb: Yep, absolutely. And you know what, one of the things that I think, especially in this digital AI space, is something for companies to consider is how do you embed that technical expertise with the leadership? Because oftentimes, your leadership is from a generation where this is not common. You know, the terminology, I just think of five years ago, we had a lot of executive leaders that did not understand what data automation was. So I think one of the things you can do to help succeed is make sure you have the technical expertise embedded with the leadership, so they understand the terminology, understand the goals, the objectives.
Ali: In today’s environment a lot of folks are very much anchored on the short term. And if there’s not a calendar year ROI on this investment, then it can be much more challenging to get it funded. If you were whispering into one of your CEO’s ears right now and said.You know, and they were debating this balancing act of short-term ROI versus investing for the long term. What advice would you be giving them?
Deb: That’s a great question. I think first and foremost, CEOs need to understand that this is a continuous investment. It’s not a single project. And I learned that from my experience at 3M is you might envision a focused project, but then you build off of it and you build off of it. So you enable the next step in the evolution with digital. Absolutely, balancing quick hit ROI types of projects with the long-term strategy in parallel is very important because the ROI drives some investment return. Also helps you build momentum and helps the people in the organization see where the quick hits can impact their day-to-day, so they’re more on board with the long-term strategy.
And, I think about quick hits, just automating some of the workflows or using AI in a marketing campaign. Or even using AI to drive fraud reduction. Those are things you can get a really quick hit on while looking more at that end-to-end strategy, which, you know, some companies involves changing to a cloud solution for the long term, or might be looking at how’s that whole customer interface look, which is gonna be much longer than a six month project.
Ali: For sure. This industry has been anchored by SAP and there’s always this perception that it’s got to be be multi-year and a massive investment. But there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. And what you just brought up in terms of just automating basic workflows, just to make people’s lives a little bit easier. There’s so many of these opportunities around. Sales and customer service and procurement, supply chain. It’s just it’s an endless number of remedial workflows that should be automated and can easily be automated today. Maybe not five years ago, but today they can. And I can’t agree with that more. There’s lots of things that they can be doing to drive short term.
When you sit back and you think about all the applications of AI or data-driven tech, what would you be focused on right now?
Deb: I might be a little biased with my background around supply chain and operations, but I think the application and the business model around customer interaction is probably the one that’s the most prevalent, especially in the chemical industry.
As we think about your.com website, how you interact with your customers, being able to set up a wiki background of all of the data that’s pertinent: product data, spec data, regulatory, even knowledge of sales individuals, where you can query to not only help your sales team, your tech service, your customer service, but then to be able to set up a virtual chemist that can answer basic questions, that helps you in that customer journey, I think is probably the most important space to start with because you can build off of that to understand your customer journey your, your segmentation and your marketplace, and eventually drive growth.
Ali: You said virtual R&D, right?
Deb: Virtual R&D in terms of molecular design and experimentation, but also we have a lot of individuals where the knowledge is held in their head.
Ali: Yep.
Deb: So the advantage of AI and machine learning is you can pull all that information out and have it queryable so other chemists or R&D or tech service individuals can pull that information. So if you create that wiki, everybody can pull from it.
Ali: This industry certainly is opaque, and in order to make decisions you need years of experience. And if you can, like you said, if you can pull all that knowledge into a central place that everyone can take advantage of, obviously massively valuable. Maybe not possible a few years ago, but today. It’s basically commoditized. And I agree with you, this is probably the thing that would cause the largest impact to any one of these organizations because it’s so applicable to every function.
You just need a lot of know-how to make decisions. A lot of things come up if you’re in TSMD or sales or customer service, we are the answers to these questions? Unless you’ve been in the role for 10 years, you just don’t know.
Deb: Yeah. And, you know, you probably know the terminology better, but you think about ChatGPT for an internal organization or co-pilot for an internal organization, that’s a means by which you can set a foundation to build off of.
Ali: Indeed, indeed. Do you think that’s the bigger opportunity or would you go after the idea you brought up a little bit earlier in terms of giving customers access to the documents and the order patterns and all the transactional stuff they need.
Deb: If you’re thinking short term, it’s very easy to see the foundation where you can allow customers to self-serve. I want product specs, I want MSDS, I want technical information. Build off of that and make a recommendation. I need a product that does X, Y, Z. I think that’s all valuable. But then, internally I get a little selfish where I think, how can I help my sales force and my tech service team be more efficient and maybe understand where there’s opportunities so that we can grow the business. So I think it it can go both directions.
Ali: From our point of view, there’s a decent percentage of chem cos right now that are in pilot mode on a GPT like service to help make certain functions more efficient. And I think it’s probably inevitable that same experience will also be available externally to their customers. As they gain confidence internally that, wow, the accuracy of the results are pretty darn good. And why are we just hoarding this to ourselves? Why not give this access to our customers? I think it’s two, three years away, but it’s inevitable.
Deb: Yep.
Ali: Deb, thank you for the insights, folks love listening to these informal conversations with folks like yourself that have helped shape the industry and continue to shape the industry. You’re still influencing several orgs. Thank you for everything you’ve done and continue to do to move this industry forward. I appreciate the time.
