Regal Rexnord heats things up with XM Cloud

Note: Video transcript has been edited to provide a summary of this episode.

Eric: Hi, I'm Eric Stine, the CEO of Sitecore, and I'm thrilled to be here today for a Digital Visionary series with Tim Dickson, the Chief Digital & Information Officer of Regal Rexnord. I'm certainly glad on a day like today that you're around, because it's about 90 degrees here in Chicago and I think you guys make the electric motors [that are] in just about every HVAC system in America. Talk to me a little bit, Tim, about a brand that goes back 70 years and is still on the cutting edge of digital and information technology.

Tim: It's a great story and a great company. It's a company that's grown through acquisitions. Regal Beloit partnered with venture capital and started buying up engines and motors businesses. When my boss joined in 2019, the CEO convinced the board to merge with the next two largest players in our space. Right before I joined in 2023, we merged with our equivalent in Europe and Asia; it’s now over a $6 billion business and driving some cool innovation.

Eric: You joined the company at a fairly significant inflection point. What attracted you to Regal Rexnord?

Tim: A couple of different things. In my previous role I was the CIO at Generac Power Systems in Milwaukee; becoming a Chief Digital & Information Officer and not having to move outside of the city of Milwaukee was certainly attractive. The second thing was everything [Regal] offered was two or three times bigger - the budget, the size, the reporting relationship, the officer of the company aspect. All of that kind of added up and just made it for a perfect fit.

Eric: You have done a ton in the area of content driven commerce. The distance between content and commerce is getting shorter, particularly in a time and space where. AI opens up the opportunity to deliver on personalized experiences that drive real human connection. Talk to me about some of the stuff you've done in the realm of content driven commerce and what excites you about it?

Tim: We're mainly a B2B company. We do have some B2C, but it's very small. We’re a B2B company selling to large OEMs as well as large distributors. That context is important in the aspect of what we're trying to do with Sitecore. Those many acquisitions all came with their own content management and e-commerce platforms. Before I joined in 2023 the previous CIO and the business teams had been trying for years to integrate into a common stack. The timing was perfect for me; most of the integration had been completed and my boss brought me in as a person who knew digital technologies.

Tim: [Once] the integration these businesses was complete, we were trying to determine if we could leverage tools like generative AI, agentic AI, chatbots, etc. Industrial manufacturing companies grow 1% to 2% per year, if that. If you can get an extra quarter point, half a point, or a full point of growth as a result of anything digital you're cooking right then and there. When I inherited the website, I knew that transformation had to occur for us to do the types of things that we were looking to do with content, with e-commerce, with IOT, and with AI.

Tim: This platform was [a] very important decision. The process…was a thorough one, and Sitecore sponsored my first hackathon in the history of the company just four blocks away in our digital office.

Eric: I feel really proud to hear that story. Tell me, what are you the proudest of over the last year and a half?

Tim: My team. I inherited what was predominantly in infrastructure in ERP and integration IT organization. For me to come in with all these big ideas around digital and AI and data and e-commerce and IoT, I needed to enroll my team in that strategy and I needed a significant amount of upskilling. Specifically when I take a look at this space we had an on-prem. We still have an on-prem infrastructure and Sitecore capability. But tools like microservices, headless infrastructure, and headless design were new concepts to a team that had been developing in an on-prem world for 10 to 15 years. I didn't know whether the team was going to embrace both my strategy and the tech stack in the cloud. So it’s really a story of upskilling and of IT transformation driving the business and digital transformation, which I love to tell. So I'm most proud of the team and the trans transformation they've made.

Eric: Let's talk about that intersection because it's something that I think we share from a values perspective. Our mission as a company is to simplify how marketers reach, engage and serve their audience particularly now when audiences have become fractured and…distracted. Talk to me a little bit about how you help simplify complexity both for your business partners internally and for your end market customers.

Tim: Absolutely. Unless you're in the industrial manufacturing space, you might not even know of Regal Rexnord. I call us the Proctor and Gamble of industrial manufacturing, and Regal Rexnord is the overriding brand of the company. But what our distributors and OEMs would know are our product brands. We have over 60 product brands that folks have been buying…for years.

Tim: So the strategy is twofold. I wanted to promote the Regal Rexnord brand. But once we drove customers to this new site, I wanted it to make it easy for them to go down a very product specific path. Bringing them to the website first and having them interact with us from that perspective before going down a product path was really my goal.

Eric: I love the fact that you have digital and information sitting side by side. In a world that is about to become awash in AI, how do you think about balancing good governance with all of that data governance the heritage information technology piece with the forward looking digital piece?

Tim: I think there's two aspects. You have to build a culture of in innovation. If you ask anyone on my team, the saying that I repeatedly offer is “think big, have a strategy, have an outcome that you want to achieve, but start small.” Then when you prove that out and prove that the business outcomes can be achieved, you scale fast. If you look at what we're doing with XM Cloud, that is exactly the strategy. We are trying to accelerate the rapid build out of brand new product pages which are new offerings for the company, and [XM Cloud] allowed the business to go to market faster, build these sites very quickly, and get our product brand out there.

Eric: I was so impressed with that the first time we met. My own background is in CPG with brand driven companies organized very much like industrial manufacturers…and you need to build on a series of wins to create momentum. So you just had two new sites go live on the platform. What division is that?

Tim: Aerospace. Our brand new aerospace site [went live with] perfect timing. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, but we launched the brand new aerospace site during the week of the Paris Auto Show. The team was…over in Paris showcasing the brand and the opportunity. It was just a perfect fit and perfect timing for that to happen.

Tim: We have a brand new transfer switch business through an acquisition up in Canada called Thompson Power Systems. That will be not only our very first brand new product site, but our first site where we go to market through a brand new e-commerce guest checkout. We're going to let anyone buy one of those products with a credit card, whether you're an OEM, whether you're a contractor or whether you're an end user.

Tim: So I'm super excited to see how that works. But all of these things would not have been possible without rapid lead building out of these content pages to showcase our products and personalize [against] the different customer profiles that we have.

Eric: You're talking the power of storytelling - how storytelling allows you to connect content with absolutely commerce. Where do you see that going? What do you inspire and motivate your team towards?

Tim: When you think about what's possible…the customer set is just so diverse. That's what you deal with in the world of B2B. Understanding your customers is the root of any sort of digital strategy initiative. AI is going to be very important to us as we look to under understand our customer better, so we can present the content to them in a way that they learn about our products…and we make it easy to purchase and support as well.

Eric: Talk to me a little bit about some of the challenges that you faced over the last year and a half. How have you navigated around them?

Tim: Change is good, you just have to be ready to deal with it. We live in an interesting world and…I love to personalize the change. I like to make it personal for folks on my team or the business partners that I work with. Specifically for the folks on my team, [it was] a huge change in transformation from an on-prem architecture to microservices and headless.

Tim: We needed help from Sitecore and we needed help from your partner network to make that transition. That team mostly sits in India…so think about all of the complexities that go into a new cloud technology, a migration from on-prem to microservices, [all with] a new training partner in a country that’s half a world away. We made that work and the team was the one who incubated and delivered these first sets of sites. I was really impressed to see how quickly my team came up to speed and changed and embraced this new architecture. That means we're ready for AI.

Eric: I love that lens on personalization because one of the things that we hold to as our company vision are digital experiences. So powerful. They drive real human connection. I believe that AI really unlocks the power, the possibility, and the potential of personalization at scale. And I wouldn't have historically associated that with an engine for an HVAC system, and you just put a very human face on that. Talk to me about how you think about as you're building these new sites, the importance of personalization and connecting with the end.

Tim: I’m a firm believer that AI will help in a couple of different areas. It will certainly drive benefits of identifying that customer and who they are specifically. AI has already proven that is the case. But where the human element still comes into play, where I haven't seen AI progress as much, is storytelling and brand awareness that I see still being a very big aspect of the business. You can leverage AI quickly to spin these things up, but unless you have that story to tell and can bring in the human element to make that connection it's not going to be hugely successful.

Eric: What do you see the biggest opportunities and lessons, what have you learned in terms of stakeholder management across the commercial side of the business, the marketing side of the business, the digital side of the business?

Tim: The term democratization is used quite a bit today with AI, but it really applies to any set of emerging technology.

Quite frankly, they might suggest a use case for that technology that you weren't planning on.

Eric: Tell me, if you could take on any project in the world for any company in the world, what's the project you'd most like to tackle?

Tim: I'm all about transformation and game changing initiatives. One of the things we were able to do very early on was implement a generative AI chatbot on our newly designed website. Little did I know that 70-year-old distributors and OEMs would rather interact with a chatbot to find answers to commonly asked questions and get product spec sheets than talk to a customer service agent over the phone. That's exciting to me. That has not been done before in the industrial manufacturing space that we are in, I know that for a fact.

Eric: That's a great way to close. Tim, thank you very much.

Tim: Thank you Eric. Thanks for having us.