38 The European Business Review May - June 2013 Turn Time Into Money: Faster Growth rough Digital Reuse By Stephanie L. Woerner, Peter Weill, & Mark P. McDonald Today’s technologically savvy firms have created an inter- nal digital reuse culture that significantly reduces time-to- market without any extra costs. However, reuse remains an underutilized strategy in most companies because it requires a high level of organization, discipline and enterprise-wide exchange. This article explores how you can overcome these challenges by cultivating the three C’s: commitment, capa- bilities and communication. D uring the recent global financial crisis, the Lubricants division of CEPSA, Spain’s second largest oil company, realized that it needed to change, and change fast. The division sells lubricants for industrial produc- tion in 55 gallon barrels. The one size dominated the com- pany’s sales, yet in the face of the crisis, customers were asking for the product in various smaller sizes that the company did not support. The Lubricants Division could change its packag- ing line to support smaller sizes, but its systems were geared toward selling the product in a single size. Reorienting the production line and systems was time critical as customers’ needs were changing rapidly. Leaders considered adding features to their system or installing new systems. That would take months - about the same amount of time it would take customers to switch to other suppliers. The Lubricants division found an answer in weeks, by reusing systems deployed by its sister retailing division. Was the solu- tion perfect? No. Did it provide a solution that Lubricants needed now? Absolutely. Reusing existing digital assets was significantly faster than other alternatives and CEPSA was able to neutralize a rapidly emerging business threat. Unfortunately too often time costs money, particularly when it comes to issues of time to market. Poor experiences condition executives to believe that realizing new capabilities quickly is costly and risky. That’s often true when everything you build is new. Digitally savvy executives recognize that apparently new problems are likely to have been solved in other areas of the business, at least in part. That recognition creates opportunities to deliver more capability in less time through reuse rather than new development. Nowhere are the opportunities for reuse as great as they are for an organization’s digital assets such as busi- ness processes, services, products, and data. 1 Why? Although you’ll spend some time and resources customizing the asset to the situation, the cost to copy a typical digital asset where you already own the rights is virtually zero. 2 Reuse can sound like a ‘hand-me-down’ strategy when you can’t imagine how clothes not tailor-made for you will work. Far from it, we have recently completed a study of digital reuse (see About the Study) and the impacts are spectacular. We defined digital reuse as the use of existing business process, technolo- gies, systems, and data to solve new business issues. Most of us now buy clothes off the rack as it’s faster and cheaper even if the items needs some minor adjustment – just imagine an enterprise-wide rack of digital assets to use and add to. In our study of more than 1500 firms in 77 countries we found that firms achieving above average levels of digital reuse: • Have higher revenue growth and margins (see Figure 1). The results here are stunning, with firms achieving above average reuse having over 12% more growth and 4% greater margin than below average reusers. Digital reuse helps firms achieve profitable growth by streamlining the current opera- tions and reducing time-to-market for new products or geographies. Innovation