A Conversation on Resilience, Innovation, and Leadership With Mario Berra, SVP, Global Manufacturing GSC at BIC [Speaker Spotlight]

In an exclusive Speaker Spotlight interview, Mario Berra, SVP, Global Manufacturing GSC at BIC shares his career journey, strategies for navigating global challenges, and approaches to fostering innovation and collaboration.

From balancing global frameworks with local needs to driving operational resilience, gain valuable insights ahead of his session titled “Overcoming Global and Operational Challenges in Manufacturing: BIC's Model For Success" at the 11th annual American Manufacturing Summit!

Can you kindly introduce yourself and describe your role and main responsibilities as the SVP, Global Manufacturing GSC at BIC?

My name is Mario Berra and I am the current Senior Vice President of Global Manufacturing for BIC. It involves two divisions – all that we have in the stationary products, and also blade excellence, our shavers division. Globally we are talking about 12 different manufacturing sites under my responsibility. We have two locations in Mexico, one is my base office in Mexico City. We have another two locations in Brazil, in the Manaus area on the Amazonian

side of the country. We have four factories in France,  three related to stationary products and one with shavers. We have our bigger shaver manufacturing site in Athens, Greece and four factories in Africa located in different regions. We have them in the North in Tunisia, we have them in Nigeria and Kenya in the West and East, and also South Africa. 

I have spent my entire career in the manufacturing industry, with extensive experience in multicultural leadership positions in different countries such as Mexico, United States, Brazil, South Korea, France, etc. Prior to joining BIC, I worked at Electrolux Home Products, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Daewoo Electronics in different roles in industrial operations, where I led and coordinated all operational activities, including safety, finance, production, engineering, and quality, in addition to the installation and start-up of 6 new manufacturing facilities. 

I have been with BIC for almost 13 years. I initially started as a Factory Director in the Mexico City factory with a plan to succeed America's Head for Stationary Products, which I did in 2014. In 2015 I made the transition to take all Americas for stationary and then in 2019, we consolidated the categories of stationary and shavers as one single business. In 2020, I took the global responsibility of combining all of these manufacturing sites. In my current role, I am responsible for ensuring the safety of operations, optimizing production capacity, efficiency, and resources to meet BIC's service, financial and manufacturing objectives. This has been a continuous journey of changes, improvements, learning, and connections with the team.

Can you share more about your global manufacturing career journey, leading up to your current role at BIC?

Historically, we are a company with very strong industrial expertise, but we were very isolated in each of our locations. During the last few years, the integration of global continuous improvement, global manufacturing, world-class efficiency and operations, and connecting our teams and experts from different countries has been one of the most important journeys. Through this journey, we were able to create different workflows in order to connect our large group of experts.

We have many experts with several focuses including continuous improvement, safety, environment, and health initiatives. Additonally, we have experts that are very technical in specific processes and industrialization processes. We've been on this journey to connect and create a global industrial expertise model and it has been very successful so far. We have very good integration of the different communities.

We established our methodology to measure the maturity of our manufacturing operations in a standard methodology, and we developed this transversal connection. In the last two years, we started implementing a new methodology, which I will share in depth during my session at the American Manufacturing Summit. This is a methodology that collects ideas from all employees, especially focusing on frontline members, to create a continuous improvement environment. This methodology ensures that ideas are flowing from everybody about all the different aspects of the operation. During 2024, we did a rollout globally in all the factories for this methodology that we call “BIC Up”. It is a methodology to create an idea-driven organizational culture which has been one of the most important parts of the journey.

What strategies have you implemented to effectively navigate disruptions caused by current inflation, geopolitical issues, and workforce challenges? What lessons can other manufacturers learn from BIC's approaches?

Throughout our manufacturing and all of our supply chain parameters, we establish four pillars to work. 

One of the pillars focuses on end-to-end. In the past, we used to analyze every market's business and challenges at the local level and then we created this end-to-end pillar. This pillar means that we evaluate everything as either a challenge to our new product, a new methodology, or a crisis. We evaluate end-to-end by looking at the chain from our suppliers to consumers including our manufacturing activities, packing, distribution, and warehousing. By looking end-to-end, we are finding better opportunities and better ways to make decisions for our business and consumers. 

The second pillar is regionalization. We start looking for this balance between what is being managed and evaluated at the regional level and global level. This is always a challenge for global companies because it's very easy to view things from a more global perspective or to focus on a more local perspective. How can we find the right balance between local, regional, and global? We have a vision of what we want and we need to operate locally, but maintaining this strong connection regionally and leveraging our local expertise and our global footprint becomes an enabler, not a constraint. 

This brings us to the third pillar which is global leverage. For example, I mentioned our manufacturing capabilities. We know that we have expertise in some processes, and how we take advantage of the strong processes that exists to also support the different markets, and then global expertise becomes leverage for local and regional results. 

The fourth pillar that we working on is all these procurement value-added designs for growth. We work very closely across different countries and across different manufacturing locations to establish standardized processes connecting in a strong partnership with suppliers and other internal stakeholders in a way that we can optimize decisions and strategies. 

Those four pillars help us, especially within the past few years with the challenges that we face. For example, when looking at logistic challenges, we have transportation challenges in the Black Sea and Panama Channel or strikes in some ports in the US. When we have these types of logistic issues, our vision, and these pillars help us to make decisions in advance and actually help to manage different alternatives of goals involving these challenges. This is what we are doing to anticipate the issues and potential crisis, and essentially make decisions in a timely manner.

Can you provide an example of a time when you successfully established a clear operational vision for your team? How did you balance defining the 'what' and 'why' while fostering collaboration on the 'how'?

With the BIC Up methodology that we deployed globally this year in all our manufacturing sites, we are setting an idea-driven organization culture and what this means is having every member connected with a continuous improvement mindset. This is not only from the identification of ideas but also by providing a friendly methodology that they can submit the idea, get it approved, and implement it along with a formal recognition and reward program. At the end, the methodology of the idea driven organization culture is to increase empowerment and autonomy in the different functions, creating overall collaboration and best practices sharing.

For example, consider a case where a regulatory change in one country prevents us from importing specific materials on time. In such cases, the team identifies the challenge and assesses its potential impact. They then work in parallel to explore alternatives, connecting directly with team members and other stakeholders to develop solutions. Instead of focusing solely on sourcing the restricted material, the team might determine whether assembly of the required components can be sourced from other factories. These opportunities come directly from the team's sense of empowerment and autonomy, enabling them to take initiative and drive solutions. This approach highlights how leveraging our expertise, organizational structure, and operations across locations can lead to effective problem-solving and collaboration.

The methodology also fosters collaboration by establishing a process for idea submission, supported by a communication framework and a system of recognition and rewards. This creates an environment of direct communication and collaboration, eliminating bureaucratic hurdles that are often challenging to organizations with teams across multiple countries. Bureaucracy can limit direct communication, requiring teams to go through intermediaries. However, with this model, teams are empowered to communicate autonomously.

As a result, team members, who face challenges daily, are encouraged to bring forward ideas and implement solutions proactively. This spirit of ownership ensures that the best ideas emerge from those closest to the problems. For example, in a recent situation, the team proposed three to four alternative solutions, all of which were activated to minimize the impact. Ultimately, this approach allowed us to mitigate the challenge entirely through the team's ideas and connections.

"The model is proving to be effective not only locally but also in fostering interconnectivity among different factories, enhancing overall operational efficiency and resilience."

When building resilient operations, how do you approach balancing global strategies and frameworks with the unique challenges of localized markets?

In the last five or six years more than ever due to the level of challenges that we have faced in all different types of industries and companies. Even on a personal level, I think we face many challenges but when we talk about collaboration and being resilient as a team, we need a structure that allows and creates this network. Resilience comes from the confidence that we are not alone and that we are a network that we can trust. The network, collaboration, and communication helps to create overall resilience as a team. We have been working a lot in this sense and we have different workflows, some of which are focused on communication. I think we come from a time where communication was dependent on situations and that is where we have an issue. We are moving now in a concept that we are in regular communication. 

"Collaboration is not an event, it is a process."

Overall, this helps in regard to resilience because the teams know that they count on each other. They know each other very well because they are in constant communication and collaboration. In my opinion, the very basis of resilience is to have confidence that we are a team, that we are connected, and that we are supporting each other. We create routines for communication, continuous improvement, and collaboration. This way, when something extraordinary happens, we are already working together as a team. 

In your current role as the SVP Global Manufacturing GSC, what methods or practices have you found to be most effective in promoting idea generation within teams to encourage innovation and drive continuous improvement?

I found creating routines very valuable when it comes to promoting idea generation within teams to encourage innovation and drive continuous improvement. Routine establishes a connection that all team members participate in, and the structure in organizations are very important. We need to have good structures for many reasons but the organizational structures could play against us. Especially when we talk about innovation and connecting because with all the tools that we currently have, we can have everybody contributing, bringing ideas, and challenging things. We need innovation and opportunities that come from taking the ideas and the minds of everyone on the teams.
What I find very valuable is how we can have everybody's ideas connected and everybody with a level of confidence to bring ideas and challenges. In some cases we are making routines, processes, cycles, communication, or activities in some others is more in the to-day interaction. 

Last week, I was in a factory in France and I was telling the team that if you have an idea, challenge, or question, you don't need to follow a routine or process for communication, you can ask me or anyone else who is available. Communicating and then promoting the communication and demonstrating if we need anything is important. At the heart of this is connecting ideas from everybody in real time. There is no need to wait for the natural bureaucracy of the organization structures because that can drain the innovation opportunities. Innovation is not only about the product or process, it could be about anything. 

We have an amazing opportunity because we have four generations working together with completely different experiences with many tools. If we can get ideas from these four generations and make them work together, we can do magic.  But we need to be very open because the newer generations are much more dynamic. We need to use digital tools now more than ever. We don't need to wait for the official channels because that could be too slow for the tool and for the opportunity that we can explore.

With our BIC Up methodology we create a social media environment where everybody can share ideas, connect, implement, and manage, and then we have a friendly system where everybody participates which is really what we are pushing to do and so far it is working very well. We started the model in our manufacturing plant in Manaus in Brazil in 2019 and after 4 years of testing and fine-tuning we started the global deployment and in some of the factories our members were a little bit concerned about the feasibility to manage a bigger amount of ideas, our model success rely on the autonomy and empowerment of our teams, to be agile, especially considering that the younger generations of team members already have this chip of direct communication and agility.

"We are moving forward and it's amazing what we are learning about ideas, communication, and collaboration."

How have you utilized collaboration networks to enhance operational efficiency and engage employees?

Often, what we lack in an organization is engagement.

How can we create an environment where team members feel not only confident but also engaged enough to point out opportunities or situations where everything is connected? The main goal of BIC Up culture is not only to establish the conditions for ideas generation and implementation, but also to reinforce communication, collaboration, and recognition to create engagement by demonstrating how the contributions of team members can become a reality.

Team members should be able to see that they are not only encouraged to participate by sharing ideas but also to take part in their implementation. They can witness how their ideas evolve into the things that we are doing. For example, at our factory in Athens, we implemented a very good system and we saw the good results. We had our team members from Athens share their experiences with colleagues in our factories in Mexico and France, where similar opportunities existed. We connected the teams and they started collaborating and sharing ideas and now we can see a direct improvement. 

This sharing of best practices not only drives results but also creates a sense of pride among team members. Seeing that ideas can become a reality and having the opportunity to connect with colleagues from other countries creates engagement. Engagement comes in many levels, and all of the activities contribute to its growth. Essentially, engagement becomes the foundation for everything else, creating a cycle where engagement enhances communication and collaboration, which further strengthens engagement.

What are you most looking forward to about the 11th annual American Manufacturing Summit?

The opportunity to share the experiences that we had with this methodology with colleagues from other companies, and also being able to connect with others and establish this network of collaboration and sharing in both directions. There are many things that we can learn from other companies, so we will be able to collaborate. It's a strong opportunity for our company to strengthen its network within this ecosystem of companies. Additionally, how we can continue improving all together while following the best practice assurance.

We are grateful to Mario Berra for the profound insights and experiences he shared in this blog post. His expert perspectives and work with global and operational challenges will greatly enhance our discussions at the American Manufacturing Summit. 

We look forward to his session titled "Overcoming Global and Operational Challenges in Manufacturing: BIC's Model" at the American Manufacturing Summit taking place on March 19-20, 2025, in Chicago, IL. 

For further insights into the future of manufacturing, emerging trends, and more, visit manusummit.com.

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