So hello, everyone. As said, I am, Signiasis, and I will be, focusing today on the global vision local impact transforming digital strategies across borders successfully.So this is will be my talk today. And when we go sorry. I think I'm in here. Yep. Shortly about the agenda, I will not go through all those, points in here, but I would like to mention that I have gathered a lot of my, lessons learned into this, talk and also integrated my know how, how to scale technology successfully. So I will also provide some my lessons learned and my tips to you. Shortly, about SunLab. So, SunLab is a leader in medical diagnostic services, and we are operating in more than 20 countries, today, worldwide. And, we are providing diagnostic services to patients, physicians, hospitals, institutions, and companies.

And more than ever, we are, today focusing on customer centric medical excellence, and it, also combines top notch, IT technology and, solutions for the customer. So this is, something that we are really focused on today. Our revenue, last year was 2,620,000,000.00, and we performed, about 600,000,000 laboratory tests in more than 450 laboratories, and, we have, more than 27,000 employees. Now, some fun facts maybe. When we think about the medicine lab then we can think that there are many women working And, this fact which you see from here, is only proving this. So we have, 74 percentage of our people as ladies. And when we look at this, fun table as well, then we can see, from the management level that all the numbers look great in here as well except the management board, and EXCOM where only eight percentage of, people are female.

So we have some, way, to go still. But the numbers look really great, I believe. And I would now, start with the question. Why is it essential to balance global and local strategies? And the most important word in here is for success and this is the answer actually, because group can think of doing the things like, we want to do some things and you have to take it, whether, you want it or not. But, we can do it in a really, like, successful and balanced way when we know how to do it. And this is now what I will be, guiding through you. So what the the group is aiming for. Of course, we want to scale. We want to standardize. We want to be cost efficient, overall, globally.

We want to have centralized covenants and, of course, full transparency in order to know what the countries are doing and how how they are doing the things. And now when we look at the local strategies then of course each of the country, will say that we are different. We have a different culture. We have local regulations. Our customers are totally different, than the others. Our market is different. We want to have full flexibility, and, it all combines together as a general resistance that you have to work on, basically. And when we look at the side of, the balanced strategies, then basically when you do it, wisely, then you can achieve more together. You can have everything which you see on those, three boxes at the same time basically.

So you will in addition to everything listed in global strategies and local strategies, you will also have shared knowledge and collaboration, globally, enhanced customer service and experiences, enhanced security, of course, because you don't have to, secure, all the different softwares in different countries.

And with that, you will get the efficiency and productivity gains, which is also something we, aim globally. So this is what you will get when you do the projects in a balanced way. In here in here, I would ask some questions that we have to go back once in a while even when we are already implementing the project because it often happens that we will get a little bit lost in the way in remembering that, this was, the goal that we wanted to achieve because when you are already onboarding, all the different countries, they have really different requirements and you it is really easy to get lost in between of everything.

So you always have to ask yourself, what do we want to achieve? Where is the value created? It's really, really crucial to understand this because you have to sell it to the countries, because you have to have some value in there. And, my suggestion is always to let's go global, but leave some local flexibility, and you also have to communicate this that, the countries would not be so afraid of going global, but they will lose, their local flexibility. So this is also crucial to think through. And, of course, during the project, program, then you have to think, of the scalability of future needs already beforehand, because there will be a lot of needs that we are not aware of today. And, of course, the performance of the technology because, you have more data, you, need more power, you need load balancers in between, etcetera.

So a lot of things that you think about during the implementation and also before the, project starts. And in here, just a a list of, how we are doing this, in SunLab. So basically, of course, it the whole starts with group IT strategy, and we are, deciding in there, whether we want to go, local this with this technology or we want to do it globally. And, then we will draft down the global vision of the layout if this is a global solution. It needs an approval, of course. And what is really important that you have to have this, really like a winning localization strategy in place, you have to think things through because the countries will ask a lot of questions and, actually, they are they are, like, waiting more from the group side than they are, putting, their, own effort into this project.

This is my personal experience. And, of course, we need to also define governance, processes, responsibilities. It has to be really clear in order to, have a really smooth, onboarding. The pilot needs to be chosen carefully because, you have to understand the complexity. You have to understand the the culture. You have to understand a lot of things in there in order this onboarding to succeed again. Then later, we can agree on the global road map. Then we implement. We gather alls, all the lessons learned and, we do regular improvements and then we are actually ready to scale. So it's, like, a really agile and also, like, lessons learned, approach, basically. And, always we shouldn't, forget, what comes next. If, the project is finalized, we have onboarded, all the countries. What, what next? We are doing this, for some kind of, like, a goal.

Is it like getting transparency, but what we will get and do with the transparency? Is it the statistics, analytics? Whatever we aim with that, then we shouldn't forget that now the even bigger steps will start. And then here, again, one example, on my personal prod project in SunLab. So, we discovered that IT service management is needed in each of the country. This is, of course, something we all know. It contains a lot of components, but you have to start from somewhere. So we defined the most crucial, parts of IT service management. We gathered them and decided that, we want to go with the ITIL based IT service management tool and processes, and, it was, put into their group IT strategy that we will globalize this project. And, on the top of the graphics, you see the global vision, which was drafted down. And all the, like, expectations that we expect from this project were met.

With that, we have now the full transparency. We, have strengthened, the security of technology. We are growing knowledge. We are collaborating everything. And, now we have the full transparency in due that in order to due the changes in our resources or our, services to go more like a shared services, approach. And this was the goal of this project. And, it is totally possible to onboard all the countries and to enhancements and everything when you are well, prepared. I'm sorry about the list, but, I know on the slide, it doesn't look good maybe, but I think, it's really, important to, like, combine those, like, tips, in a in a, like, a combined way together. So my tips, for you would be that, of course, you have to prepare the strategy, and adjust on the fly because it can happen that things change, environments, change. Countries say that we cannot, do this project, today, but, we will do it, in the in six months, whatever there can be.

You should, add this and, adjust it on the fly. You should involve, countries, decide together, and collaborate. This is a really crucial thing also when, going global, so that the countries would feel that, we have, also said something. We have been involved in here, etcetera. But, I can already tell you that even if you do, all what is listed in here, sometimes still countries are, resistant, of course. And then, all the necessary prework, like, draft down the governance processes, strategic communication plan is really crucial because I see communication as a, most crucial thing in, globalization, projects, actually, and, responsibilities. Choose to pilot carefully. In here, I already mentioned some, keywords, but, mostly, like, when you move from the smaller, to more complex, then, you can show positive examples and reliability.

You have a bigger chance to have a a successful project delivered. And, also bigger countries may have more complexity, which results in more resistance. And more resistance, more complex it complexity, it means maybe this is not such a big success when you start with that. And, of course, ask for feedback, be open and agile, and improve continuously, and share progress, with share stakeholders. Sorry. Okay. And then here I have a note down that communication and involvement are really the most, critical parts of, that kind of, like, global projects. And then I have listed down, four, main key challenges that I see, to mitigate in the implementation strategy, and these are mostly my, personal, lessons learned. So for for, for example, cultural, key challenges, the one is regulatory. Then we have technological, and we have also process wise.

So it's a big slide again, but I I was thinking that maybe it's good to have that kind of little bit, more longer text, on here because then you can also review it, later. So language barriers, of course, it can lead to miscommunication and misunderstandings. This happens a lot. And also when some countries are not speaking, English, then we have a problem. But, we can have someone to, translate, our, what we are talking and what we plan, etcetera, But it's, of course, really complicated. Local teams are not keeping themselves informed before the project starts. It's, happening again and again. And when we, jump to the project, then they are saying we didn't know, we don't understand, etcetera. So it can lead to, resistance, to new initiatives and also, of course, delays because you have to communicate again, you have to explain again, and everything what comes together with it.

The quality of understanding is different. Even if you explain something, it doesn't mean that the other person understood it in the same way. So, it can lead to inconsistent implementation and performance. Of course, different time zones, can lead to coordination issues and delays in communication. And then, different levels of fear of the unknown. This also happens really often that, the countries are really afraid of what is coming, and they are, like, over afraid of it. And it can lead to resistance to change and, they don't want to adopt new things, new practices, and innovation together with group. And, of course, openness versus resistance level. Inconsistent experiences across different regions can affect overall performance and morale. So a lot of, here, I have also, met in my, job, daily job when we do the projects.

So this is something, you can actually mitigate in order when you prepare the project, with that kind of, like, risks and the plans how you are going to mitigate this risk. Then regulatory, of course, like, GDPR, Often, it can happen that, in, in addition to, general laws, there are local laws. And, when you are not following them, of course, this can lead to the legal penalties and the loss of customer trust. You have always have to take into account that you, meet all the requirements. Then cybersecurity regulations, of course. Again, like, it can lead to data breaches and security incidents. And, in here, again, like industry specific regulations, for example, using cloud in the health care sector, it is not allowed in every country. So it can, end with fines and operational disruptions. And country specific regulations and contracts, the same thing.

So you have to be really careful and think through, what, you are doing and whether this meets all their, local requirements, but you have to do it already beforehand. Technological, one risk of course is we need to build a scalable and secure infrastructure, and we have to think about this already beforehand because it can lead to failures in scaling and the security threats. So we have to be really, really careful in here, and we have to review what we are doing once in a while. Again, global secured access, it can lead to unauthorized access and data breaches, performance optimization. Of course, in here, again, it needs to be reviewed whether the load balancer is needed or, can we choose some, tests in order to test, whether, we can handle, such amount of the data and people, who are using the systems. Do we do the data migration? Because, many countries are asking, we have our old data. We want to migrate this into the new, system.

We always have to think whether it's a no or, it's a yes, but what are the conditions when it's a yes. So, it can also, result in data loss and system downtime. And, it is also raising questions on legal regulations and data storage whether you can do it. Because, again, when it's a global, system, then you also have to think through what are you holding in the system. And latency, it can lead to poor performance and also technical skills, gaps. Again, people are different. You have to understand, but that, not every person is using the system in the same way. There can be errors, etcetera. So, there has to be a lot of trainings, in a regular basis, for the people.

A big part of, every global, project because again, countries are saying we already have our local process or they don't have anything in place. But, even if I don't have anything in place, then, the global process, is not the fit, for me. Then, we have to I hope you still can hear me because I had a disconnection in here. Budget is not allocated. It can also happen. Thank you, Laurie. It can also happen that the countries have not allocated the budget, and it's a, issue again, and you have to deal with that. It also take, takes time again, from your daily work. And it's important to align and agree on their road map early, because, again, like, this is my experience that countries discover that, oh, I am on the road map and it is starting on the next month, but I have no resources, then we have an issue for everyone.

Training quality. As I said, like, training is the really crucial part, on a global project because, poor training quality can result, in, bad, like, skill development and low adoption rates. They they will say that, I don't know how to use the system. The system is, hardly, handleable, etcetera. So they will again come with, general resistance. So everything that they can see, they will be resistance. Then standardized processes and agreements, this can lead to inconsistent processes and communication to confusion and inefficiencies. Again, a lot of resistance coming, from the global projects, daily. So, when we do this, continuous communication communication and we will review everything and we will, gather the feedback and lessons learned and we are polite, then, actually, it can be a success.

So, I have reached to the end of my slides, but, what I would, summarize is, that we can really achieve more together, with scale. But in order to do that, we have to really carefully balance the global and the local strategies. We, have to visualize, the end results. We have to know why we are doing this and where is the value created because we also have to sell it, to the countries. They have to understand why we are doing this, what are the benefits, coming, to us when we do it. Then we have to prepare well, and really crucial again is the communication because I would say it's all about the communication. And even if, we communicate, and communicate and communicate, they still say, I never heard about this. And it, will go again to the, like, box of, this general resistance.

And this is coming and coming and coming in from all of the corners, basically. And, where is the challenge? There is your tasks. I would say challenges are really good because we are then learning and we can identify, we can learn, we can adjust and improve. So, I am not, afraid of challenges or some, like, things that we are maybe not doing in the perfect way because we really can learn, we can improve. But, again, I'm coming back to the communication part because if you communicate this and you will, like, have the balance also, like, in your communication that you are not, saying to the countries that, you have to do it and, this is how we do it, etcetera. But you will negotiate things and you left the feeling that you are doing this together, not only, as a group, then, it is achievable, as a success. So I would tell, like, say that this is my experience, and these are my tips that I have, gathered, in here.