Guillermo Romo is Director of Global IT for Logistics Applications at Grupo Bimbo. With an MBA and over a decade of experience at the intersection of technology and supply chain, he’s played a key role in modernizing logistics systems across the company’s global footprint. His approach combines technical depth with hands-on operational insight.
Through this article, Romo highlights how logistics has evolved from a neglected, paper-based function into a core global supply chain performance driver, powered by technology, standardization and strategic IT leadership.
Entering Logistics Through IT—and Evolving with Global Scale
When I joined the Baking Industry in 2011, Logistics was an area that lagged behind others in terms of the use of technology, as it was commonly seen as just a “loading floor, a dock and a truck”. At times, it wasn´t even considered an area of the company itself but rather “the backyard of the manufacturing plant”. Most capital investment and people´s attention were instead put on manufacturing lines or strengthening the goto-market strategies. Logistic operations would commonly rely solely on paper-based activities and physical effort.
In the past decade, I have been lucky enough to see Logistics evolve from being a heavy cost center into a productivity hub enabled by technology. Logistics is the backbone of the supply chain, where service must be delivered on time and at the correct cost. It has been fascinating to see how different business models can drive completely different operating flows in a logistics network and how technology nowadays plays a key role in supporting those flows, no matter how complex or elaborate.
As companies grow bigger, being able to implement technology in multiple geographies is a considerable challenge, mainly linked to three factors. One is scalability; it is not easy to replicate the same solution everywhere, not to mention having the resources to do so (time, money, talent). Another obvious one is change management because culture, people´s habits and different levels of training vary significantly from place to place. And also, the relevance of building a solid business case; this means costs, ROI and expected savings differ a lot between countries, making it hard to identify value in all initiatives.
Bridging Global Standards with Technical Reality on the Ground
Deploying technology globally requires not only a strong team with proven soft skills and a profound technical acumen. However, it also demands a clear global template that would prevent you from reinventing the wheel every time you deploy, and a well-defined process to stick to. When we refer to a global template, this means a standard process enabled by standard IT functionality. It is critical to have this framework well-defined for your team to guide the implementation successfully and set the guardrails for the business to run its core processes. This template should rely on native functionality as much as possible and must account for about 80 percent of your business scenarios.
On the other hand, you cannot avoid localizations, as there are always particular legal/fiscal requirements in each geography. These must be considered and account for about 20 percent of your scenarios. Each localization needs to be understood and identified by the entire business.
“Understanding the nervous system of a company will open the door to a deeper root cause analysis, will give access to a whole new spectrum of viable solutions enabled by technology and provide the possibility to respond to future challenges in a more proactive and meaningful way”
It is always challenging to tell the local teams that their specific process/business flow will not be customized. The implementation team must be capable of explaining how their requirements will be covered with standard functionality and how their day-to-day work could be impacted. In those cases, very strong documentation and functional training must follow.
