8:57 AM CIO Karl Wachs?s Office
Call Him Confident. or Crazy.

Wachs speaks rather softly. His demeanor echoes his business-casual dress. His most demonstrable emotion is puzzlement?his face goes blank in an instant, and he volleys your questions back as terse rhetoricals. It is not rudeness so much as it is incomprehension. For example, Celanese recently snapped up a $150 million emulsions company, Clariant, that now must be slipped into the OneSAP strategy. Wachs is asked if that adds risk to OneSAP. Baffled and agitated he shoots back, "What are you going to do? What? That’s normality."

When Celanese AG demerged from Hoechst AG in late 1999, the company launched a slew of integration initiatives known internally as One Celanese. Hiring a global CIO was part of the effort. Celanese found Wachs at the Mount Olive, N.J., wing of chemicals giant BASF, where he was director of systems integration. Prior to BASF, Wachs worked with the North Jersey Media Group, managing IT for the company that publishes The Record of Bergen County, N.J.

Wachs started at Celanese in 2001 with no direct reports and one directive: Cut costs.

First, he hired Paul Peters, someone who embraced this cause. "We saw $30 million on the table if we could consolidate IT," says Peters, the project manager for OneSAP. "We took information from 30 other chemical companies. Everyone was moving toward consolidation."

SAP was a fat target. Wachs paid consultants to look at his options. They came up with three: Do nothing; consolidate by division, with some governance; or roll up into a single instance of SAP. Each was riskier and more expensive than the last, but each also carried exponentially greater benefits. Wachs spent the better part of the next year building a business case for OneSAP.

Wachs’s soft-spoken exterior belies what his team says about him. "He is a change agent," Peters says. "A spark."

"He doesn’t mind being the only one on the other side of arguments," says Tony Perroni, the lead BearingPoint (formerly KPMG) consultant on the OneSAP project.

"Karl’s fearless," Peters adds. "He likes?OK, he loves?change and friction."

This explains how Wachs convinced Celanese’s rabidly independent business units, despite strong resistance early, that OneSAP was tenable. He simply didn’t care that he would, as Peters put it, "get shot down every time he told them we were doing it."

"They saw this would cost money, and they saw very few benefits," Wachs recalls of the early meetings with business unit IT leaders. "They were trained to be independent. When we got them to understand they weren’t perfect and they told their bosses that this could be a good thing, that was a major milestone."