Podcast: How small wins drive digital transformation growth at your plant
Josh Cranfill is the general manager of Quickbase’s manufacturing business. With a decade of experience in the manufacturing industry, Josh works to deliver solutions for complex manufacturing challenges at the convergence of IIoT, enterprise integration, low-code/no-code tools, and advanced analytics. Every day, he talks to manufacturers that are looking to adopt new technologies to begin digital transformations but are up against the pressures of staying competitive, on time, and on budget and they need to keep employees productive and safe. Josh recently spoke with Smart Industry managing editor Scott Achelpohl on how to begin your digital transformation journey by picking small, achievable, and measurable projects to demonstrate success and gain company buy in.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
SI: We have some questions for Josh to get our discussion going today, and we're hoping he'll give us some valuable tips on digital transformation despite the complexities. So, here's our first one. Josh, how can you identify a smaller project to start with?
JC: I think this might be a surprising answer, but I think first I'll say it's generally not about the X's and O's. I've been part of major global, big digital transformations, and I think every single one of them started in the way that I want to talk about. So, the first, the biggest piece, is actually building a culture for innovation and problem solving. It’s about culture, culture, culture, and driving trust in your organization. When I say culture, it's about driving ownership to all levels of a company. That's Kaizen culture that we've always heard about.
But to answer the question more directly, go to the front lines, get rid of all the distractions, get everyone in the same room, and do a process mapping session. If all stakeholders agree on identifying a problem and you don't move on to solutioning until that's done, which, by the way, is a huge issue when you start to get into digital transformation. Everybody wants to solution first and then kind of figure out everything else afterwards. You have a better chance of getting it right if you focus on the problem and focus on the culture first. So generally, your frontline operators are going to have a way different opinion than your indirect labor force and, frankly, the other people that are responsible for making software changes. There is, in my experience, a tragic disconnect here in a lot of companies. The key is getting them to work together. Frankly, identify the problem and design a solution together, together, together. The solution is the easy part if you can actually do the first two steps.
Another thing to think about is just making sure you have something finite. These cultural and philosophical changes, they're not easy. So you almost have to pick something small. And in fact, every good digital transformation I've ever been a part of, they picked something small and did it really well before they moved on. So, let's say you identify a part of the value stream which serves as a bottleneck in the process. It could be anything. It could be paint. It could be welding. Whatever else. Just take that one little area, map it out, figure out where the problem is, and design a solution. The first mistake is usually spot on right there. No changes should be made in a vacuum. Not all local optimizations, and there's a whole other discussion on local optimizations versus system optimizations, but not all of those local optimizations serve as a system optimization, but really, they should. You have to ultimately look at all of those changes as global optimizations. How do they affect the company as a whole, the value stream as a whole, and how are they going to better the effort as a whole?