Podcast: From Excel chaos to connected data—One company’s digital manufacturing journey
Key takeaways
- Custom software should adapt to proven shop-floor processes—not force teams to change what already works.
- Digital workflows boost traceability from sales to QC, helping teams catch issues earlier and reduce costly rework.
- Successful tech adoption starts by involving floor workers early and building around their real-world feedback.
- Sometimes employees prefer their own tools—don’t assume; ask before investing in hardware they might not use.
In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Scott Achelpohl, managing editor at Smart Industry, and Dennis Scimeca, senior technology editor at IndustryWeek, speak with Bradly Walker, chief engineer and digital transformation leader at Texas Pride Trailers, about the company's journey from a fully analog operation to a digitally integrated manufacturing workflow. The conversation explores how the company transitioned from Excel-based systems to the custom-built Nexus platform, streamlining everything from lead generation to quality control. Bradly shares practical insights on change management, employee engagement, and lessons learned—like why listening to workers matters more than investing in unused tech.
Below is an edited excerpt from the podcast:
DS: So before we get started, Brad, you want to do a really quick intro to the audience?
BW: Yep. So, my name is Brad Walker. I am the chief engineer for Texas Pride. We manufacture a variety of trailers that everybody has seen driving down the road—from smaller lowboy-style, single-car hauler trailers all the way out to 45,000-pound-capacity flatbeds, paver specials, car haulers, roll-off trailers, dump trailers. We're in several different class-based markets in varying capacities, all the way from 7,000 lbs. up to 45,000 lbs.
I started there in 2018 just as a senior engineer, and I’ve held a few different roles: senior engineer, warranty and service manager. Now my title is chief engineer, but 90% of what I focus on now is all digital transformation efforts.
DS: Now, do you build all the components for these trailers, or do you get equipment from OEMs that come in for assembly?
BW: We do buy some parts and pieces—smaller things that just don’t behoove us to manufacture ourselves. If it's a part that's made out of raw steel, generally, we're going to try to manufacture that in-house. And from there, it's all raw steel welded together by American blue-collar workers that take pride in what they do. They build high-quality trailers for us. Yeah, we buy some pieces here and there, but primarily, we're building all of it in-house.
DS: How many different parts—if you could slap a round number on it—how many different parts do you manufacture?
BW: Oh, it's in the hundreds, probably. It kind of depends on how you classify parts, but if you're talking about granular parts—brackets, pieces that are welded on—it's in the hundreds for sure.
DS: And how many plants do you have, or how large is your campus? How many employees?
BW: We have one manufacturing plant in Madisonville, Texas. That’s kind of our corporate headquarters. We have inside sales lots scattered all across the country—from California all the way to North Carolina. But all the manufacturing is done in Madisonville. We're spread out across several acres. Obviously, we manufacture a large product, so we need space to store and keep inventory—and just to build them. We're spread across probably 30 to 35 acres in Madisonville.
DS: So, as Scott mentioned, this is a pen-and-paper, analog-to-digital story. What sort of data were you recording and sharing with an analog system?
BW: The short answer is: everything. It was everything—from accounting, lead generation—it was all done in Excel. That handoff was passed to production as a physical paper copy of an Excel spreadsheet. That was then turned into a manually typed sort of work order for production.
It was manually tracked through production where we were, you know, literally handwriting department status updates once a day at the end of the day in production. And then in warranty, if there was a claim they were trying to look into, it was rifling through paper copies of different records and quality control checklists, trying to troubleshoot something, trying to glean some information about what transpired to a certain unit. I mean, it was all done in Excel—completely manually.
DS: Now, was there a precipitating event or a light bulb moment that made you realize, “We can't stick with this analog system anymore”?
BW: It was a couple of different things. I wouldn’t say there was some acute incident where we said, "We have to change our ways. We have to move away from Excel." I was the warranty manager at the time. I wanted a more digitalized, easily accessible sort of quality control database that I could look back to. That was what opened my eyes and ears to the digital transformation world.
Around the same time, we were also talking about building a new facility. We wanted to make a big-scale push. We were having lots of success and wanted to capitalize on it.
While I wanted the quality control aspect of it, we also, as a company, realized that there was no way we could scale to what we wanted by doing things the way we were in Excel. We had to get things in a database. We had to automate some mundane processes if we wanted to scale with a manageable increase in overhead.
DS: Just to be clear, what’s the system we're talking about? The digital system you went to?
BW: We went with Nexus. We did some R&D on several different platforms out there. We landed on Nexus. And generally, the question is: do we use a more custom software solution like Nexus, which allows you to fully develop and build something for your needs, or do we go with something off the shelf that we can buy and use within a few weeks?
The problem we had was that we were so well-established—we had established processes that worked. They were tied into Excel, yes, but they worked. Going with a custom software solution like Nexus allowed us to build an app that matched what we were already doing in manufacturing. So, we made the system match the process—not upend the process to match some off-the-shelf solution.