3 keys to successfully scaling digital transformation initiatives
Successfully implementing AI or advanced automation in an advanced manufacturing facility isn’t rocket science (yes, even if you’re in an aerospace plant making satellites and launch vehicles). Successful projects tend to have three key features:
- They center on the people who will be using the technology.
- Companies set broader key performance indicators for success than simply cutting costs.
- Program leaders chose the right projects that can solve multiple problems across the organization.
Tessa Myers, Rockwell Automation’s senior vice president of Intelligent Devices, shared those insights in a keynote address at this year’s Automation Fair in Chicago. Myers said she’s studied results from Rockwell Automation’s surveys and talked to many of the company’s clients who have successfully implemented new systems.
“Disruption and uncertainty are really the new normal,” Myers said. “Uncertainty, volatility and change are really the challenges that all of us as leaders in our companies and teams face…. And, it feels like the stakes are really high. That’s often because they are higher today than what they’ve been in the past.”
Successful strategy starts with people
‘If people aren’t at the center of your strategy, you will fail!’ A simple metric, but what does it really mean to put people first?
“First, [successful leaders] start with clarity,” Myers said. “They outline clearly the business outcomes that they want to achieve, whether increasing the ability to need customer demand, creating agility and resiliency in their businesses, reducing costs or becoming more productive. They start with the end in mind.”
Clear leadership pulls people in because they can see and support exactly what the company is trying to achieve with the technological implementation. Rather than dozens of people pursuing individual departmental goals, people-centric leaders make the big-picture goal apparent from the start.
The second part of people-centric transformation is to “lead with transparency,” Myers said. Leaders “share not only the clear objectives and goals for the organization, but they get people involved in the process. They ask, why are we struggling with this today? Why are we having these challenges? What ideas do you have to engage? So, transparency shows there's work we need to do. And being transparent about the objectives.”
The third key to involving people is empowerment—giving teams the tools and training they need to drive change, she added.
“Artificial intelligence and digital tools can play a role an important role in enabling and empowering your teams and getting people engaged on how they’ll use those and how they can make an impact,” Myers added.
Case Study: Perth County Ingredients
The Canadian food manufacturer wanted to improve maintenance operations, but rather than starting with what tools were available, leaders started with studying how their employees were doing maintenance.
“They outfitted them with tablets,” Myers said. She added that the mobile devices mean “everyone was empowered with the information they needed in their hands at the right time to perform their work.”
Reactive maintenance fell by more than 50%, and after-hours calls also fell by half. Effectively, the work became more predictable, less stressful and more strategic because the company engaged its people to identify critical issues.
Volatility and disruption should motivate action
Quick question: Which is easier, finding a great technology to implement in your operations or convincing your boss (or board of directors) to fund the associated spending? Many great projects fail to even get started because change advocates can’t build a business case for management.
Myers said that’s because manufacturers have often used far too narrow of a lens to evaluate opportunities, and that’s cost.
“Cost is a very tangible item. You could measure it,” Myers said. But, she added, there’s a risk in being too lean, primarily in missing growth opportunities and the ability to serve existing customers in difficult times. Companies should reduce the focus on cost cutting and think about “the ability for you to be agile in your operations to respond to volatility and the external market… Your ability to have availability of your operations and be able to mitigate downtime or disruption that might occur… Ultimately, your resiliency to operate as an organization.”
Companies that embrace those new economic realities—being able to get the basic job done in an increasingly chaotic world—will find new ways to justify spending. And, that agility will put them at a significant competitive advantage to their peers, she added.
“Thinking boldly and broadly about the value that you can create and getting to scale across your operations, those are driving real results for other companies,” Myers said. “They’re getting faster recovery when they have supply chain issues, seeing higher first-pass yield and quality from their operations. They’re reducing… unplanned downtime…. They’re not just making progress towards their goal, their driving performance in their organizations.”
‘Don’t start small. Start smart!’
A major reason so many projects fail to achieve goals as they scale up is that they’re solving small problems. To produce big results, companies should pick projects carefully. Rather than dipping toes into new technologies to get comfortable, Myers urged companies to find their biggest shared pain points and focus efforts there.
Case Study: Frozen Food Company
The frozen French fry producer wanted to drive standardization and optimization across multiple plants without building new lines or adding another facility. To boost throughput, they turned to predictive modeling technologies to manage incoming spuds (raw materials).
“They monitored environmental conditions in real time and adjusted the cooking process in order to make sure that they got a perfect product every time, and they could increase the throughput of their plant,” Myers said.
She called it a great encapsulation of her philosophy: The project started with getting the right people involved. Then it evolved to take economic realities like uptime into account instead of only focusing on costs. And finally, it scaled successfully because it was solving a common, multi-factor problem within the organization.
“They’re driving performance across their organizations” Myers said. “All of our businesses are becoming more complex, more connected and more competitive. That challenges us to think smarter about how we lead our teams and our organizations to achieve the results that we want them to achieve.”
“Identify horizontal applications that can scale across your business,” Myers advised. “When you can impact a scalable use case across plants and equipment, it can have a wide-ranging impact on your operations.”
Some likely areas to explore:
- Quality: “Advanced sensors and AI vision can help you automate more of the quality inspection process.”
- Material handling: “Moving materials from a production line to another production line or back into either the warehouse or a dock is a great, scalable application that can move across plants and operations.”
- In line-process optimization: “Sensors and AI [can] monitor the variables and the parameters within a process and make real-time adjustments to increase the yield or quality.”
She suggested a thought exercise to identify promising systems that address multiple problems: “Think about if we were to run just one shift in this plan in an autonomous way. What would it really require… in our planning and our scheduling, our material availability? How it will perform maintenance for or after that shift? It really gets a team thinking about what it’s going to take to achieve that, and I think you’ll see that there are great ideas that come out from the organization.”
About the Author
Robert Schoenberger
Engineering Design and Automation Group
Robert Schoenberger is vice president of content strategy for the Engineering Design and Automation group of EndeavorB2B.