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?

So don't start with machine learning for predictive maintenance. That's very hard. Nobody has all the time series data to do it. It's a very difficult thing that costs millions of dollars. Instead, start with standardized processes and software changes that help everyone collaborate together. Scrap reporting comes to mind because in and of itself, it's kind of generally a good place to start, something everyone can get their hands around and easily look at. OK, here was our process before, here it is now, and here are the measurable benefits. And frankly, that's something even your CFO will get behind, and it's easy to find out and put your finger on why it was successful.

SI: Josh, here's a follow up to that. Based on the idea of “smaller projects,” could a company look for manual processes in smaller teams and projects that can be measured quickly and fully and counted as early successes? Everybody wants to have an early victory, obviously. It builds up some confidence within an organization. Would you say that that's true?

JC: Yeah, 100%. That's true. And sometimes it doesn't even involve technology. Again, the most important thing is getting the culture right, getting the trust within those different stakeholders, and making them work together.

SI: Where can technology be applied for obvious gains? Places like reducing data silos and spreadsheet utilizations, sharing and collaboration, easing reporting and metrics.

JC: Well, I don't want to look like a hammer looking for a nail, which I am, because I'm a software guy. But I would say almost everywhere. I think that with the significant change in the ability and availability to have tribal knowledge on the shop floor, it makes it absolutely necessary to democratize that knowledge through systems and through technology. Simple technology. That's a fact. And it's almost ubiquitous in the industry. If you talk to anybody, their turnover rates are just not what they used to be. You don't have 30-year operators. You don’t see it anymore. So again, you start small, you keep culture and system optimization top of mind, you drive the ownership to everyone in the company, and it will be extremely obvious where to apply the first changes. Because people will tell you. I do think isolating one concern or even one department is important to learn the principles and methods that are going to drive the rest of the company to a data-driven, simplified approach. It always has to be simple.

I think the first areas in manufacturing are, what I would refer to as, lighting up the data, which means just start to have digital representations on your shop floor. On the shop floor and in the back office as well. The plant manager should be able to see how things are going at all times. People generally want to see what the score is. What's my batting average? How's my work cell doing? That generally helps out culture as well. And this could be as simple as taking an hour-by-hour board, there's white boards all over the world that do that, that everyone can see to isolate the problems with speed or quality and act accordingly. And on the other end of it, I think we need to do a bunch of this stuff. A successful digital transformation is marked by three things. It's simplicity, the job should get easier; it's interoperability, your departments and your systems should feed one another; and visibility for the entire value stream.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.