Step 1: Setting the Stage, why even take the leap with a new approach?
Change is hard and can feel risky. Oftentimes a plant can be meeting its targets, even with significant downtime and inefficiencies. So why rock the boat?
As a famous business book said, the reason is that what got us here won't get us where we need to go next. Manufacturing is at a crossroads where we can’t get the talent we need to fill our key gaps today, never mind expanding our capacity. We’re looking to onshore more of our manufacturing to higher-cost geographies, but that means finding ways to drive down costs to stay competitive. Our suppliers are in the same boat we are, so we can’t wring more price reductions out of them. We need a new way forward and fast, and that means mastering change at a pace we’ve never had to deal with before.
New technologies are emerging that can help us make that leap forward. AI is moving beyond a buzzword to becoming a practical tool that can address some of our most persistent challenges. New ways to collect and analyze data can give us insights into our processes and assets we never had before. We can finally stop reacting to even and start driving them instead. But embracing these new ideas means embracing change and moving fast- something that’s hard to master in manufacturing, where consistency and risk management have often ruled.
That’s where you come in. The changes that have to happen in manufacturing might get dreamed up at the executive level and discussed in new management books. But they only become real when we can make them work on the factory floor: that loud, messy, unpredictable and even dangerous place where fancy ideas and shiny new tools meet their real test. Helping them pass that test and become part of a new way forward for manufacturing takes courage, discipline, leadership, and imagination- the kinds of traits we see so often in the plant managers, team leads, and quiet heroes who exist in every manufacturing facility. You’re the people who can make that change real if you have the tools and techniques to do it.
The need to change is clear, and the technologies that can make it happen are real. But the key ingredient to the change is you. So we will get started with step one: preparing the ground.
ob worked his way through the maze of round tables towards the door, cellphone in hand. Once in the hallway, with the music from the wedding band distant enough for him to hear himself talk, he answered.
The name on the phone was Carlo, the manager from the 3-11 shift. He could already guess the conversation he was about to have.
“Sorry to bother you Bob. How’s the wedding?” Carlo said once Bob answered
“Going fine, Carlo. What’s up?”
“We’ve got another failure on line three. This time it’s one of the feeder pumps.”
Bob felt his blood pressure rising. The feeder pumps were hard to access, and that meant trouble. “How long?”“We’ve got to get one of the lifts, so it will be a few hours at least. But we’ve got plenty of spares so that’s good.”
Carlo talked about the spares like it was a positive, but all Bob could think of was the grilling he’d gotten from finance at the last order for spare parts. They were over budget already, but the team kept buying more, afraid they’d be caught short if something broke, like they had a few months back.
“Did we have any warning?” He asked.
There was a pause. “It’s been a few weeks since we’d looked at that one,” Carlos said. “We’re behind on our routes since Marcy retired.”
Bob rubbed his temples. “Isn’t that one of the machines we’re covering with the new predictive monitoring system?”
A longer pause this time. “It is. I know what you’ll say. We’d gotten an alarm the other day saying there might be an issue, but the team decided to wait until they could do a manual review to see if anything was really wrong.”
“So they ignored the alarm?"
“They say they’re just too busy to tear down a machine just because a light went off on some new system, Bob. They wanted more proof.”
Bob sighed but decided now wasn’t the time for another fight. After that major failure in January had brought the line down for three days while they waited for a motor to be air freighted in, he’d freed up budget to buy a digital system that could monitor the machines every hour and give the team warning when a failure might be coming. But the team was refusing to accept the new solution. Tony, the Vibration Analyst who covered the plant, refused to trust the alerts that the system provided and insisted on keeping the route based approach they’d used for months. The technicians didn’t like having a system ‘tell them what to do’ and kept saying they were too busy just keeping the line running to mess with something new. After that major failure the team simply increased the volume of spares they kept on hand and doubled down on their preventive maintenance routines- which was driving up costs but hadn’t prevented three smaller but impactful failures in the weeks since January.
Bob finished the call with Carlo and made his way back into the reception hall, but his mind was still lost in the issues at the plant. He knew the new technology he’d invested in could make a big difference. He’s shown his team the references and even had the vendor do a workshop with them. But the rollout was met with resistance at every turn, and even with the system up and running his teams refused to use it the way he knew they could. He kept chiding them and running the report to show them the issues the system was raising but they refused to respond. He was spending more money on parts and maintenance than ever, but getting less for it.
He sat down with a scowl on his face, trying to figure out what had gone so wrong.
CenterMediumAccessibilityDelete
What did go wrong? We’ve all been there: seeing a new process or new technology that we knew could have a big impact on the business, only to see it fall short for all the wrong reasons. Adoption goes too slow. Old habits don’t change. The teams stay too busy ‘firefighting’ to learn the new systems. The very issues that the new solution could address become the reasons it never gets adopted.
But sometimes it can be different. The change does happen. Productivity goes up. Stress goes down. Weddings don’t get missed and the plant runs better than ever. What makes the difference between success and failure?
That’s what we’ll explore in this blog series. Based on our experiences across literally hundreds of rollouts of our machine health solution across different industries, geographies and company sizes, we’ve seen the patterns that can lead to shining success or frustrating failure. We’ve identified the fundamental challenges and tactics that can help ensure success for any technology rollout or new process change, and we’ll share them with you to help you make the kinds of impacts we know you want to have on your team and your business.
Be sure to check out all the Lead the Change posts!
Comments
-
What I refer to as "readying the environment"!
1
