Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1265351
44 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2020 had some processes deployed across multiple plants, the manner in which we designed them was, largely, not globally extensible. They hon- estly lacked the ability to truly scale out to the broader enterprise. The founding COO, whose footsteps I fol- lowed, tasked me with the re-footprinting of our manufacturing supply chain. That involved critically assessing where we were with man- ufacturing. Did we need to be there, and if we needed to be there, were we doing the right things in that particu- lar plant from a product and service perspective? Equally, we weren't presently manufactur- ing where we probably needed to be for a vari- ety of reasons. I gath- ered a group of program managers, engineers, and practitioners to assess the current lay of the land, and we spent about two and a half years re-footprinting the supply chain. When the dust settled, we had transitioned from 26 plants across all regions to a total of 20 plants; of those 20, six were built as greenfields in that 2.5–year timeframe. You can imagine an incredible amount of change transpiring within our manufactur- ing entity, and as we began to stand up the new manufacturing plants—which, in many instances, were some of our largest plants in the company—we had to decide what systems we were going to deploy. How were we going to create a more uniformed, standardized, capable, and contemporary global footprint to leverage our people, process, and technol- ogy assets? We couldn't continue to sanction all the local variations that existed across our plants for how work was getting done across what were generally very similar processes. That turned into the formulation of what has become a key market message for our com- pany as we work with customers. We essen- tially "connected our enterprise" digitally in a far more contemporary and globally scaled uniform fashion. We did all of that internally, and we'll talk more later about the business results it created for us from a safety, quality, service, and productivity perspective. As we were going through this, we found that it was very easy to focus on the techno- logical aspects of what we were contemplat- ing. Even the process definition and guidance aspects came naturally to a company that's founded on engineer- ing and design princi- ples. As we deployed these new capabili- ties, we found that the human and change management ingredi- ents became front and center, so we needed to shift our priorities. There were some slips, trips, and falls along the way, but we figured it out after enough of them to recognize we had to lean a lot harder into the people element of our digital transfor- mation work. We started spending a lot more time talk- ing across our enterprise about why we were doing what we were doing, not just the what and the how. There was a real end in mind that was designed expressly to create a far more competent, capable, and content manu- facturing associate. It was easy for me to want to avail all of that for our associates because I was an associate way back and I knew what it was like to deal with less than capable or com- plete information or have to migrate during the day from one to three to five different systems to get essentially the same type of work done. Thankfully, the things we wanted to do reso- nated well, and we started spending more time communicating the whys and wherefores, and the buy-in, support, and anxiety—in a good Bob Murphy