Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1267313
JULY 2020 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 19 a measurable way, they feel pretty good about it. They're more capable. They're more confi- dent in their jobs and roles. There's a tangi- ble difference between the kind of work they used to do that might have been mundane and repetitive, if not error-prone, to predictable, confident, and more contemporarily enabled from a technology standpoint. That expands their capability, which expands the company's performance. As a company, our mission is to espouse those very same principles with our customers. Matties: It sounds like what you transformed into is a company that's in an endless pursuit of process improvement rather than reaction- ary process engineering. When you look at the endless pursuit of process improvement or continuous improvement, what drives the engineering? Is it market-driven in terms of markets that you pursue, or how do you set your technology roadmap for your process? Murphy: It is increasingly an outside-in driven roadmap, meaning we want our customers and their needs to drive what we should do inter- nally to satisfy those new outcomes for which they're searching. For example, if our histori- cal lead-time expectation for a given product or service is suddenly met with what used to be affection but is now disdain, something has to change. The increasingly short lead times for information, products, and services that we all enjoy as private consumers has established a new bar for what's expected by all industrial customers. That filters down to our supply chain, so as we embark on what we have to do differently from a performance standpoint, our customers demand something to be done in three hours that used to be done in three days. The next question is, "How are we going to do that?" That sets in place the people, process, and technology solutions that should be brought to bear to achieve that order of magnitude improvement. It ranges from something as sig- nificant as that to the kaizen of "a little better every day in every facet of what we do" type of improvement activities. What's different now is how that happens across our company, and many of our customers are not deploying resources toward continuous improvement on hunches or saying, "I have this gut feeling that we're not doing well enough in this given process capability." We let the data speak for itself, and we respond to that with whatever corrections, changes, revolutions, or evolutions we need to make in the process to respond to it. There's a respect for that informa- tion because we gather it similarly in every plant across the globe. Our operators engage with our equipment in an entirely similar construct now. They use a single pane of glass to conduct what- ever affairs they're doing from a production, quality, and traceability perspective. We leverage that technology to the benefit of the users, and for us, there's no more impor- tant user than our manufacturing associate. It's important that they have the right infor- mation, make the right calls, and add value versus conducting mundane transactions that, in the past, weren't adding a lot to our com- pany or customers. Our focus on continuous improvement really hasn't changed in terms of its criticality to us, but how we do it, and what it has enabled in the way of markedly better outcomes has indeed changed. Matties: When you do continuous improve- ment, you have to look to your suppliers to buy in as well so that they're delivering your raw materials when you need it and commu- nicating with your systems in the right way. What was the challenge there? Murphy: Supply chain is required to improve. You can't just look for step-function improve- ments in performance within the four walls of your manufacturing plants, whether there are 20 or 200. You have to look at the entirety of the supply chain, including the upfront sourc- ing, forecasting, and planning for that mate- rial, as well as the backend logistics and opti- mization of that network of getting products through distribution and to customers. We quickly began to take our continuous improve- ment and extend it beyond the four walls of our plant into that broader supply chain. We