Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1463464
28 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2022 Kottke: We hired someone in business intel- ligence (BI) and that's all he does is create reports that highlight where the problems are and predict where they are likely to be in the future. It has been so worthwhile, espe- cially when he keeps pointing out ways to save costs and I realize I had no idea. If you can cut 100 to 200 line items out a week, you're talk- ing about a buyer FTE, a receiving clerk FTE, not to mention the part going through receiv- ing inspection, and getting put into the stock- room. If you replace those 35 times with three, they put 500 parts in the stockroom one time, instead of 35, or three times, so you save labor across the whole process, and if you don't have somebody who's analyzing the data and looking at it, you miss that kind of stuff. Matties: e data is there, you just have to extract and utilize it. Kottke: In the movie "Flight of the Phoenix," a plane crashes in the desert. One of my favorite scenes is when the guy explains that if you walked to the nearest town 10 or 15 miles away and you're off by two degrees you would walk right past the town and never see it, even though it's just two degrees. I com- pare that to running the BI soware; you find these glaring things that you would've just walked by and never saw. It's shocking. Matties: What was the most surprising point in this journey for you? Kottke: e material side is just shocking. At any one time, Rocket has over 100 active cus- tomers. e challenge with having 100-plus active customers is 100-plus different assem- bly-level part numbers, all the bonds to sup- port them, and all the different part num- bers. When you look at the purchase history, you start to see so many parts you could buy in larger quantities. As you track the movement of the item through the stockroom, and you look at the efficiencies of moving a part 500 at a time through the stockroom, you see just how much money and time was wasted with labels, bags, etc. I know it sounds silly, but you will notice that there's less garbage in the stockroom because you're receiving a 500-piece reel and dropping it in place, instead of 20 little bags. I think the shocking thing is just how much you can nickel and dime yourself to death with little stuff that you don't see because it's just so small. Matties: You don't see it because there's no one extracting the data to put it in front of you. Not every- body is equipped with a DIY digital factory. What made you special and why were you able to do it? Kottke: When you start to look for the root cause of a problem and you don't have the data, it takes you so much more time and you can come to the wrong hypothesis, the wrong root cause. Once you start collecting the data, then you become obsessive, thinking, "I could collect this data, and I could collect that data, and I could pull this information." e more you start looking at it, the more addicted you become. Matties: You don't have to be a soware genius, right? You just make a choice and then find the people to implement the vision. Kottke: Yes. Luckily, I wasn't a soware genius, originally I thought it was going to be some- thing relatively simple, but the Voyager team now consists of seven people. Everyone gives