Digital transformation is accelerating amid the pandemic and manufacturers are increasingly deploying digital tools to remain competitive. Part one explored three habits of transformational leaders. Here are four more ways top project leaders can contribute to ongoing digital success.
Habit #4: Enable transparency, drive decisions with data.
Having real-time visibility into an operation, such as equipment status and how time is being spent, can help organizations produce data-driven insights to maximize investment in digital, lower costs, adjust processes and reduce downtime.
- Gain a better understanding and more granular data on how mills operate
- Process data quickly, reducing time to manually transfer data from systems and process it
- Implement a digital thread that connected once-siloed sources of data and analytics across the operations
Patricia LeRoux, Norbord’s director of procurement and supply chain explained, “We measure our improvement through increased productivity and OEE and communicate these successes through dashboards and key performance indicators. We’ve also rolled out mobile applications that deliver real-time information about production system status to mill-level employees.” With a successful pilot complete, Norbord plans to expand this digital transformation initiative to the company’s other mills.
Habit #5: Align new offers with customer needs.
Successful leaders of digital transformation projects leverage new digital and communication technologies to re-invent the value proposition offered to their customers. Gencor Industries, which builds equipment primarily for the hot-mix asphalt industry, incorporated cloud-connected sensors for real-time monitoring of equipment health, cloud-based applications for monitoring key performance metrics, and scalable plant dashboards that consolidate performance metrics into its equipment and engineered systems to help users manage operations effectively across plants.
Habit #6: Prioritize pilots that will scale quickly.
Investing extensive time and effort into proving use cases makes ROI difficult to quantify and scaling pilots across an organization can be difficult. Successful project leaders must take a scalable approach to pilot projects to ensure they can be easily replicated across an organization.
Caterpillar, the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, selected the top 10 use cases, out of 36 potentials ones, to drive initial investment based on business benefit and ROI. Brent Ruth, who is responsible for Digital Operations & ERP Strategy for Advanced Component Manufacturing at Caterpillar, described their process:
“To generate and prioritize our DX use cases, we invest several weeks in visiting our plants to assess their readiness for DX. We plumb their ERPs and deep dive their master data. We then look at the actual conduct of their business both in the back office and on the shop floor. Once we have a good understanding of the nature and conduct of their business, we then present our findings back to the facility and its leadership team and then prioritize various DX initiatives aligned to their business needs and goals. We find that this time spent in and with the plants is definitely worth the investment and helps uncover true value that can be expressed in dollars and cents.”
By prioritizing pilots that deliver business value and can be scaled easily, organizations can avoid “pilot purgatory” and effectively execute digital successful digital initiatives.
Habit #7: Partner carefully, learn from others.
By partnering with key organizations, project leaders can learn from others and maximize their digital success. For example, Georgia Pacific creates alliances with other similarly sized, non-competitive companies which allows them to share experiments and knowledge without being duplicative. According to Mike Carroll, senior vice president of innovation, “This enables us and our alliance partners to move faster, prove faster and develop faster with an increased probability of success.”
All these seven habits of transformational leaders have proven to contribute to digital success. By gaining support from top leaders, having a humble and curious mindset, eliminating data silos, using data to drive decisions, and developing strategic partnerships, digital transformation project leaders can take their initiatives from proof-of-concept to a successful initiative driving ROI for the organization and improving operations for employees.
Keith Higgins is Vice President of Digital Transformation at Rockwell Automation. He previously served as Vice President at FogHorn and CMO at RiskVision until its acquisition in 2017. Higgins was also an executive at Symphony Teleca Corporation, an IoT and connected services company, where he played an integral role in the doubling the company’s revenue leading to a nearly $1 billion acquisition by Harman.