Mini-sode 9: Mike Bradford’s Perspective on Change Management

Gene: It seems to me that you’re in the tech industry of the biggest issues is change management. Now, when it comes to the IT Industry, there always seems to be certain people or certain teams that are unwilling to change.

Gene: What are your thoughts for people who think that they don’t need it, or that their staff knows what they’re doing or any other number of excuses?

Gene: How exactly do you fight back this concept of “tribal knowledge” versus “best practices”?

Mike: We had a customer, a TNM customer, -a transportation mobility customer- and they had a plant where they were rolling out our solution. And. One of the things does, is it walks the operator through what they have to do, and enforces your business process- according to how you’ve defined it- including what components to use, what steps to go through, and that sort of thing.

Mike: They rolled it out, and one of their supervisors said, “this system’s wrong! It’s making me do this, isn’t right!” That supervisor, because of his tribal knowledge that he’d been doing the process for 10 years, He didn’t think he needed to pay any attention and he had been doing things wrong for several months and it had never been caught until much later in the process because he just did things the way he always did them.

Mike: By enforcing the engineering change systematically, you know that it’s going to be done right; by enforcing data collection systematically, you know operator’s going to be using the right components. So, it gives you a level of control, it gives you a level of accountability, and it really does improve efficiency on the shop floor; because now, you know whether Frank does it, Sue does it, John does it, Fred does it, no matter who does it, they’re doing it in the same way and you can see the results per individual if you’re regional, environment enables or allows that.

Mike: But that ability to provide visibility to who’s doing what? What’s happening? What are the exceptions? What are the problems? That ability to direct the operator to what the right things are to do and that ability to build in POKA-YOKEs and Error Proofing into the system systematically so that they can’t be skipped or overridden by the employee.

Mike: All of those things bring value to the manufacturer with better products, faster and more efficient production and better visibility.

Mike: I mentioned I was a management consultant. So, I did a lot of implementations and that sort of thing. And change management having done a lot of it for me becomes education. Why are we doing this? How does this help you, Mr. Operator, to do your job more effectively and efficiently and maybe make your job easier?

Mike: So, a lot of change management is communication, execution and obviously having senior management support, not just they say it’s okay, but support and that they’re involved and willing to step out and say, we do need to do this and why?

Gene: Change management seems so easy on paper, but when it comes to the implementation of it, the inability and the unwillingness to change is so widespread that it just seems impossible.

Gene: We work primarily in the automotive industry and one of the biggest issues when it comes to manufacturing and scheduling software is companies- no matter how big or how small refuse to get rid of the spreadsheets.

Gene: And I can’t help, but ask, “why are you still on the spreadsheets? It’s 2024, we have AIs that can do this stuff now. You don’t have to use them anymore!

Gene: Just upgrade and get rid of these things!

Mike: You know, that’s one of the definitions I give for clients who don’t want to implement “M.E.S.”

Gene: definitions?

Mike: “More Excel Spreadsheets”.

Gene: I walked right into that one.