“What are the key elements required to successfully manage a digital journey?” Patrick Gaughan at Axiom shares insightful perspectives on applying a digital lean approach. He emphasizes the importance of corporate sponsorship, empowering evangelists within the organization, and developing a solid core strategy. Gaughan also highlights the significance of engaging experts, internally or externally, to set the course strategy right from the start. Let’s explore these crucial elements to pave the way for a successful digital lean transformation! This discussion was facilitated by Chris Luecke, Host of Manufacturing Happy Hour, as he sat down with Patrick Gaughan, Partner, Axiom Manufacturing Systems onsite at CESMII’s annual member meeting hosted at SME’s SOUTHTEC Smart Manufacturing Experience in Greenville, SC.
Transcript:
Well, since you are out there in the field, I do want to get some insights from you around what it takes to transform digitally as well. My first question is, what are the key elements required to successfully manage a digital journey? Yeah, and I think that’s really important, and I hope your folks pay really close attention to this. And it maybe backs into the question from a different perspective than maybe what you’ll hear from a lot of other folks. The single most important thing that you need to have to be able to be successful is you’ve got to have sponsorship at the corporate level, the C-suites level. Somebody has to believe that this is the direction the company needs to go. As you know, smart manufacturing is very much strategic.
So we have to be able to have a good core strategy to do that. And in order to do that, you have to have support at the top. Someone has to clear the roadblocks out for the folks underneath. The very next step below that then, Chris, is you have to find an evangelist within the organization. Someone or some group of people that you can empower to say, I understand that maybe this isn’t what you do today, but we’re going to upskill you to learn how to do these things. And me as a C-suite guy, I’m going to empower you to be able to go do that work and allow that to happen. Once you have those two pieces of the organizational component, I’ve got the education, the motivation, and the support,
Now what we have to do is we have to be able to put pieces in place to set the core strategy. And this is where some folks go wrong. They don’t take the time to either look internally or to study or to find someone else who actually knows what to do, engage them, bring them in, develop that core strategy so that you know that you’re not going to have false starts and you’re not going to have missteps along the way and frustrate the organization. Once you lock in on a strategy, you’ll be able to get there successfully. And that’s part of what Axiom does. We help people with all the experience that we have to be able to help set that core strategy to know that you’re doing the right things right from the start.
Process Engineering Innovator with 34 years of Product, Process, and Plant design experience. Twenty-five years of hands-on LEAN Six Sigma Experience. Two decades of Engineering and Quality System Management. Personal engineering philosophy: optimization is helpful, but innovation changes the world; it’s a choice!