What digital transformation can learn from the automotive industry
We humans are naturally optimistic and hopeful regarding change. We often hope for the extremely positive outcome of a new initiative, like weight loss when starting a workout program, race times, or a championship for our team at the start of a season because of a new coach or player.
The same can be said in the corporate world. We want to tear down a legacy process, workflow, or product to fix every possible issue encountered, to deliver a more efficient and effective system. Yes, this will require disruption, but what changes do not?
While I don’t disagree with this sentiment, I think we can call back on an industrial segment that has taught us invaluable lessons in implementing and maintaining change: automotive manufacturing. Automotive factories today seldom resemble the factories of the 1970s, and why should they?
The product requirements have changed substantially despite the fundamental product, transportation, remaining the same. Think of evolving requirements like safety measures, luxury features, and fuel efficiency requirements. In this regard, most industries can empathize: customer requirements evolve over time, requiring more sophisticated products to satisfy the market. However, what remains constant is the demand for quality.
We, the consumers, demand consistent, reliable performance in every product or service we utilize regardless of frequency. A car that rarely works is a lemon, but do we have a comparable term for digital products and processes?
Herein lies an interesting thought: What can manufacturing teach us about digital transformation? If this doesn’t feel like a direct comparison, I get it and ask that you hear me out. The mentality of major automotive manufacturers in the 1970s was to address quality concerns and new products with sweeping changes: re-engineering a manufacturing line, a completely new product, or entirely new factories to address the shortcomings of legacy facilities. This is time and capital intensive.
During this time, a disruptive approach was, and remains, in use by a company from Japan: Toyota. Their approach to addressing quality early and often through continuous improvement is the cornerstone of the Toyota Production System. This mindset is pervasive throughout every division at the company, not just the factory floor: deliver measurable, incremental, and sustainable improvement day over day, year over year.
Whereas Toyota’s counterparts might take years to deliver sweeping improvements, the company from Japan (and many of its Japanese brethren) made smaller, more rapid improvements in substantially less time. In today’s terminology, we might be so brave as to call them “Agile.” Others have rebranded this as lean manufacturing while incorporating statistical controls pioneered by Motorola, Six Sigma. Regardless of what we call it, this mindset to identify small changes is something we often lack as digital change agents.
And I ask: “Why? Why do we have to build a new factory to usher in change? Why can’t digital change come in increments that complement existing workflows?” After all, rearranging digital workflows and assets is generally a lower lift when compared to the herculean efforts of retooling a factory floor. Furthermore, we might examine the willingness of the end user to accept these changes.
One might begrudgingly learn and use a new system to accomplish their day job, but will that system succeed with a user starting with such resentment? What if our focus were not to reduce the perceived effort of a task by 50% in a year’s time, but to reduce that effort by 10% in a month’s time? Can we reduce it by 10% again the following month while incorporating feedback from the end user to improve the user experience?
With this approach, we not only incrementally change the system, we also incrementally retrain the end user while giving them ownership in the architecture of the process. Frequently adjusting and improving is why the Agile methodology was promoted as a management style for software products. And this is why Toyota’s production system embraced this concept by a different name, “Kaizen,” decades before commercial software was a going concern.
At Precision Drilling, we practice implementing change through small, measurable steps. In addition to what this article presents, we believe that small changes are easier to control in regards to scope and are easier to abandon when we find our hypothesis is invalid or the change we need to deliver requires a different approach. What is often overlooked: an agile mindset and framework like this requires a trusted partner with comparable values, which we firmly believe we have with Prescient.
Know more about the transformative collaboration between Precision Drilling and Prescient in here.
