Digital Transformation Efforts Fail Without Vision

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Digital Transformation Efforts Fail Without Vision

“This is nowhere near our biggest opportunity from a cost optimization or performance improvement [perspective]. We have products that are much higher demand, higher profit margin, higher AUR [average unit retail], but we couldn’t get the traction with those teams to [pilot the new TQM system] and we weren’t going to spend a lot of time trying to convert the unconvertible,” Giresi says.

Traditionally, operators on the twinaxial cable manufacturing line captured information on pen and paper during their shift. The data was reformatted into a standard form after the shift. Supervisors reviewed the information and took appropriate action, often too late to affect any manufacturing problems during the shift in question. Inspections also took place at the end of the production run, literally on the ends of the cable reels.

“By the time we got the information that something wasn’t where it was supposed to be from a quality control perspective, it was too late, and you had to rerun the batch, rerun the entire schedule to make up for the inadequacies,” Giresi says.

To add to the challenge, the Guadalajara plant faced a significant amount of employee turnover, owing to the large number of plants in the area and constant supply of new job opportunities. Training new operators in manufacturing procedures as well as the analog data capture and analysis system took time. Novice operators created opportunities for error.

Coordination between the digital development and data team and the physical manufacturing operations team was essential to getting the new TQM system right. Molex needed to find manufacturing teams open to the possibilities Industry 4.0 could accomplish and struggling with operations. The twinaxial cable manufacturing team fit the bill.

“Everything we’ve tried to do…is to solve real problems. Let’s not just spin up a whole bunch of tech because we can. Let’s focus on real, hard pain points where we have people who are excited about making progress against them,” Giresi says.

He adds, “But, give them the accountability. … We can certainly stand up the architecture, the security, the infrastructure, the resiliency … but you need to tell us what great [performance] looks like, because I can’t tell you what it looks like. I can show you examples of greatness in other areas, and if that helps you think about it, but you have to own it. This team in Guadalajara wanted to do it.”

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