Senior Industry en IT Professional
Professional with 37 years of experience in many areas such as R&D, Production and Maintenance, IT business services and organization advice to industrial clients.
Tom’s roles varied from execution to specialist and supervisor. He was employed on a permanent basis as well as through temporary contracts in local and global organizations. His work ranged from the development of products and processes to line management, project management, business development, organizational change management and overseeing a portfolio of services.
In the past 5 years Tom was responsible for advice on and development of services in the area of information supply in a production environment Data Analytics (Big Data) and Industry 4.0 (Smart Factory, Internet of Things, Factory of the Future and other buzz words).
International experience: all continents with the exception of Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
- Change management in a production environment
- Business case for implementation of uniform IT solutions in a production company (8 locations)
The logistical manager has implemented a new IT system to support order planning, production, stockroom and handling processes. As a consequence business stagnates and the results come under pressure. The employees that have to work with the new system have not been involved sufficiently.
Tom was asked to record exactly what the new way of working means, in close cooperation with the managers of the relevant departments, and to discuss this with the company’s management.
The next step involved demonstrating to the employees concerned the advantages of the new processes for their work.
Based on the most important cases, role play was used to make employees familiar with the new processes. By alternating between the various roles, people could experience what the consequences of ‘mistakes’ meant for colleagues.
After approximately 6 weeks the processes were free of faults and people started to contribute ideas and suggestions for improvement that were implemented in a number of cases. This increased motivation and self-directed teams emerged.
The client discovered during the implementation of a new ERP that the investment would only add value if integral standardized exchange of information would take place among the 8 production companies (Belgium, France and Spain). Since in the past these companies had worked with different work methods and business processes, it was established that the goals could only be achieved by revising the complete IT infrastructure for these production environments.
Choosing a universal business process model for production and testing this in workshops in each company established a joined business process model in 2 weeks. This model could serve to support further specification of the main requirements set for the possibilities the solution should offer to facilitate separate production goals. In addition, it helped to make clear what conditions an IT system should meet in order to be able to support the necessary business processes and goals.
The managers involved have committed themselves to additional ‘benefits’ that could be achieved by implementing the integrated solution.
The additional investment that each company should make was estimated.
With these two elements and a planning for implementation, it is possible to build a business case and test if it meets investment criteria. By using a modular approach, various scenarios have been analyzed. In the end, the company chose to implement the system in all companies at the same time.