Businesses in the industrial sector are constantly looking to innovate and improve to meet the challenging demands of today. But as each department of an organisation strives for success, it can lead to teams becoming increasingly insular and silos begin to form. We discussed the need for a more collaborative approach with Jamie Eckmier of Wrike, and Jessica Hadfield from HellermannTyton.
If businesses are always talking about the benefits of collaboration across all areas, then why do we continue to see these inward-looking ways of working? Jamie is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Wrike. “It’s often a matter of scale”, he explained.
“Silos are not as much of an issue in smaller organisations. But in a large enterprise, I think silos are a natural function of organisational structure. I think to some degree, a company couldn’t work without the silos. I don’t think they are a bad thing at their heart.”
He continued: “You absolutely need to have departments who are trying to function on their own. The question is, how do you enable collaboration across those silos?”
There are other fairly logical reasons that silos occur. Geographical locations, for one. A UK based facility or office won’t always know what their US counterparts are doing.
Different departments are also working towards individual goals. These outcomes may not always align with the targets of other teams, and often people are so fixated on their own domains that they are unaware, or perhaps uninterested in other areas of their business.
“I think this is a concept that does not have to be there just because of the structure”, said Jamie. “Where is your focus? Are you communicating? Do you care what’s happening in the other parts of your business, or are you solely focused on what’s important to your team or department?”
Communication break-downs
Jessica is a Project Leader at HellrmannTyton, an American manufacturer and supplier of products for electrical cables and network connectivity solutions. Jessica works specifically in the automotive section of the business.
When a business becomes too confined to its silos and doesn’t communicate across departments, the consequences are often costly.
In the case of HellermannTyton, similar to many manufacturing organisations, there are specific areas of expertise. Engineering typically focuses on designing innovative and functional plastic parts, utilising advanced materials and technology.
Production aims to maximise efficiency output and minimise downtime on the manufacturing floor. Quality Assurance is dedicated to ensuring that every product meets industry standards. And lastly, customer expectations and sales concentrates on building client relationships and driving revenue.
“All these roles are super important to any business”, said Jessica. “However, they can cause teams to concentrate very narrowly on each of their tasks.
“Many times I’ve seen engineering teams design a component without consulting the production team, resulting in a product that is difficult or costly to manufacture. This obviously leads to increased production time and expenses overall, affecting the company’s bottom line.”
Jessica also referenced the cultural differences that can exist across different departments. As many will know from their own time in the industrial sector, different terminology and jargon is prevalent across each area of specialism. Engineering might use specialised language that people in sales don’t understand, and vice-versa.
“There are also differences in work pace and priorities”, explained Jessica. For example, sales typically operate on a tight deadline to close deals, but engineering and quality don’t. They usually require extended periods for design and testing.
Different departments also typically protective of their processes and ways of operating, whereas others are used to rapid change and things like that to their processes.
“I’ve seen previous examples where the tooling department has resisted adopting a new process suggested by project management. It was because they perceived it as disruptive to their established workflow.”
The solution is alignment
These issues are likely true for any type of company, but manufacturing is a complex system. And these levels of complexity are much greater than in other industries, thus making the untangling of company silos all the more tricky.
As Jamie pointed out, product life cycle is often simplified into five phases of ideation; design and engineering, prototyping and test, launch and production and maintenance. In trying to simplify the process, you have created more silos.
“Design and engineering in itself can break into many different silos; mechanical, electrical, software, for example.
“You might have a dedicated system like Product lifecycle management (PLM) that helps you design the product, but that doesn’t help you with the creation of that product, bringing it to market is its own stage of product life cycle which sits in its own department.”
Jamie continued: “Then when you need to bring in testing and prototyping, and you hand over to your quality assurance group, you realise that they are not using the same PLM as design and engineering. They don’t have access to that information.”
The common solution to the problem often involves the information being sent over via emails and spreadsheets. Any business on some form of digital transformation journey, no matter how small, will tell you there is a better way. Approaches that actually connect and help people to collaborate and align on tasks.
“With the help of Wrike, I’ve set up automated workflows for task management at HellermannTyton”, said Jessica. “These workflows inform people about the due dates of their tasks and whether or not their tasks are ready to start, this gives them timely notifications, and also dependency awareness.”
By the sounds of it, this approach has yielded results. Efficiency has increased tremendously, because departments know exactly when to start and finish. This then leads to improvements in on-time delivery, because there is clear visibility within deadlines. Each department can see what their targets are, and the project is completed on time.
“I’m also working on developing a blueprint focused on deliverables”, said Jessica. “These are basically default plans that we use if we ever get a new project. The real benefits of this is that we can reuse them different types of projects.”
She continued: “This impacts everybody by giving them greater alignment, because if we focus on deliverables, then each department works towards shared goals. This drastically reduces conflicts that arise from misaligned objectives. We get higher quality outputs as well.”
Jessica has also found success through setting up custom dashboards in Wrike. This is done for each department; one for validation, one for engineering, one for tooling, etc. This allows each department real time visibility on task statuses, project progress or upcoming deadlines.
“I’m also customising the view for each department”, said Jessica. So they can see what their relevant metrics and KPIs are, and overall, that will enhance productivity, because each department lead will have early and easy access to information that will help them prioritise their tasks.
“From there, we can also be proactive and resolve issues early in the process, rather than after.”
For more information and insights on the topics discussed here, visit Wrike.
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