Dina Wing: A lot of it depended on the person. So, like, for instance, we have a production manager who has a huge amount of experience — he's been doing this for a long time — but he likes paper. He likes paper, he likes to carry around lists, he's comfortable with it. And so a lot of his buy-in was based on our relationship. I built a relationship where he trusted my opinion. He was like, “Listen, if you want this, if you think it's going to be better, I'm going to go with you on it. But I don't like it.”
So he wasn't enthused, but he understood why I wanted it. He was willing to trust me. And then, over the last six months, I've showed him how to do a couple of things, and now that he can pull his lists and pieces of paper out of the system by himself, without asking, he's delighted. He's very happy about it. He has no problems with Steelhead as a concept. He's fully involved, and he's ready to bring his guys in for retraining if something is wrong.
So buy-in for him was initially a matter of trust, and then over time he saw why it was useful.
For other people, it was harder. A lot of the order entry stuff — we're actually making customer service and order entry probably do more work than they were doing before. Because we make them actually create part numbers, and put things together, and be organized — whereas before that wasn't really happening. Which, of course, led to more quality problems or parts just stopping and nobody knowing what to do with them.
So in that, people saw why it was useful. But for them specifically, it was going to be more work, so that was harder. Once they kind of got used to the new steps, they were like, “Okay, this is my job, I get paid for it, it's fine, I'm cool.”
Then there’s people like me and like John who were like, “Oh my goodness, data!” — like, love this, absolutely on board, super excited from the beginning.
And it's not just the top though — the communication from the top has to be pervasive and persistent. Even if the guy at the top is fully on board, if he doesn't say anything to anyone, then you're kind of screwed.
Oh yeah — so like, the QC guys — they don't worry about parts unless they have the yellow label. So they can unclutter what they're looking at and just look at the things that need their attention.
For order entry, they can only search for things that are green, because that’s the only thing they should be touching.
And then, when I go in and I wonder, “Well, why are all these parts still in receiving? What's going on?” and I see a bunch of it’s pending customer disposition — I can go in and look at that list and just follow up with every customer until we get the answer that we need, so that parts don't sit.
That is the main benefit that we've seen from Steelhead: parts don't sit. They keep moving — like a shark. Because the minute something stops, it always becomes a problem. So we have to keep stuff moving.
It's me. The call is coming from inside the house — which, in this one case, it's better if the call is coming from inside the house.