Augmented Lean by Natan Linder & Trond Arne Undheim

Author:Natan Linder & Trond Arne Undheim [Linder, Natan & Undheim, Trond Arne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119906018
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2022-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Visualizing, Tracking, and Training at Terex

Classic lean states that quality is everyone's job. The story of distributed quality apps has brought this notion into the digital sphere and has drastically empowered individuals’ ability to customize their job content and manage and track their own quality improvement. However, what does that mean in practice? We will draw your attention to industrial equipment manufacturer Terex, because its augmented lean journey is simply mind blowing, and it was not easy. It still isn't easy.

Terex Corporation is a $4.3 billion revenue (2017) global manufacturer of lifting and material handling equipment used in industries as varied as construction, energy, mining, shipping, transportation, refining, and utilities. According to John L. Garrison, chairman, president, and CEO, Terex is currently undergoing a transformation from an acquisition‐driven company to a process‐driven company by focusing the portfolio on aerial work platforms, cranes, and materials processing; simplifying the company structure, both in complexity and cost; and executing to win by optimizing the supply chain (Terex 2021). How that translates to digital lean is expressed by CIO Andrew Campbell: “Our IT organization was 250 people, but we had 183 different titles,” says Campbell. “Often, the title didn't represent the work the person was actually doing.” He decided to try to turn the global manufacturer's IT “generalists” into “specialists” who are “true partners with the business.” Three years later, Terex IT has 30 titles, shifted from digital “plumbers” to strategy “co‐creators,” and the workforce shifted into roles that made more sense to them, resulting in high employee engagement scores, although “it is always the middle of the organization that is the hardest to change” (Heller 2019).

Audra Kirkland is the director of Digital Manufacturing at Terex Corporation; she is responsible for supply chain and warehouse quality as well as for executing digital tools. Her 21 years of experience includes working for GE Power, having spent over half of her career developing and implementing applications for factory team members. Audra, a self‐declared rebel, wants employees to hack, and is escaping pilot purgatory through inspiring her co‐workers to find their own solutions to any problem. She found the move to remote work had a productive influence on some parts of her operations. This was particularly true for training. “We normally have peer training,” Kirkland stated. But now Terex is testing digital training applications that can be practiced remotely. “We're moving through a guided work approach where we're having people learn on the job as they're doing the work, but through a guided process without a human having to be right next to them. It's been eye opening how we can use technology in order to limit exposure in the future now that we know what the future may hold.” Terex adopted Tulip for production ops, due to its ability to rapidly get up and running and because it allowed them to be on AWS, which they had already installed, Kirkland said (Tulip 2021d).

How did Terex end up deciding which processes to streamline through digitized apps? Augmented lean brings tools that previously only software engineers and product managers were using.

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