Simply... from the gut! (Part VI)

“When the going gets tough, the tough gets going!” the CEO of the company mentioned during a town hall meeting with employees. We were facing a very difficult situation. The labor union had declared a strike and there was no end in sight for settling the dispute. He was an inspirational leader and was urging that the factory must run despite all the challenges we faced. It was the month of November 1992 and President Clinton had won the election and I even remember his words quoting this success and motivated us to do our bit. I volunteered to be a machine operator and was assigned to work on a grinding machine at Tool Plant II. I worked there in the morning shift and continued in my regular job in the design department in the afternoon working over sixteen hours a day. The company had recently invested in a state-of-the- art technology for design and manufacture which I was leading along with a colleague of mine. One of the areas of my focus was to generate CNC machine code for electrode machining of insert (cutting tool) geometry directly from a surface model of CAD. We went on to set up a program for efficient creation of design and connect it to the manufacturing module for generation of NC code which could then be sent to a third-party supplier for feeding into the wire cutting machine for the electrode manufacturing. Very pioneering effort indeed!

Looking back at this story after almost three decades, I really admire the leadership of the CEO who continued with his investment in technology despite the tough business situation. As the threat of COVID-19 continues to impact across the globe, companies are challenged to balance between immediate needs and long- term strategic differentiation. While many companies have invested in setting up a mature design and engineering department with sophisticated CAD/PLM technologies, there is still a gap in leveraging this information across the enterprise. Also, I believe that this is the ideal time to connect the factory operations, front line workers and service technicians to the digital ecosystem. This will help in reducing the operational cost, improving product quality besides creating new revenue streams through innovative service offerings.