From Idea to ROI

(And still paying out...)

By Katie Bandstra

December 17^th, 2014

Ideas are free

Shape Corporation is one of the best run manufacturing companies in the world. Their record of lean manufacturing, empowering their employees and creating world-class parts at world-competitive pricing is second to none. To remain ahead of the curve they truly rely on their associates to help them innovate on the manufacturing floor and across corporate functions. I co-founded an innovation team whose mission was to find ways to better support manufacturing and our team members.

Shape has an intense rigor around solving problems in the manufacturing process. This process gleans out the root cause and helps improve the line. The results of these intense group findings were sitting on shelves in individual plants around the world, not being shared with other lines who were experiencing the same or similar problems. A line supervisor in one of our meetings asked if we could simply create a problem solving library they could search when they had a problem. They were reinventing the wheel all the time.

The answer is of course, why hadn’t we done it sooner? Then, how can we do this? What’s the best method? The best platform? How can it be accessible? How will we paper archives in there electronically? What processes do we use moving forward? How do we get buy in across the company?

What's the next move?

I asked to champion the project. Our team created an initial set of requirements and then I reached out to different departments that would be affected or could help make our idea reality. We then formed an execution team. Before we could get approval for any budgetary spend we needed answer a giant list of questions. We vetted different solutions and vendors, weighed the long term and short term costs. Projected our ROI.

I negotiated our contract for our solution along with our IT Director. We challenged new and existing vendors to help us find a solution.We worked with an existing vendor to take advantage of a feature in a suite of applications we had been under-utilizing that turned out to be perfect for our needs. We realized this solution could turn our problem-solving library into a company-wide library of important documents for Safety, Quality and Human Resources.

Once we found our platform, it was time to convince the leaders and floor associates this was a good idea. I met with the leaders in groups and individually and created a training module (that I taught) on how to utilize the system — upload new documents and search for things like “weld skip”. I showed them first hand the benefits and collected their stories to share as testimonials. I created a month-long campaign, that included rolling out kiosks in the lunchrooms, touting the benefits of “Shape Web” and spoke at all the quarterly meetings (over 1,600 employees in attendance total).

It’s adoption was a great success. Everyone understood the benefits and knew the original idea came from the floor — we just implemented it for them. This library set the stage to help Shape successfully grow exponentially internationally. I’m sure the library itself has morphed into something new, it is 10 years later, but the concept of sharing and having access to information has helped them stay competitive and relevant in a cut-throat industry.