Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Boosting Manufacturing Project Success: Engaging Teams for Better Outcomes

31 Jul 2025 · 2 min

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1:43

In this presentation, the speaker outlines the purpose and benefits of performance‑tracking projects in manufacturing—namely improving efficiency, cutting scrap, smoothing machine operation, and making operators’ jobs easier. He then describes a common failure mode where senior leaders dictate solutions without involving the people who will use them, leading to resistance from operators and shift leads. To avoid this, he recommends early, inclusive design workshops that bring together operators, shift leads, engineering, IT, and executive representatives. Finally, he stresses the importance of clear, mass‑targeted communication that explains the project’s vision, why it matters, and whether it is merely a software tool or part of a broader strategic goal, ensuring broad stakeholder buy‑in and successful adoption.

Chapters

If it is a performance tracking project, then it is very much about we are trying to improve our efficiency, we're trying to reduce our scrap, we're trying to be better at what we do, we're trying to make sure that these machines run smoother, that your job is easier, and here's the benefit to everyone. Communicating that out of that this is not just a— and this was another problem that we've had a long time ago that also spurred this on. We've had it before where one senior engineer or one plant manager comes to us and they're like, yeah, I speak for everybody. Okay. And so you go through an entire project and it gets released And the operators think that it's dumb and the leads don't want to use it because they weren't involved in it at all. And so part of the messaging is getting different groups of people involved very early. So we do initial design workshops and we'll have operators in there. We'll have shift leads in there all the way up to engineering, IT, executive representation. And so it's about, again, you need that majority of the people, you need your stakeholders, but you need to have enough messaging to the masses that they see this journey. They know why it's being done and what the vision is of what are you gonna do with it? Is it just a software system or is there a point to why we are doing this?