Joe is VP of Operations at Cogswell Cogs, Inc.
He’s been doing this for ten years now, and he’s good at his work. In the face of an unpredictable market for cogs he’s kept costs down and protected jobs. In fact, Joe’s done such a good job that it’s allowed Cogswell to branch out into sprockets as well. Senior leadership respects him. His department heads look up to him.
Joe has a secret too, a secret that keeps him up at night. It’s a question that he continually asks himself, the secret weapon that cuts through all the overwhelming complexity of the cog-and-sprocket business.
Years ago, a mentor told Joe a story that inspired him: the story of the 1998 Olympic gold medal-winning British men’s rowing team. That team, after a long history of crushing defeat, had cut through all the complexity of training with a simple question:
“What will make the boat go faster?”
This question, asked doggedly over the course of years, took the team from hopeless also-rans to gold medalists.
Joe took this question and internalized it. Business was his boat, and he saw it as his job, in whatever role he found himself, to make the business go faster.
Seven years ago Joe saw an opportunity to make the boat go faster by improving Cogswell’s inventory process. When he started, inventory took two weeks and brought the company to a halt during those two weeks.
Today, seven years later, the full inventory takes one day, and is more accurate than ever. In fact, this year, on Inventory Day, the daily estimate was within 99.9% of the actual numbers.
And that’s not the only department that has seen marked improvement during Joe’s tenure. Joe takes the same approach everywhere, and the results speak for themselves.
What’s really Joe’s secret? It’s not custom software, though that certainly plays a part in Cogswell’s success.
The truth is, when Joe first started on this journey, he had his reservations too. He’d also seen failed software projects and heard his share of horror stories. He was wary of consultants and vendors with big price tags and bigger promises.
But Joe didn’t start with software. He took his question to the Warehouse team. “What will make the boat go faster?” They knew what their most inefficient processes were, and they told him.
Joe wasn’t looking to revolutionize inventory tracking. He was just looking for an edge.
The Warehouse was using Excel to generate pick lists for order fulfillment, then manually updating the daily estimate. It was Cindy’s full-time job to manage all that, and she was getting overwhelmed with the volume of orders coming through. She had asked for an assistant to help with the volume.
But Joe saw an opportunity. He talked to Marty, the CTO, and asked what it would take to turn Cindy’s spreadsheet into a page on the then-new company intranet.
The CTO came back to him with a number. Yes, it was expensive, but compared to the costs of even a part-time assistant for Cindy, it would pay for itself in two years.
On that day, Joe became the accidental champion for a new inventory system. It started small: just a simple spreadsheet turned into a web application to help Cindy do her job faster.
The funny thing was, Joe didn’t understand software at all.
He used the tools he needed to do his job—Outlook, Excel, the usual suspects. But when he went home, he was a proud Luddite. He worked in his garden, talked to his friends on a flip phone, and read old-fashioned paper books. He didn’t even have a Facebook account.
But exactly because he didn’t understand it, when the warehouse project started, Joe worked closely with Marty and the IT team. He wanted to understand what they were doing at least enough that he could report on their progress to the Warehouse manager and to the executives.
Also, Marty was a busy guy with a lot of irons in the fire, and he didn’t have a lot of time to give to Joe’s pet project, so Joe knew he needed to keep a close eye on it himself. If the project started costing more than expected, or slipping in the schedule, he was ready to pull the plug.
Of course, it was Joe’s close attention and desire to learn that helped the project succeed. He arrange regular meetings with Cindy as Subject Matter Expert to review progress, and on several occasions she helped the team avoid implementing planned features that she really didn’t need.
The project completed early and under budget. Now Cindy could handle twice the volume in the same amount of time.
The Warehouse manager saw the improvements and asked for more. He had a list of ways to make his boat go faster. Joe listened, then went and talked to Marty.
Over several years that little web application grew and grew until warehouse pickers were walking around with iPhones strapped to their wrists, scanning QR codes as they worked through the on-screen pick lists.
And that’s about when they started noticing how quickly the daily inventory estimates were improving, so they started looking at ways to shorten the annual inventory.
The story goes on, but the important thing to recognize about Joe’s story is that he looked at software as a tool in his tool chest, an asset to make the business go faster.
Remember Ken? He’s still back at Spacewell, worrying about rising expenses and his competitor’s rising fortunes.
Let’s talk a little more in-depth about the differences between Ken and Joe.