If you want your company to embrace digitalization you need to find your change agents, people with the background and enthusiasm to manage egos, especially when data challenges long-held truths.
Mark Labrie joined Mueller Water Products, a manufacturer of water and gas infrastructure systems, in 2018 as a facilities engineering manager reporting to the maintenance manager at the company’s largest plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Seven years later he’s in a director-level position reporting to the VP of operations and guiding the course of Mueller’s multi-plant digitalization strategy.
Labrie worked his way across the steel industry and found that it struggles with the transition to a tech-based environment, he says, a disheartening lesson learned over years of trying to encourage his employers to adopt new digital tools.
He told himself he would never get involved with Industry 4.0 ever again, because of the politics and the cultural conflicts, yet shortly after joining Mueller, he couldn’t help himself, leading an effort to create an MES for the plant.
This interview is edited for length and clarity.
Marc Labrie: What you see across the sector and across a lot of companies that I’ve been a part of is these pockets of technology trying to get created in companies. You see younger people entering the workforce…trying to bring solutions into the space. … People are trying to buy software to solve the problem that they have and they’re not necessarily having a strategic vision for the software.
Dennis Scimeca: When you came aboard in 2018, Mueller was using a bunch of different legacy systems that were becoming unusable for one reason or another.
ML: Chattanooga…did not have something that could work for operations. They had an operational system for quality. … I said, “I can give you a matrix of solutions that we could leverage to move forward in one department. … Give me a cut of the savings to do the next department. And if that generates itself into something large, we know we have something here.”
We did three major deployments in a six-month period, and those deployments proved fruitful, not only on a quantitative basis, but on an optics, cultural and qualitative basis as well.
DS: And these were all Hexagon Nexus deployments?
ML: They’re all Nexus deployments, everything I’m talking about. I was a maintenance manager who developed an MES system in my spare time.
DS: From scratch?
ML: It has to be from scratch. There’s no canned system that works from a MES perspective…because you have to force it. Building your own MES forces continuous improvement and cooperation in a way that, if you’ve bought in to the digital journey, is a compliment. But if you’re not sold into the digital journey, and you don’t have a strategy…the value prop makes no sense…
If you go with the standard out-of-box systems, they’re not customizable.
DS: They have modules, right? Vendors will provide customizations.
ML: Super expensive and they have a wall on customization. They have a wall on granularity. … And then they charge $300 an hour [and take] way too long to do it.
The volume of changes we make as a system is launching…I care about the operator that comes to me and says, “This font is too small,” and our organization changes it in three minutes. And then the operator says, “They listened!”
That’s a hair-standing-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment. We’ve lined up managers, supervisors, everybody, [they] have a problem, we come up with a solution, and everybody’s sold.
The real problem with digitalization is not getting the C-suite to say yes, it is a problem, but it’s also getting the people below the C-suite to engage and interact and take part in the digital process.
DS: You began building this from-scratch MES in 2019. How long did it take until you had a critical mass of data, a really rich dataset from which you could look at trends and track improvements?
ML: Chattanooga is a very large site. It’s vertically integrated. There are six major departments that could each be a plant of their own. So, it took us two years to get all of those departments spun up.
[We started] generating the kind of buzz, savings, cultural change that became too large to be maintained at that single site…. We had to centralize and govern and standardize across the whole company, which is when I got moved to corporate to take on the role of starting to lead that charge. That was 2022.
DS: You began building this from-scratch MES in 2019. How long did it take until you had a critical mass of data, a really rich dataset from which you could look at trends and track improvements?
ML: Chattanooga is a very large site. It’s vertically integrated. There are six major departments that could each be a plant of their own. So, it took us two years to get all of those departments spun up.
[We started] generating the kind of buzz, savings, cultural change that became too large to be maintained at that single site…. We had to centralize and govern and standardize across the whole company, which is when I got moved to corporate to take on the role of starting to lead that charge. That was 2022.
DS: And then the door opens to scaling to other plants?
ML: We had proven scalability, the amount of governance that we had, our interaction system…project management plans…[the] tools of organization to maintain this together. Once all that was proven out to the point where it was trusted and everything else, then it [went] company-wide.
DS: And you decided that Nexus was the software you were going to scale?
ML: Oh, no. In the 2021 to 2023 era, every challenger in the business came out. Mueller brought together a team of cross functional people, led at the time by the director of engineering, and we did a matrix analysis of all the major [MES options]. We went all around the country, touring sites that had other platforms. … Diligence was the name of the game. And quite frankly, nothing ever came back that came close to what we delivered in Chattanooga.
DS: So even though you’d been using proven software at Chattanooga for two years at that point, rather than just going with what worked, you still had to go through and assess all these other options?
ML: When you’re a change agent, everyone’s coming for you all the time until you become a system of record, or things become so deep that strategically and from a governance standpoint you are somewhat immovable. … Everyone else wants to be the person that brought in industry 4.0, machine monitoring and tied-in MES. Everybody else wants their own thing.
And it’s just good diligence for us to do that. But [they] absolutely put us through the ringer, testing every other system that people could bring up and vetting them, touring them. It is stressful to a point but at the same time I’m of the mind of “Go ahead, if [what we’re using is] worse, I’ll be the one to help you put the new [system] in.”
DS: So even though you’d been using proven software at Chattanooga for two years at that point, rather than just going with what worked, you still had to go through and assess all these other options?
ML: When you’re a change agent, everyone’s coming for you all the time until you become a system of record, or things become so deep that strategically and from a governance standpoint you are somewhat immovable. … Everyone else wants to be the person that brought in industry 4.0, machine monitoring and tied-in MES. Everybody else wants their own thing.
And it’s just good diligence for us to do that. But [they] absolutely put us through the ringer, testing every other system that people could bring up and vetting them, touring them. It is stressful to a point but at the same time I’m of the mind of “Go ahead, if [what we’re using is] worse, I’ll be the one to help you put the new [system] in.”
DS: Aren’t you on pause for scaling other facilities until the company settles on its final software choice? What if you kept going with Nexus at Chattanooga but had to turn around and switch to entirely new platform? Wouldn’t that make all the continuing work a waste of time?
ML: I don’t think so. … We were gathering data, knowledge, culture and processes that were transferable. We would have had more data-literate supervisors and managers. If you told me I had to replace Nexus today, it’s going to be expensive, but it’s not a system loss. Migration is hard and it’s expensive…
I have all those relationships built… all of the leadership stuff is done. We have buy-in through the higher layers. [That’s] worth more than the tech.
DS: What was the most important element in spreading the MES to the other four plants?
ML: There’s a little bit of salesmanship, but for the most part it’s people cross pollinating from plant to plant. “Oh, you have that problem? We solved that.”
Usually, you [also] have top performers in there [whose interest in the technology] immediately gets piqued and [they] want more. … Even if there’s not the change appetite at the site, you will find change appetite in most of your top performers. Then you’re forcing a lot of pressure through the org, but it’s healthy.
DS: How do you measure when an MES reaches critical mass at a plant, where if the system isn’t clearly demonstrating ROI it might be time to change tacks?
ML: If you have control of your bottlenecks to the point where you have the levers from a digital standpoint that tell you, “I need overtime. I don’t need overtime. I need to throttle up here. I need to outsource there. I need to whatever.” If you have the visibility to maintain strategic direction with the data at your site, even if you have 10% of the site digitalized, you have made a monumental jump….
Then, when not only do you have the lever, but you can immediately assume and verify what the lever did, now you’ve reached the point that you have not only the bottleneck, but every process that’s intimately close to it, so that you can see that the lever pull went exactly as you thought it would. That’s that critical mass you’re talking about, and that could be as much as 30 to 40% of the plant digitalized.
Your OEE tends to be more like an infection. Just because you have a fever doesn’t mean you treat a fever. And you know, in the process of putting in digitalization, it’s funny, the hardest part is that you have a lot of employees that have been there a long time that have decided that [their numbers are] truth, and if the data says “No,” and if you can get everyone behind that, then I don’t care if you kill the system, you’ve already changed the place.
