Industrial Digital Transformation and Change Management

The Challenge

Initiate the process of identifying and defining needs and goals for a digital solution for Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) of its unionized blue-collar workforce.  The initial focus was the Seattle facility, but ultimately the need was to contribute to a company-wide solution including 5 locations on the West Coast.

The shipbuilding & repair business is, by its nature, filled with variable human resource needs based upon bid vs appointed work vs skilled worker’s availability vs deadlines and the normal ebb and flow of this type of operations.  In addition, the business has used legacy (paper, email, spreadsheets, whiteboards etc.) mechanisms to communicate changes to that human resource need (Dynamic Resource Management) between stakeholders inside and outside the company.

Business Drivers

• Executives and Managers alike were striving for greater ability to stabilize the ebb and flow of DRM such that they can provide an ability for the employees to count on consistent employment throughout project lifecycles.
• Executives were looking for better tools for drafting, maintaining, and projecting costs and stability of Staffing Plans from the initial stages of a project through the fluid DRM stages of operations to completion.
• Executives needed to identify gaps in each division's project workflow and fill those gaps with work from another division’s workforce – before looking to outside vendors for fulfillment.
• Operational Managers, in particular, were in need of a digitally based solution that could replace their current manual system and allow them to assign various skilled employees to a project then communicate changes to key stakeholders as needed in real-time via text, email, and web.

Our Solution

Our digital transformation and change management expertise were applied by conducting stakeholder interviews and process development guidance. We then created a detailed of business requirements specification to convert their manual processes to cloud-based software solutions for sourcing, assigning, optimizing, and utilizing 700+ unionized human resources into a database (and data) driven solution. 

Impact for Client

The development was successfully outsourced by the company and upon implementation created several key aspects that facilitated the scale in production needed during a period of rapid growth.

• Pushed vital operational information down to the factory floor/ship deck allowing front line leads to collaborate on DRM needs and projections in real-time.
• Simplified many of the aspects of managing a largely unionized labor force, with multiple bargaining agreement requirements, and by dynamically accounting for key agreement points.
• Provided a single user interface and information portal that allowed for centralizing the staff responsible for operations into a single location where they could more efficiently collaborate on DRM between multiple projects and other departments and divisions of the company.