People rule in a successful automation environment

For any company to succeed in a collaborative manufacturing environment, a company needs a corporate culture focused on people being able to work with one another in a truly collaborative environment.
That all seems pretty obvious, but as all the experts say, that is easier said than done.
“Creating a highly collaborative culture is extremely important, especially now when you are building global operations. There are a lot of problems with collaboration so companies have to educate their people and provide the right tools to help their people collaborate all over the world,” said Andy Chatha, president of ARC Advisory Group at today’s “Winning Strategies for Global Manufacturers Forum” in Boston.
“Without connecting you can’t accomplish what you want to do,” Chatha said.
Jerry Gipson, director of engineering solutions technology centers at Dow Chemical, agrees.
“Collaboration is more than just working with people,” Gipson said. “Collaboration is not an option, it is a requirement.”
Dow is starting an engineering technology center in India, one question that comes up is how does Dow avoid having all the technology centers across the globe working together versus each becoming too siloed, Gipson said. Communicating all the needs for the company becomes a key.
John Wheeler, executive director of CIDX, also knows communicating with everyone will lead a company down the road to success.
“The joke in IT is we change the process without telling the people,” Wheeler said. The sober answer to that joke is “we have to understand how the work gets done,” he said.
“In the end, we are trying to create a company culture that will allow collaboration,” Wheeler said.
“Companies in the future that can create products will win,” he said. “To get high quality products to market faster and to be able to adapt quicker; we need to create organizational mobility that will enable us to win. We need to create an infrastructure for agility and speed. It’s all about speed.”