Audrey: To me, it's not a technology problem or a lean problem. It's how do we solve this problem using lean principles and the technology that we have available to us, right? It's 2025. I'm sorry. You're solving problems on a piece of paper. Like I feel bad for you.

Announcer: You're listening to Augmented Ops, where manufacturing meets innovation. We highlight the transformative ideas and technologies shaping the front lines of operations. Helping you stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving world of industrial tech. Your host for this episode is Eric Marandet, Chief Business Officer of TULIP, the Frontline Operations Platform.

Erik: Welcome back to Augmented Ops. Today we're here with Audrey Vandecastel. Senior Director of Operational Excellence Technology at Stanley Black and Decker. Audrey, it's great to have you with us. Thanks for the time. 

Audrey: For sure. Excited to be here. 

Erik: Well, look, I have to first ask, you know, I was taking a look at your bio and I saw something in there that I didn't know about you.

And it says that you are into fighting robots. Can you tell me about, like, what does this mean? Can you tell me about this? 

Audrey: Sure, yeah, you know, I hang out with a lot of engineers, and engineers tend to get into things like robotics, typical of them, right? And many moons ago, in our shop space at the Stanley Black Decker campus, an engineer came to me and said, I really want to start a BattleBots team.

I've been doing these kind of small circuit robot fighting events, and I think we can go big time and get on BattleBots. The stick is that we need a welder. Some of my background is in welding and, uh, don't threaten me with a good time to weld a bunch of robots together. So, joined their team and I'm an official BattleBot welder.

I've welded for a couple seasons for this team that has a big, goofy robot named Mammoth. So if you're a BattleBot nerd, you probably know who Mammoth is or you could go Google it. She's very large. She's six feet tall. She can flip a car. Uh, she made a chromoly tubing, uh, which is pretty awesome. A lot of fun to fight and, uh, get torn up.

Not as much fun to fix when she gets torn up, but definitely a very cool group that I'm engaged with and a claim to fame, if you will. 

Erik: Yeah, I'll say. So this is a six foot fighting robot that can flip a car. Like, don't piss off Mammoth, yeah? 

Audrey: Correct. Exactly. And 

Erik: hold on, is this like on TV or? It's 

Audrey: BattleBots.

Yeah, like the actual show BattleBots. We've been on a couple seasons, I think. Three or four seasons. I don't know if they're filming new seasons right now. Bottle box. They should be if 

Erik: they're not. And this is like a show that I was only like vaguely aware of it, that I'm now about to binge watch. 

Audrey: Yes. Uh, you can see some really amazing clips of mammoths fighting on YouTube.

So some really good chaos where we take people out. And then also some chaos of ourselves. We're like, we're like middle of the pack. I'd say it's, it's more about like what's the gimmick you can get on the show and not how good is your robot, right? So there's a lot of like these typical boring robots that all look the same and they're all like spinners, right?

Yeah, I always see the spinner 

Erik: robots and I'm like, yeah, you know. 

Audrey: Yeah, we were like, we just are going to go really big, no armor, six feet tall. They're only limited by weight. Right. So we made a big goofy robot to make sure we got on the show. 

Erik: So everybody listening, like go to the show notes and you're about to see some links to Mammoth kicking some ass.

So hold on, you got into this through your role at Stanley Black Decker. So this was like somebody you're working with who got you into this? 

Audrey: Yeah. So when I first started at Stanley, actually I was running our employee maker space there. So my background has always been really in like the intersection of technology and shop floors, tools, equipment, manufacturing, right?

And so I was running a shop space, a big maker space, a shared shop space where people come and hack stuff together, and also like a product innovation portal and platform. So there was a lot of industrious go getter engineers that like cobble stuff together in that space, and that's kind of where The idea to go big and, and try and get on BattleBots came from, and we did.

Erik: And there's a couple of themes, you know, I think, um, some of the most interesting, cool people I know in manufacturing are in this field, right? It's like late in breaking, cutting edge technology. It's like real making of physical products in a new and better. way, but that's also like so gritty and real because one of the things I love about this space is, uh, if you start going to shop floor people with buzzwords, they are going to pick you up over their head and throw you out the front door.

And it's just so. They're just so honest, you know, I like, I love it. And so like, I learned, I don't know, every time I feel like I have one of these conversations, there's like so much interesting stuff to discuss. So let's maybe start with that. We skipped right over something, which is like, you have a long history welding, which is not, you know.

You don't hear that every day. Where are you from? How did you get started? How, how does one have a long history in welding prior to the BattleBot competition? And then we can get into all the, the work stuff at Stanley Black Decker, which I happen to also know is quite cool, but that'll come. Let's start with, with you.

Where, where are you from? 

Audrey: I'm born and raised in Baltimore city of Maryland. So East coaster for sure. Uh, grew up here. I moved actually to Massachusetts for college, did a semester in London, um, and college is really where I found my passion for metalworking. So welding was kind of my entry point and then blacksmithing really quickly after that.

So I loved being in a shop. I loved making stuff and really. In college, I gravitated a lot more towards the creative aspect of that, so I did a whole bunch of big metal sculpture, big metal furniture, started mixing it, um, with other various mediums as well, the woodworking, textiles mainly in, in college, and then some weird rubber materials.

After college, I realized, wow, that's a really expensive thing for me to get into as a broke college student, and so I was a little lost after college, and then moved back to Baltimore and found that there was a makerspace that was just opening. Looking for people to teach welding classes and I was like, wow, the stars have aligned for me.

Look at me studying a creative field and getting a job in that right after college, which is kind of unheard of, right? So started in, uh, working in a makerspace we got invested in by Under Armour and some of their subsidiaries. So moved into a really big space down in Baltimore City. Did that for about four years running that kind of public facing makerspace, if you will.

Where I honed a lot of my woodworking, CNC, textile, laser engraving, 3D printing skills, and then saw that Stanley was hiring for someone to come run their makerspace and innovation portal. And I was freakishly qualified for it, right? And was already in Baltimore, which is where our engineering HQ is for Stanley Black and Decker.

And yeah, the rest is history. So that's kind of was my entry point into the more corporate world, but still from a very You know, technology and shop floor focus and driven, but I've always been around the shop and power tools, right? So to have the opportunity to come work for some of the great brands like DeWalt, Craftsman, Stanley was too juicy of an opportunity for me to pass up.

Erik: Yeah. So that's fairly atypical. Was it an, like an art degree or what was your formal field of study? 

Audrey: Yeah. So I went to a weird school, Eric. I went to a school called Hampshire college that actually doesn't have majors. And doesn't have grades. 

Erik: I'm all about weird schools. I'm all about weird, weird just generally actually, but weird schools are all the better.

Audrey: Same. I had this book. I went to Catholic school, private school my whole life until college, right? So I was like, I want something totally different than what I've experienced in high school, right? I found this college. It's the only college I applied to. The only one I was interested in going to after I learned about it.

So they, instead of a major, You basically create your own major in a way, but they don't call it a major. It's kind of like a concentration, right? So my div three, as they call it, your division three, which is your kind of final senior thesis, if you will, was a intersection really of art and art therapy, I thought I wanted to be an artist.

I didn't realize that there was a lot of careers that I could use these skills. And not be an artist in, right? I still definitely have a creative practice on the side, but yeah, I kind of, you know, walked through some of these weird doors that were open in front of me and found myself working in software and plants and manufacturing.

How about that? 

Erik: Sounds like you've never been afraid to cut your own path. You've always been creative, and you've always been hands on with physical product. So then you find yourself at Stanley, Black Decker in their makerspace. You're building stuff. You're getting your power tool fixed. You've got your creativity outlet there.

You know, you're subsidizing some of the costs because presumably there's like leftover materials and you can do your thing. Uh, you're building like a massive, six foot fighting robots as one does. 

Audrey: Yep. As one does. 

Erik: As one does. And then how did you end up? at the helm of a enterprise wide digital transformation initiative.

And I've, you know, spoiler alert, I've heard Audrey referred to as like a boss and like the shit and like the one who gets it done. But like walk me through how you got from that space to where you are today. What was the path? It seems non linear at a minimum, yeah? 

Audrey: Totally non linear, right? And I think that that's the world we live in though, right?

That's how things work sometimes. I've always had a reputation of being a doer. I get shit done. Like you said, uh, no matter what that shit is. And so there was an opportunity to join our industry 4. 0 team in a kind of training technology perspective, and I wasn't sure if I was going to take it. I had a couple managers that I really trusted at the time, and they were like, look, You know, the maker space thing is cool.

And I was like, that is my identity. That is my career. I'm maker space lady forever. Right. And I was like, Oh, I don't know. I don't know if I want to do it. It's not exactly where I see myself or where does my career go from there. But then I also sat down and thought about like, where does my career go from here?

I'm just running a maker space. Right. So I was open to trying something new and. I walked through that door. I took that job. So my kind of first foray into not that I wasn't doing manufacturing before, but it was very early stage R and D prototype type manufacturing, right? New product idea manufacturing.

And so I, I stepped into this training technology role. That was doing a lot of training. I do a lot of hands on training. I've been training and teaching people for years. Right. And so it made sense. Definitely in hindsight, it made sense at the time. I wasn't sure, but I did it anyway. Right. And so I was doing a lot of training technology stuff for all of our plants globally, did a good job at that, I guess, and, uh, basically my portfolio expanded.

They said, Oh, what about this technology? Why don't you also take this technology team, right? So the team at the time was kind of a new and constantly changing team and the way that they organized and the things that they focused on. So the stars aligned a couple of times for me. And I think that, you know, my performance and the fact that I was able to show that we can take these external technologies.

Put them in our plants and actually drive improvements and engagement and benefits with them afforded me the opportunity to take over the tulip team. And, uh, now I've got a whole bunch of awesome technologists and engineers and nerds that work for me doing all kinds of awesome stuff in our plants. So it's been a great ride so far.

Erik: It's so interesting though, because when you think about what does it take to be qualified to lead some sort of like digital initiative or large scale enterprise, you know, uh, transformation, I'm kind of reluctant to use these words because I think they're. quickly falling out of vogue, because as we know, it's not a singular moment where you transform from a before state to an after state.

This is increasingly like, no, no, this is just, you're constantly, yeah, exactly. It's this continuous process. The only thing that's changed is the tools and technology available to support this process, right? So I'm like, I don't think the industry's landed on good language to describe this phenomenon yet.

We still are kind of stuck in this transformation before and after paradigm. But typically when you think about what does it take to be qualified to run these types of initiatives you sort of naturally gravitate towards Oh, well, I was an ME or a CS in undergrad And then I rolled out my first MES and then I went to IT and then I went to ops and now I have both Perspectives and convergence of IT and ops, etc, etc What you don't hear as often is look I got a background in helping people Realize their creative ideas and see the potential of something and not necessarily know how to get from A to B.

They're in this like garden, this in a maker space or a greenhouse, call it what you will, but the point is like, they've got a vision, they're there, they're empowered, and it's not a safe place. It's really easy to screw it up and you're somebody who comes to this problem from like, look, I'm going to make sure.

You get enough rope, but I'm going to make sure you don't hang yourself with that rope. And here's how a CNC works, but you can't destroy it. So like, do your thing, but you got a safety net and you got some guard rails. And I just think it's such an interesting mental model for how we think about digital transformation.

You know, again, kind of like caveat asterisks, like this continuous transformation, if you will, within our manufacturing environments, because the reality is that's all manufacturing is. It's just a huge. Makerspace that makes all sorts of cool stuff. 

Audrey: Exactly. Right. And my team likes to remind me of this.

I'm not technical. I'm not an engineer, right? I certainly know many technical concepts. I've been around the block many times. I've been doing this for years now. But I don't have that official I. T. Certification degree, right? But I think that's part of what makes my team successful because I think about things in a different way and I push them in different ways.

And to be quite frank, I have a bunch of engineers on my team. Mackey's electrical engineers, software engineers, right? Do we need an engineer to run the team as well? I would argue as I'm leading the team. No, you don't, right? You want someone that is thinking about the things that Yeah. Your engineers typically don't think about, right.

Or, Hey, maybe we don't need seven decimal points in that field. Just make it a round number, right? Engineer brain is a very real thing. And a lot of times you want engineer brain many times I need engineer brain. Uh, but sometimes you want to push the engineer brain and you want to have. A different perspective and a different lens on things.

And I think that's part of what I really bring to our program as a whole is change management, training, delivering the right solution, not going too far ahead, really understanding where we're at, what do we need. If you don't need a Corvette and you can get by with a scooter or a bicycle, hey, you should probably just use a bicycle right now until you can get to the Corvette level, right?

So I pushed my team in that way and they pushed me in a lot of ways too, but I think it's been a really good joining of really technical background and experience, and then also this kind of out of left field, creative, technology, innovation driven, but thinking outside of that traditional engineer mode.

Erik: Yeah, well, I think your point is a good one, which is like both perspectives are important, right? There's a time. When going really, really deep and understanding one particular topic, super, super deep and having a highly precise position on the matter. That's critical. You want to nail that, but also, you know, when navigating complex topics like.

You know, there's the engineering piece and then engineering is like dramatic oversimplification. You've got the CS side, you've got the like SCADA level side, you've got the actual physical properties and how they come together. You've got like the technology available to manipulate these physical properties and to create different shapes and etc, etc, right?

So like even engineering is dramatic oversimplification, but then you also have like psychological considerations that need to be taken into account and then political, organizational and governance considerations that need to be taken into account and this, you know, what I hear from you is that This latticework of mental models across a multidisciplinary approaches, right?

That can take into consideration all of these different perspectives and then combine them to understand which is appropriate to apply to solve the particular problem in front of you, or as you said it, to get the shit done, whatever the shit. And I think that's such a super interesting perspective.

Audrey: Yeah. If you want to paint a big picture, you need a lot of different tools to do it. Right. Or you want to make a big piece of art or big, whatever, big transformation, big MES deployment, right. You just do it with engineers, you just do it with IT, you just do it with a third party, right? It's not gonna succeed if you're not thinking about that big picture, right?

So how do you think about that big picture and make sure that you're covering all your bases to be successful? Because it is a hard space to win in. 

Erik: Yeah. So when was it that you, you put the TULIP team on your shoulders and this is like the thing that you sink your teeth into? 

Audrey: 2019 is really when I moved over from the makerspace and then I think I got the TULIP team in 2020.

So it's been about 

Erik: four or five years that you've been running with this. Can you talk to us a little bit about those four or five years? Like how was it when you started? What's the journey been like? 

Audrey: Yeah, you know, journey has been exciting, winding. When we first started, I would say that there wasn't necessarily.

A great strategy around digitization in our plants. Um, and a lot of the things that we did with tulip was, Hey, this plant said they wanted this. All right, we'll build it for him, right? Or we think this is a good app to make. Let's make it and see if Plants will buy it from us, not buy it literally. Right.

But is it something that a plant will use? Right. So we were in a way the team was trying to find their space, find what was working. And we are really lucky that we had the space and the time to do some of that testing and trial and error. So we were building apps ourselves, but then also trying to sell the concept of citizen development to our plants as well, right?

We are. A very large company. We've got over 100 manufacturing locations around the world. And like many large companies I've found, we grew through merger and acquisition. We had a lot of inorganic growth. And a lot of times when companies do that, they don't do the due diligence of spending a bunch of money to integrate their networks or make sure their processes are the same way.

Right? So there was a lot of that I think is really common in this industry where different sites look different around the world, even if they make similar products. We have hundreds of thousands of SKUs within Stanley Black Decker, so we make everything from a tiny rivet that'll go into a Tesla battery or a cell phone all the way up to, of course, power tools, hand tools, but then even, you know, zero turn lawnmowers, right?

So everything from a simple fastener to like a really complex mechanical gas powered engine or battery powered product, right? So we really run the gamut in our plants. So it was daunting to say, man, how do we build solutions that can go into every single one of our plants when we have such varying products and processes and plant sizes, right?

Some of our plants are like mom and pop fab shops with 100 people in them. Some of our plants are 2, 000 people assembly sites, right? It's just a very vast and different landscape, which was complex to kind of sink our teeth into. And so the strategy really evolved and we started pushing more As a holistic team.

And at that time, the team was kind of transforming from this industry for a team into. An operational excellence team. There was a lot of buzzwords around simplification at the top and how we streamline things right, which is the right direction to go in the environment that we were in. And there was also a lot of leadership turnover and change that I think really helped usher in a much more solid strategy for the team for the larger organization as a whole.

But then also because there was that really solid, awesome supply chain strategy in place that helped us say. All right, we need to worry about this, this, and this and nothing else. That's really easy for then you to take as a leader to your team. What do we affect within this box? What is the stuff that we can actually move the needle on, right?

So we really had this kind of tops down strategy push a year or two into it that we've been continually refining over the past couple of years. Where it really is about how do we get good at doing what we want to do and not worrying about maybe a cool, fancy AR thing, which was maybe one of our priorities before, but quite frankly, our plants weren't ready for it, our infrastructure wasn't ready for it, right?

So how do we simplify and get to What are these kind of basic foundational building blocks that our plants need? How do we want them to behave, right? How to put a production system in place, and really assess where the maturity of our plants are for that. And that's really where we kind of landed on with my team and our strategy is, look, An AR tool is cool.

The digital twin is cool. But if you don't know how many parts you made this shift, I'm not going to waste your time even talking about a digital twin. Like, let me help you know how many parts you made. Let me help you know if you're making good parts. Right? So that really was a big aha moment for our team.

It was like, look, some of this basic foundational data that you need to run the business, you can't get right now or you can't get it fast enough. You can't get it real time enough. You can't get it visualized in the way that you need. That's what we'll take off your plate and deliver to you, and that's really been what we've been focused on in the past.

Maybe two years, year and a half, and what will be continued to focus on for many years to come is how do we get that foundation, infrastructure, technology, monitoring in place in our plants, and Tulip is one of the big tools in our tool belt that we use to do that. 

Erik: Yeah. Literally, figuratively. 

Audrey: Yeah. 

Erik: You touched on something pretty interesting and that we sort of touched on a little bit earlier, which is this notion of like digital transformation, continuous transformation, continuous improvement using digital tools.

But it's kind of interesting because you said you went from this industry 4. 0 transformation team to an operational excellence team. With technology in there as well. Can you talk about this mindset shift and how that changed the way that you were able to interact with this highly varied set of production sites that you have all over the world?

And for context, I mean, everybody knows the brand Stanley Black and Decker. It's probably not the case that everybody knew that, you know, there's maybe a hundred. production facilities where this is taking place in terms of total employees that are involved in the making of these hundreds of thousands of different SKUs.

Can you just give us a sense of about how many people are we talking about here? 

Audrey: Sure. Yeah. So within Stanley Black Decker as a whole, we're maybe 55, 000 people within our supply chain. So those are, you know, folks working around the manufacturing and distribution of our products. We have maybe 30 to 35, 000 employees globally.

So biggest slice of the company is really. The one's working on making product and getting out the door to you. 

Erik: Yeah. For those who make the world, I think 

Audrey: you nailed it. It's awesome. 

Erik: It's like the best I looked at it. I was like, man, maybe they'll let us borrow this for our, for our mission as well, because that's at the day, but philosophically it's very, very similar.

Like we look at what we do is we're making digital tools for those who make the tools that. You know the rest of the world uses so yeah, but let's talk a little bit about that mindset shift, right? So from like hey AR digital twin and all the other things that went around with it blockchain was big for a minute here Like we need blockchain in our operations.

It was like why I was like because it's everywhere and if we don't do it We're gonna fail. It's like

You know, you know the time right this was like yeah for you five years ago or something like that. Yep But you shift, you go, no, no, no. Let's focus on building good product and improving the process. Talk to me a little bit about that mindset shift and how that changed, how you engage with folks in ops.

Audrey: Yeah, you know, I think number one, there was a new leader that came in and he honestly, man, he cleared the bench. Luckily, I stayed with my booty on the bench, which is great. He really came in and having his vision to lead our team, right? Number one was where he was like, what are y'all doing with all of this, right?

But luckily, I was able to see some of the downfalls of that previous team. I saw a lot of things fail, right? And I saw that they didn't approach things. Hey, site, what do you need? What would be helpful for you? What are your gaps? There was, Hey, here's this cool, shiny tool that some salesperson sold to us.

That's supposed to solve all of our problems. We shove it down your throat and when it doesn't work, it's definitely your fault. It's not my fault. Right. Um, so there was a lot of baggage that came along with being that former team because of some of the, I don't want to go out and just say it was a total failure.

There was a lot of good things that we did. A lot of good learning, good lessons that we had. But quite frankly, like not much to show for it at the end of the day or five years later, right? So we knew that we needed to reassess our strategy. We knew that we needed to reinvent ourselves. We needed to refocus and we needed to make sure that we were doing the right thing for the business.

And for us, that looked like, again, like I said, getting back to basics, right? How do we help the sites, you know, win the shift today so that we can see a better tomorrow, right? How do we help them with productivity? How do we help them with the challenges they're having around quality issues potentially or tracking or capturing data?

And that's really where there was a step back and bring in a bunch of lean principles, right? How do we take the lean principles, get back to basics? So the operational excellence team now. You know, my team is focused on technology, but there's a much larger portion of the team focused on continuous improvement in general in our plans, right?

So, where my team comes in is, hey, we've got these continuous improvement standards and beliefs and behaviors that we want our sites and our site leaders to own and leaning into. How do we make that easier for them to adopt with digital tools, right? So, if you want a line lead to have a sick board, maybe you shouldn't get a whiteboard out, you just give them an iPad and the Tulip app.

And they might still be manually recording their data, but now it's digital, we can already visualize it for you, it's real, near real time, you don't have to erase it every shift and lose all that data, right? So how do we kind of partner with the rest of our team to drive these lean principles, these lean foundations?

while also doing what's right by our plants. And quite frankly, there's been plants that I've walked into or plant managers or leaders in plants, or they're like that industry 4. 0 stuff. No, no. You know what I mean? And so sometimes I'll have to, and you don't blame them, right? 

Erik: You don't even 

Audrey: blame them a hundred percent.

No, I get where they're coming from 

Erik: and they're like, look, I don't have time for that shit. I need to build product in like, it's cool that you have your, uh, strategic AR initiative, but I need to, you know, ship product. It's so interesting. Let's take the example you just gave. Um, you know, Hey, I need to record this and I'll roll out a whiteboard.

I can do it right now. I don't need to talk to anybody. It's just right there. I can do it. But then at the end of the shift, you're going to erase it. And at the end of the day, the end of the week, it's going to be gone. And it's hard to understand like historical trends and like the impact of one particular thing here or there.

CapEx investment, personnel changeover, et cetera. If you don't have kind of a historical reference for performance. And by the way, you know, we work with hundreds of customers everywhere. And this is a very common problem, right? Like people say. Hey, we adopted this new capability and we're doing a lot better.

And we say, well, how do you know? And they'll say, well, we don't know how we were doing before, but we're pretty sure we're doing better now. And we know we're, we know what we're doing now. We're like, well, 

Audrey: the 

Erik: point is they have visibility. They didn't before. It's hard to compare data. You don't have to like.

data that you think is probably better, right? So just establishing and maintaining a baseline is actually, I think, objectively very important. But that's not the crux of the argument here. What I would say is, like, forget that for a moment. The thing about manufacturing operations is it's this interconnected set of complex systems with all sorts of interdependencies that exist.

And so, that whiteboard is great. locally for the people who can see the whiteboard, but there are people who are impacted and whose Decision making is going to be informed by what's on that whiteboard who do not have access to that whiteboard, right? And so I think one of the major benefits of transitioning to this digital paradigm or incorporating digital tools Is that you can now share this information route this information to all of these interdependent players within the system, you know, Hey, we're going to miss our production target.

There's a person responsible for the customer order that needs to be aware. There's like a warehouse and shipping implication of what we're discussing here, and you can start to expose these interdependencies and enable the system to work much more efficiently. 

Audrey: Yeah, I get asked this question a lot because, you know, and again, no fault of our plants and I, I would do the same thing if I was in their shoes.

We have a lot of either plants with homegrown one off systems or maybe they've gone out and purchased something from a vendor, but they're the only plant in our network that uses it. So a lot of times I get, well, why would I switch to your solution when I've already got something that works? Right? And for the plant, it's true.

Maybe for them, it doesn't really matter if they have a central solution or not. They have something that works for them. Okay. Great. But that's where you get the leadership buy in above the plant level, right? Your pods, or if we have a pod structure, right? Um, and then even above our pod structure, the head of our supply chain or the head of our planning department, right?

For them to have that information and know that it's apples to apples across site, right? That's where the real big value unlock comes with a centralized team like mine is once you turn on it. And light up multiple plants and factories. You can look across and say, wow, we make similar products in these two plants, but this plant can make 20, 000 a day.

And this plant can make 3000 a day. What's going on here. Right. Or maybe we should shuffle this over here and put this over here. Right. Or we've got capacity on stamping here and we're outsourcing stamping over here. Why don't we just stamp it at this plant, right? So being able to give your leadership a holistic view at performance that they know and can trust is measured accurately and measured the same way, measured at the same cadence, with the same data structure, right?

Like that's the dream, right? That's the dream that we're working on. You're unlocking, 

Erik: like we talk about this multidisciplinary approach to these types of decision making and what's so interesting about your background, like what you're talking about is, it's like Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations. You're unlocking the principle of comparative advantage, right?

For how do you not optimize on a, how do I make object a little bit faster, a little bit better, by the way, a non trivial problem in a labor constrained environment with a rising cost of labor with like a higher degree of supply chain variability than I had maybe five years ago, or I assumed when I was building a facility in the supply chain, right?

All of that is like, that's like a super hard problem to solve, but now let's abstract that up at the enterprise level. And let's say, Hey, where should I focus production in different facilities and take into consideration distribution of that product in the respective markets? The point is, if. Your basis for decision making here is on the whiteboard that just got erased in like Holliston, Massachusetts.

You're in trouble. You're in trouble, right? I want to also, if I could pick your brain on something else you mentioned, you said, hey, we've got operational excellence technology, and then we also have operational excellence lean principles in the way of working. I was recently on site with a not yet. to the customer, um, but they were doing a sort of a traditional lean transformation workshop.

And at some point, uh, and this is kind of like pretty old school. Um, but at some point there was a question around, uh, how, how should we approach this problem? Uh, and it was, you know, probably 30 people there. The coach for this particular workshop said, well, the first thing you need to do is you need to decide.

Is this a technology problem or is this a lean problem? Do I want to solve this problem with technology or do I want to solve this problem with lean? I didn't freak out, which I was, I'm still pretty proud of myself for, um, but what's your take on that perspective? You know, 

Audrey: yeah, I can see why you felt challenged and impassioned by it.

Um, I think a lot of times people will take technology and look for a problem to solve. Right. And I think that's what I really try and stay away from. And I do think that there are certain lean principles, lean things you can do without technology in the loop. Totally. Can you probably do it faster with technology loop?

Definitely. Can you get better data, maybe more accurate data? More volume data with technology. Definitely. Right. So for me, it's it's about bringing both of them together. Can you do line balancing with a stopwatch and a whiteboard? Definitely. Does line balancing get a lot easier when you've got connectivity on every station on the line and you can tell down to the millisecond for the past three months how long each station has taken?

Absolutely. Right. So to me, it's not a technology problem or a lean problem. It's How do we solve this problem using lean principles and the technology that we have available to us, right? It's 2025. I'm sorry. You're solving problems on a piece of paper. Like, I feel bad for you. 

Erik: Yeah, it's so funny. I talked to so many like, uh, disenfranchised young engineers that, you know, they take their engineering courses.

They're like smart. Problem solving machines that have been supercharged with the best processing power in solving like problem solving tools that the world has ever known. Right. And the whole power of the internet and generative AI behind them. And then they show up and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not the time for face space or my book or whatever it is you kids are doing these days.

Put that super computer away, put on a hard hat and grab a, you know, some pen and paper, we're going to do some complex system analysis and they're just like, 

Audrey: like, I don't, 

Erik: you know. 

Audrey: I'd say this all the time that being digital and digitally enabled in manufacturing is table stakes to last another 10 years in the industry, let alone 180 years like Stanley Black and Decker has been around, right?

And that's the world that I'm, I'm really pushing to create for our plants because A lot of our plans don't even have Wi Fi in them and it's like Wi Fi was a thing when I was in middle school, right? How do we not make that investment then? So we, a lot of times, and this is definitely not unique to SVD, a lot of times we dig ourselves into these tech debt holes and then it's so expensive to get out of them.

At some point, you have to rip the bandaid off and make that investment to at least fill the hole back in so that you're at the ground level again, right? And I think if you're not moving in that direction and not pushing yourself and pushing your leadership, say, hey, we can't do it in all our plants, but our key plants, we have to make this investment.

We have to get more drops put in. We have to connect the plant floor. We have to get the data from our devices on our plant floor, right? That is where we need to go as an industry as a whole in manufacturing. And there's a lot of catch up to do because a lot of us have dug ourselves into those. Deep holes of poor infrastructure, no sensorization, no data collection, right?

And that's really the, the foothills that we're on right now. 

Erik: But I think what you guys do particularly well, you know, and I look, I see a lot of folks solving this in many different ways, but I think what you guys really nail is you say, look, I'm not here to get you to adopt technology. I'm not here for the purpose of upgrading wifi or infrastructure, adopting whatever shiny tool it is that I think is so cool.

You're here to say, how can I help you build better? And the answer might be, listen, we're not there, you know what, we might need to grab a stopwatch and go to the shop floor and like do a line balancing activity, and that's not, that's okay. If that's where we are and that's not certain, that's fine. Is there a better way to do it?

You betcha, but it's not a religious discussion, right? It's about how do we Make this better for the people who are building these tools. Uh, I, I like the analogy of NASCAR, it's like the people who are driving that car are the people with their hands on the product that's going to the customers, and we're all pit crew, you know?

I think you guys do that well, and you can see it in terms of the buy in, and I know that we were recently looking at some of your, um, you know, your NPS data, right? But you see this! Five years ago, if you say there was this like, this aversion to like, ah, get out of my face with that industry 4. 0 initiative.

Like, if you look at the way that people in your operation are engaging with you and the tools that you're making available to them, what was the, uh, you know, the quote that we saw, it's like giving me the power to do whatever it is I need to do or something like that was the quote. And it was, it was in Spanish, so it's like a translation, but it was representative of how they perceive you partnering with them.

Yeah. And I think that that's. To your credit, 

Audrey: I mean, that's the mindset shift that folks should have if their technology first, right? Think about being in those shoes. You're a manufacturing engineer. You're a quality manager. You're a plant manager You're a line lead a supervisor what bugs those people day to day is that they don't know if they're having the right material They don't know if they're making bad parts right now.

Are they making the right parts, right? Where do these parts need to go where they're going to get stored, right? Those are the problems to solve first. That's how you get the buy in from those people. Yeah, maybe in a couple years. We can go digital twin or you can go AR VR, right? But like let me help you first to get the hurdles that are immediately in your way out of your way Make you faster make you smarter make you better make you more data driven.

I won't say smart or not I'm not implying people are stupid right but equipping you with more knowledge of what's going on instead of just you know Which way is the wind blowing or I see a big pile over there? So we must be close to being done actually giving them speedometers and instrumenting their productions.

They can see oh Things are looking bad. Let me go over and help them out. Right. Or let me pull the Andon cord and get the materials over here. So I think that that's the mindset shift is. What's gonna make my technology shine? How is my technology gonna make our plant shine? 

Erik: Yeah, right. Well, and what you're saying is like, look, there's nothing wrong with ar vr.

There's nothing wrong with digital twin. There's nothing wrong with blockchain and operations. Like the point is, if it solves a real problem that the operations are dealing with, then it's on the table and it's a good, yeah, it's a good solution. But if we're trying to prioritize adoption of a technology over the problems of the shop floor, well then we've probably missed the train 

Audrey: precisely.

Erik: What you've described is, and I never thought about it in this way until our conversation, but you have a 30, 000 person makerspace in SPD, and your team is like, Hey, careful if you're using the CNC, let's make sure you know what you're doing here. Like there's a left lane and there's a right lane. My point is, it's not a free for all.

And I imagine in a makerspace, you don't let randos off the street just come in and like grab power tools and start drilling stuff and cutting things, right? You there, you, you need to have. Some governance and some controls here. And how do you do that across a hundred different facilities? Mom and pop shop, 2000 person, you know, 30, 000 total employees, building everything from like mini automobiles.

If we think about this zero turn lawn care, uh, all the way down to like something simple, like a rivet or a chisel. And for those that are making rivets and chisels, no offense. I know that it's not simple. I don't beat me up when I'm next on site with you guys. 

Audrey: Yeah. You know, the short answer is adult, right?

We're on a journey of governance. I won't come out here and say all a hundred sites are governed very stringently in our platforms. Right. So part of it is being lenient in some areas where it doesn't really matter. Right. But the areas that it does really matter, because I do care about things like.

Being able to roll up our data globally to give our leaders views, right? What are those kind of real critical points that we need to govern and standardize right now? So, our table schemas, the architecture of our solutions, making sure that IT is comfortable with my team building solutions, but then also, yep, maybe there's some people in the plants that are going to build solutions.

Those types of things go a long way in making the powers that be in IT feel comfortable that a non IT team is going out and deploying technology and plans, right? I've spent a lot of time building trust. With our I. T. team. And now you know, we talk every day. They come to me. I come to them. They help us.

It's a great relationship, but it definitely took years to get there. So having I. T. in the loop helps us govern, helps us bring down the iron fist of I. T. when we need to. Hey, sorry, site in Europe. You can't take pictures of people's faces because of the legal requirements that we have to pay attention to, right?

So those types of things and helping to facilitate those types of legal and compliance conversations. You have to control that. You have to govern that. That also builds trust with your central teams like IT. But then also being okay with, alright, hey, you guys made a really cool 5S app. My team has a standard 5S app.

You really are married to your UI. I'm not going to come in and rip your UI out, but I will, what I will ask you to do is replace the back end tables to match our tables, so that we can roll that data up globally, right? Or let me just make sure that your tier board process matches what the standard is.

If I'm not super engaged with your site right now and you build a fancy tier board in Tulip, as long as those KPIs are the KPIs we need, cool, have at it. I'm not going to come in and rip it out, right? So there's a, there's a line to tow when it comes to kind of forcing one standard versus allowing people to kind of play in a walled garden, if you will, around standards.

So for us, it's really data structure, architecture, compliance with IT. And then also, um, you know, on our really centralized applications that we've done a lot of development work on its approval workflows. So we don't have approval workflows on everything, but the apps that were really tightly governed and we know meet our requirements, meet our data standards and are really linchpins for a lot of our plants do have approval flows on them.

Because once I leave, I want you to keep using it, but I don't take it in there and mess with things. My team needs to be in the loop. If you're thinking about changing some of those really critical applications, 

Erik: Yeah, interesting. Okay, so, last question. You're five years into this role, tons of learnings, tons of perspective, tons of experience, but you're also, you're further along than a lot of people who are just either considering, you know, looking at you and saying, Wow, I didn't realize I could Do this as a professional grown up, you know, they're in university now thinking about their future or maybe they're in industry and they're trying to understand how they're going to take this on and manage both the availability of this new class of digital tools with like wanting to empower the people on the front line at the same time needing to have control over in many cases like regulated industries.

What what advice do you have to these folks? 

Audrey: I would say number one. Go to the Gemba, go to where the work happens, right? If you're not spending time in the plants and when you're in the plant, on the plant floor, talking to the people, running the equipment, talking to people, assembling things, then you're doing it wrong.

You have to give yourself that perspective. You, even if you're a leader, even if you're a VP, even if you're a chief, whatever, go to the plant floor and spend time on the plant floor and talk to people there about their pain points. Super enlightening, super illuminating. And it could be something as easy as.

I still can't get Wi Fi here, right? So get that perspective, number one, super, super important. And then I really also think be willing to fail, but fail fast and learn from it. So if something doesn't work, great. Now we know that that's not going to work. Keep it moving. What else can work? I think being okay with failing fast, that's one of the things that's nice about Tulip is we can iterate really quickly.

Ah, right, we forgot that. Let me add it in, right? So, failing fast, getting out to where the work is, and then also I think being transparent. It's hard to get buy in sometimes on our plant floors. People don't trust technology, they don't trust Big Brother, right? And so making sure people believe you, that you're authentic, you're clear about what you're trying to do.

Look, I'm just here to make your life easier. And I'll need your feedback to do that. Right. So I think taking that approach and perspective has definitely helped our team be successful over the past couple of years. 

Erik: Awesome. Well, Audrey, listen, it's been a pleasure chatting with you today. Thanks for all the great work you're doing with an SBD.

And it's a pleasure working with you on the professional side as well. Thanks for taking the time and talking with the audience today. 

Audrey: For sure. Always enjoy our combos, Eric. 

Erik: All right. 

Announcer: We'll talk soon. Bye. Thank you for listening to the Augmented Ops Podcast from Tulip Interfaces. We hope you found this week's episode informative and inspiring.

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