Digital transformation for materials testing manufacturers: 5 mindset shifts to spark success

2. Embrace change

One reason Dickson’s digital transformation has been successful in the last two decades is that the company has enthusiastically embraced change.

The classic fable about the oak and the reed helps explain why agile companies are better suited to survive periods of disruption: when the “winds of change” blow, large, rigid organizations are likely to blow over (or be seriously damaged), whereas flexible organizations (like reeds) bend in the wind but do not break.

So how can large, ITW Test and Measurement companies become more “reed-like” so they’re positioned to seize new opportunities? Let’s take a look at Dickson’s experience.

How Dickson embraces change

The Dickson of today is a very different organization than it was 20 years ago when we started working together. But it’s important to recognize that the company’s transformation has been gradual and ongoing––and those two things are key to its success.

Dickson’s team didn’t update one product and decide they were “done” with modernization. They recognized that their industry was entering an era of ongoing disruptions and that, if they wanted to be able to stay competitive and meet customers’ needs, they’d have to explore new ways of doing things.

Also important is that they started small, with the goal of solving a straightforward problem: understand what people were doing on their website.

That first change gave them access to a world of data and analytics that they then used to power ongoing changes and updates.

But not all ideas came from the data. Salespeople were consistently vocal about customer feedback, making product suggestions to integrated, cross-functional teams within the larger organization that included folks from TXI.

You can enjoy similar results by following employees’ curiosity and by asking for customer feedback about your products. Employees and customers who work with different facets of your products every day are often best positioned to identify pain points that can be corrected and opportunities to make things better.

Takeaways for embracing change

1. Start small. Ongoing incremental changes are easier on people and organizations than drastic changes; a ubiquitous culture of accepting change can also greatly reduce the need for dramatic change.

2. Stay attuned to new technologies. We all have that relative who resisted getting a smartphone and then was stranded at the airport and unable to call an Uber. New technology may seem like a luxury until suddenly it isn’t––it’s a necessary foundation for seizing new opportunities.

3. Listen to new ideas. Even if you don’t yet use artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML), your customers no doubt have heard of these things. Your sales team may be fielding questions about them. The industrial firms that win in industry 4.0 will be those that see these questions as a jumping-off point to learn more.

4. Try new approaches. Not every experiment will work, but an organization set up to continuously experiment, learn, and move forward will constantly be learning things that can lead to improvement.

5. Embrace experimentation. This applies to every part of the business: products, technology, pricing, business models, customer care, and beyond. Embracing change means practicing it constantly so that you don’t grow too large and rigid to adapt when conditions shift.

3. Focus on customer needs

Customer experience is a contemporary buzzword for something ITW has cared about forever. And that’s incredibly savvy: between 2007 and 2019, public companies with the best customer experience performed 307 percent better than CX laggards.

But in an era of evolving expectations, meeting customers’ needs is about more than slapping a few sensors on your hardness testers and precision cutters. Let’s take a look at how Dickson has consistently focused on customer needs and how you can create new value streams by doing the same.

How Dickson focuses on customer needs

Industrial companies may sell mostly to businesses, but it’s still individual people who use, interact with, and depend on their products.

Before wifi connectivity and digital solutions were the norm, for example, it was standard practice for medical employees to manually check temperatures on medication refrigeration units. There was nothing “wrong” with that system. But as customers grew accustomed to real-time data in other parts of their life (say, to track the location of a pair of shoes they ordered online), the Dickson team recognized that they’d expect the same level of visibility into loggers and chart recorders.

Reimagining its analog products to include digital sensors with wifi connectivity and data visualizations empowered Dickson to meet a much more pressing customer need: peace of mind.

Now, a lab director can get a temperature change notification while they’re watching TV at night and take immediate action to investigate and address the cause. This makes it much easier to not only protect the valuable components of an organization but also relax and enjoy life with the knowledge that, if something goes wrong, you’ll know right away.

That’s what it means to cater to customer experience.

We might start by asking customers about their day-to-day work to identify places where they experience frustration. From there, we’d explore ways to alleviate that frustration, including via product updates.

Takeaways for focusing on customer needs

1. Ask for customer feedback regularly.

2. Be proactive about customer experience; don’t wait for “problems.”

3. Recognize that customer experiences with consumer products affect expectations for using ITW Test and Measurement company products.

4. Remember that business buyers and users are also individual people.

5. Understand that listening to and acting on customer feedback will lead to deep, abiding customer trust.