SVP and CIO at Oshkosh Corporation

How does an organization approach its digital transformation in a way that maximizes value for the company and its customers? It’s an important question to consider as companies are embracing digital technologies to gain competitive advantages. So, what approach do you take ? A radical transformation or a discovery-driven gradual approach ? A radical approach is where,digital solutions are pre-chosen based on successful transformations of other companies and applied organization wide. Or a discovery-driven, gradual approach is where opportunities are identified that align with the business strategy and address current real challenges. And then the digital solutions are chosen based on insight from the discovery process and applied at point of impact. For us, digital transformation is about discovering the challenges that exist within the business and applying technologies to improve the safety and productivity of our team members, the quality of our products and improve the efficiency of our facilities around the world.

Oshkosh is an industrial technology company, applying technology and innovation to design and build purpose-built vehicles and equipment for everyday heroes – our firefighters, construction workers, refuse collectors, and other vital members of our communities. As Oshkosh’s Chief Information Officer, I quickly learned that we could harness the innovative culture of Oshkosh and adopt a discovery-driven digital transformation approach. Together with my leadership team, we defined our vision to apply technology to “Maximize the potential of our people, manufacturing assets and data.” With this vision as a north star, my leadership team built three distinct capabilities of Digital Process Automation, Digital Manufacturing and Analytics/AI journey. Then we started discovering meaningful business use cases to create real impact.

We developed an approach grounded in our business strategy. We partnered with the business to co-create solutions and leveraged an ecosystem of partners to deliver real value to our organization. This strategy focuses on developing an innovative team that constantly learns, leverages new technologies and most importantly partners across our businesses to find purposeful solutions for digital disruptions in our business.

"Digital transformation is about discovering the challenges that exist within the business and applying technologies to improve the safety and productivity of our team members, the quality of our products and improve the efficiency of our facilities"

To accomplish effective digital transformations, we built and delivered a framework of processes that drives:

1. A digital strategy and detailed roadmap tied to the business strategy.

2. Co-creation with business and a value-first mindset applied to jointly quantify the business impact (Operating Income and sales growth) of digital initiatives.

3. A culture of discovery, innovation and experimentation coupled with key external partnerships.

We have advanced our digital transformation across the organization and are deploying innovative technologies across every business and functional area like Supply Chain, connected customer experience and manufacturing. This is helping us to deliver value in a new way. Our digital initiatives are helping us to automate human tasks, which allows our team to work on other projects, improve our decision making through analytics, and improve efficiencies in our manufacturing operations. In manufacturing focus areas, these efforts have resulted in several recent project successes, including:

• Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR): Oshkosh is embracing augmented and virtual reality for building robust and immersive training programs. These programs minimize physical training and safety concerns through a better developed digital environment. While previous in-person training might take weeks, digital training can be accomplished in just a few hours.

• Vision AI: Vision AI technology detects issues in-station during the manufacturing process. This ensures that the design intent is being met before it reaches the customer. Our team of engineers leverages Vision AI technology to proactively address challenges before leaving an employee’s work center and eliminating costly downstream rework and potential customer impacts.

• Ubiquitous Indoor Tracking: By utilizing a 3-D digital grid of our facilities and geo-fencing technologies, we are improving our point-of-use metrics in our manufacturing process. This means we can quickly spot and trace disruptions inside the facility and make sure the right piece of equipment is in the right place at the right time. Minimizing disruptions in the manufacturing processes improve the quality of the products being produced.

Every day we’re thinking of new ways to reimagine our business. We prioritize innovation as we know that everyday heroes are using our products for a greater purpose. Our teams around the world are working together to drive digital transformations, and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. At the end of the day, the most important thing our team can do is create an impact that goes beyond us, an impact that is more than a technology but a purpose-filled digital transformation.