The Data Heads

Last Friday evening I drove up two hours to Valpo University. The Business Department at Valpo has an annual lecture series, and this year’s topic was Sustainable Business. I have no real connections with Valpo, but when I got a notice about the lecture from an associate, I followed the link to a video clip about the keynote speaker, Ray C. Anderson. If you’ve followed my posts with the tag “Environmental Sustainability” you won’t be surprised that I made the trip.)

Anderson gave a compelling talk. He is an industrialist - actually an industrial engineer by training. His company, Interface Global, is a $1B carpet and floor coverings company. Fifteen years ago Interface began climbing what he calls “Mount Sustainability”, with the goal of meeting the United Nations definition of sustainability by 2020:

”Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

I really appreciated the fact that Anderson is rooted in the industrial world and is actually doing something. At the risk of oversimplifying it sometimes seems like there are two camps in the environmental debate: the environmentalists who have all the theories and spend their time throwing stones and distrusting the industrialists, and the industrialists who focus on “the message” and are mostly not doing much besides “greenwashing.”

Anderson had the passion of an environmentalist and the discipline of Six Sigma Black Belt.

His talk oscillated between the macro and the micro. On the macro level he addressed issues of species extinction, depletion of resources, and the burden of industrial waste. On the micro level he dove into details of specific projects (very Six Sigma-like) where his company has reduced energy use and waste, switched to renewable power sources, and taken responsibility for recycling their products at the end of the product life cycle.

Another thing that impressed me was the fact that there were probably about 100 undergrad business students who gave up their Friday night to come to an evening of lectures. How cool is that?

I bought Anderson’s latest book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. When he signed it we talked briefly about all the gap between his company and the manufacturers who didn’t seem to see beyond the end of the quarter, much less a five year plan, much less to the next generation. His parting comment? “One mind at a time. One mind at a time.”

I don’t think I’ve ever plugged a book before in this blog. I urge you to buy Anderson’s book, and watch some of the videos floating out there on the internet. Pass it around your office and to your CEO.

And he got me thinking about what’s next on Hertzler Systems’ sustainable business journey.

One mind at a time.

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Back in August I gave a sneak preview of a new case study that I was working on. Yesterday I finally completed it and published it on our web site. You can read the entire study and download a copy to share with colleagues.

My favorite quote?

“We can’t credit GainSeeker with all of these benefits. We still had to do the work. But we would never have been able to capture the changes we needed to make if we didn’t have GainSeeker. We’d never have been able to do any of this if we didn’t have the system. So truly it deserves the credit. GainSeeker is the tool that enabled our people to make the changes.”

Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

At today’s web seminar How Best-in-Class Food Processing Companies Drive Profits, Increase Efficiency and Reduce Risk, my colleague Tom Albrecht offered a number of free resources for individuals who would like more information. (If you missed the live presentation, you can still view the recorded version.) We decided to put links to all of these resources on one page so that you can use this as a starting point.

Here are the resources:

• The Aberdeen Group’s Event Driven Manufacturing Intelligence Benchmark Report.
• A supporting white paper that examines the role of real-time data in improving profitability and customer satisfaction.
• The Aberdeen Group’s Cost of Quality Benchmark Report.
• Free gap analysis software that helps you rate your ‘Gap to Entitlement‘ to a data driven organization
• Case Studies and video presentations from McCormick Flavor Division, Hormel Foods, Consolidated Biscuit, and Del Monte Foods. Additional case studies and white papers are available from the Portfolio pages on our website.

Of course, if you’d like to link to this, share it with a friend or make a comments, please do so. Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.