At last week's ARC Advisory Group Forum in Orlando, Skip Holmes, Associate Director, Power, Control and Information Systems for Proctor & Gamble, spoke about the business value of having employees working with industry standards groups. Specifically, he has three people devoting about 10 percent of their time to the Open Modular Architecture Control Systems (OMAC) user group.
In doing so, he revealed something of what leadership is about in manufacturing.
Working with a users group directly impacts P&G's bottom line, according to Holmes by leveraging scale with key suppliers. The deliverables of the users group leads to simplification of automation integration. Its OEMs have access to common solutions that in turn reinforce the automation simplification.
One of the initiatives of OMAC has been the Packaging Working Group. Its "Plug and Pak" best practices could save P&G as much as $15 million, according to Holmes. Another of the deliverables was improved working with Microsoft from the Microsoft Maunfacturers' Users Group (MS-MUG) headed by P&G engineer (since retired) Dave Bauman. This initiative has led to more robust software which Holmes sees yielding increased quality, reliability and capacity.
When I asked him to relate from manager's perspective how these P&G people came to provide this industry leadership, he said that the initiative came from them. They each came to him and made a business case for doing this work. Not being altogether altruistic, Holmes looked at the cost/benefit equation and went with the benefits. He told them to go for it. Then he provided the management backing to do the job.
Where does this fit leadership? First, leadership comes from anyone who sees a problem and a way to solve it. This can come from any level of the organization. Then there is management who doesn't get in the way, but instead says, what can I do to help you do your job better so that the company prospers.
8:38:39 PM 
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