How This Senior Program Manager Transformed a Legacy System with IoT: Key Insights and Complexities Revealed

Yeah, definitely. So when I was in my previous role, I was working in the energy sector and we were rolling out a new smart IoT storage unit for our customers. So the idea was our customers currently had kind of a very basic. Tank and pump system in their, in their systems that they would use to um basically take our chemical and inject it into their, their pipelines, and every time they would need new product, they would, they would call us and then we would deliver it to them, and um this system was enabled with uh IOT sensors that would essentially be able to gauge product levels, uh, send it back to us, and we would be able to. Uh, proactively deliver our product and chemical to them, uh, but the main design focus that I had to focus on was how do we implement this procedure, as now, our teams and our supply chain teams would be responsible for the process of monitoring these tank levels and delivering it to them. Uh, so the one way we did this after our engineering team developed the prototype was to launch a field trial in one of our locations that the customer had agreed to. And here we truly build out the process on, here are the uh standard operating procedures that would be required to, to effectively operate this, and I was the lead uh lead engineer in designing those operating procedures and coordinating with not only our manufacturing plant, but also our supply chain plant on what, what, what our operating procedure would look like, on what levels that we would trigger to go out and deliver to our customer. Uh, so that required cross-functional collaboration across our organization, as well as the customer, to ensure that this process was as seamless as possible. Uh, there were some hiccups along the way. Uh, our supply chain teams, this is an old company, they were very used to doing things in an old fashioned way, but in order to essentially meet the customer where they are and, and, uh, come and to adopt some of these new technologies, we needed to push more aggressively and, uh, boost our customer service offering. Uh, so, uh, by doing so, we were able to essentially boost our levels of customer service and the reliability we provided our customers in terms of inventory management. And, and this helped boost our customer relationship a long way. OK,

Yeah, the most complex part of that system was essentially Uh, my, so my, my follow up question to that is, do you mean from an engineering standpoint or just a process improvement standpoint?

OK, the thing that kind of hurt my brain the most was from a process improvement standpoint, the idea was that our supply chain teams are very used to our customers reporting when they needed product and basically ordering on a PO type of basis. However, this would change to where our supply chain team would need to. To be proactively involved in, hey, this is when we need to go out and deliver a product, and our customers would be left out of the burden of, you know, ordering the product and oftentimes running into inventory management issues where they didn't have enough of our chemicals uh to move forward in, in, in their business operations, uh, so really the main process was a, was a change in mindset on our supply chain teams that, that we needed to overcome and, uh, uh, and, and push through. And a couple of ways that we were able to do this was by implementing this in uh in short bursts, so not rolling out the product all at once, but really field trialing it and prototyping it to make sure that we got uh a succinct operating procedure in place to make sure that we were doing this effectively and to our customers' level of satisfaction.

Yeah, in, in terms of complexity, this required a couple of changes in essentially the way our, our, our tech functioned. So one, now that we had IOT sensors put into place, this was pushed out to basically uh imagine like on your computer you would be able to see what your tank levels were and. One of the things, a couple of things that we have to do to make this more effective was, OK, tell our engineers to set triggers and levels that uh were, were based on each individual site's usage. So each individual sites would require uh almost a a a a different uh procedure to where, you know, hey, like this site's using this much volume, so, you know, we gotta send this out. Uh, we've got to send a tank out at this time of day and so forth, and this all had to be tied into our supply chain network where, you know, they're managing thousands of deliveries every day. They need to know every Friday what they're going to send out next week, and that can't really vary based on what's happening in an individual site. So we had to set up, OK, so what's going to fit in best with our supply chain team's network, OK, like every Friday we're sending out our trucks for next week. But at the same time, managing each individual unit's uh unique operating procedures and saying that, OK, hey, this site consumes this much, this site consumes this much, so the real management issues was doing that inventory management and integrating it with our supply chain and uh our logistics teams uh were functioning.

Right, so my, my main role was our so our engineering team was responsible for designing the, the, the storage unit and designing the IOT sensors itself, uh, but when one of the issues we faced was when we did this field trial itself was, OK, how is this, um, going to fit in to how our, um. Supply chain team sends our um our our our tanks out, so, so my goal was essentially to figure out, OK, um, now that all this information and data is being tied in, how do we collectively take that data and. Deliver it to our supply chain teams to where we don't want them to just look at the data and understand it. All we want them to do is saying that, OK, hey, this is what we gotta do next week. Uh, so my role was working with our engineering teams to figure out how we could condense, uh, those tank levels and inventory levels and change it into like an actionable plan, um, for our supply chain teams to basically take that, take that information and, and do their job effectively. So I work closely with the engineering team on that and developing kind of the um. The general logic of, of what those steps would encounter, uh, some of it was, OK, so this is kind of the, the level of programming, the, the kind of the design features of that programming that we need, and then we also for our supply chain team to say, OK, this is what's coming in, and this is the steps that you need to execute based on um the information that is coming in. Got it.

Yeah, the most important thing that I learned out of that experience was, um, uh, you know, if I, like our engineering teams were very able and capable of doing the programming and the design features of all that, um, but really implementing that change in our organization, uh, proved to be a little difficult, uh, all of a sudden, this was a new pro uh process, a new procedure that was being implemented, uh, but. How to basically take this new technology and condense it into something very simple and very actionable that our, uh, that our team's gonna, that our uh stakeholders could implement effectively, uh, so, you know, really drilling down to, OK, so this is what our supply chain team does on a day to day basis, and how this new technology could help them continue to do that without changing their daily operation procedures and adding an additional level of complexity. That would hurt our uh effectiveness and our efficiencies. OK. Let's finish my note here.