Chad Wicklund: I’ve spent a lot of time in design engineering, so I know the design side, and then I am getting to know the sourcing side. So we’re implementing aPriori really in both design and the sourcing side of this.
Leah Archibald: And have you in the past used one system that goes for both design and sourcing, or this is new?
Chad Wicklund: Prior to aPriori, we really used just a cost per pound analysis to find outliers and negotiate or we would do competitive costing with supply base throughout the supply base.
Leah Archibald: So how has it changed since you’ve adopted aPriori.
Chad Wicklund: Really, our ability to get to the detail of what costs are the drivers, not just the cost of steel and the per pound, it’s is the labor rate different? Is the cycle time different? Is there a bend that is causing something to be way more expensive? Things like that.
Leah Archibald: And we’ve talked this morning about the tremendous pressure that is facing manufacturing right now. You’re likely feel pulled in a lot of different directions. Could you describe just the pressures that are facing your industry and how you’re trying to get a hold of them?
Chad Wicklund: Yeah. Not only from supply chain, just being able to get parts to being localization into markets where we maybe were globalized before, and just the competitiveness in the market place is challenging. And so trying to use the tool to help us move products to a different manufacturing location or develop a lower cost products from the get go.
Leah Archibald: And what success have you seen so far with aPriori?
Chad Wicklund: We’ve seen really some of our anchoring or moving steel parts around, we’ve been able to use the tool with better data to drive our cost out anywhere from 15% reductions on a collection of steel parts.
Leah Archibald: Which is not nothing in this current time.
Chad Wicklund: No.
Leah Archibald: In this current time.
Chad Wicklund: Yeah. And we’ve been very competitive in the way we sourced in the past and so to find that at this stage of our journey on cost reduction is pretty impressive.
