Podcast: Texas Pride Trailers a prime example of digital transformation success

LAS VEGAS—Digital transformation success, when it happens for a manufacturer and that elusive ROI comes around, is a great story that we at Smart Industry can’t resist, and when we met Bradly Walker of Texas Pride Trailers here, we couldn’t resist telling his company’s transformative story for an episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast.

Walker, who is Madisonville, Texas-based Texas Pride’s chief engineer and digital transformation leader, turned out to be an impressive spokesman for the trailer maker last week here at the Hexagon LIVE technology conference, where he joined Smart Industry’s Scott Achelpohl and Dennis Scimeca, senior editor for technology at sister brand IndustryWeek, for an informative program.

For this episode, we focused less on the 100% American-made products—dump trailers, gravity tilts, power tilts, flatbeds, car haulers, low boys, and roll-offs—that Texas Pride manufactures and more on the plugged-in ways, with the help of Hexagon's products and support, that the company goes about its business. Sales, inventory, warranty, and production functions all have been transformed from a years-old reliable but cumbersome Excel-based system at Texas Pride.

ROI has been monumentally improved, and Walker described how the company’s ability to scale and expand its operations has been radically transformed. In this episode, he also offers some lessons-learned (like the company’s purchase of touchpads for employees to use when they preferred their own smartphones) along the digital transformation journey. An instructive episode, brought to you by Smart Industry.

Below is an edited excerpt from this podcast:

Dennis Scimeca: As Scott mentioned, this is a pen-and-paper-analog to digital story. So, what sort of data were you recording and sharing with an analog system?

Bradly Walker: The short answer is everything, from accounting to lead generation, was all done in Excel. That handoff was passed to production as a physical paper copy of an Excel spreadsheet. That was then turned into a manually typed sort of work order or production. It was manually tracked through production where we were. You know, literally handwritten department status updates once a day at the end of the day in production.

If warranty had a claim that they were trying to look into, it was rifling through paper copies of different records and quality control checklists, trying to troubleshoot something, trying to glean some information about what transpired with a certain unit. It was all done in Excel, all done manually.

DS: Was there a precipitating event or a lightbulb moment that made you realize that we can't stick with this analog system anymore?

BW: To go digital, it was a couple of different things. I wouldn't say there was some acute incident where we said we have to change our ways, we have to move away from Excel. I was the warranty manager at the time. I wanted a more digitalized, easily accessible sort of quality control database that I could look back to. That was kind of what opened my eyes and ears to the digital transformation world.

About the same time, we were also talking that we'd like to build a new facility, we would like to make a big scale push. We were having lots of success, and we wanted to capitalize on that. And while I wanted the quality control aspect of it, we also as a company realized there was no way that we could scale to what we wanted the way we were doing them in Excel, we had to get things in the database, had to automate some mundane processes. This is if we wanted to scale with a manageable increase in overhead.

DS: Just to be clear, what's the system we're talking about, the digital system you went with?

BW: We went with Nexus (by Hexagon). We did some R&D on several different platforms, and we landed on Nexus. Generally, the question was do we use a more custom software solution like Nexus, which is fully developed and built for you.

The problem that we had was we were so well-established, we had established processes that worked. Now those were tied into an Excel spreadsheet, so going with a custom software solution like Nexus allowed us to build something in an app that married what we were already doing in manufacturing. So, we made the system match the process, not match it with some off-the-shelf solution.

DS: Did you have to get buy-in from anyone to start deploying the software and, if so, from whom?

BW: Initially, our CEO was the one who signed off on the capital expenditure to get those initial workflows built. We're not in the business of, you know, forcing our people to do something that they don't like. That's not going to behoove them. So, we had conversations early and often with the guys on the floor that we were going to be asking to interact with this interface.

And we got their feedback. What are your pain points? What annoys you about the way you do things now? There's a pay sheet, there's a tracking sheet there. I have to fill out this paperwork every day. OK, great, we can automate all of that.

What else? Gaining an understanding of not necessarily just what they do, but how they do it. What are the mechanics of how they do their jobs? Making sure that we had those workflows available in Nexus, not just for the standard work, but for all the exceptions that they manage.

When you have a very manual process, that makes exceptions easy because you have to kind of do the same thing to every unit. But when you look at automation, you have to make sure that you can handle most of those exceptions. And, so, we had conversations a lot early on when we would get a demo. The guys on the floor were the first ones to see it.