21ST CENTURY HITS THE FACTORY FLOOR,
Da ny Nadeau has spent most of his career managing factory workers. He’s now manager of ArcelorMittal’s Contrecoeur-West Bar steel mill, just outside Montreal. But every time he has come into a new plant, he’s heard the same story.
“This place is terrible,” workers say. “Management has no idea how to train people. And the communication is worse.”
What does it take to solve such a stubborn problem? A couple of 20- somethings who understand both the factory floor and the potential of mobile data and handheld video. And, it may help if one of the founders has family connections that enabled them to develop their solution i n- house before releasing it as a productivity tool for manufacturers worldwide.
Alexandre Leclerc, 28 — the second son of Denis Leclerc, president of Leclerc Groupe, whose six factories in the U. S. and Canada produce cookies and snacks sold in more than 20 countries — started working in the family’s plants at age 15. He knows all the problems with unread bulletin boards and binders full of unreadable training manuals. He even found one of the biggest challenges occurs every day at the workstation level: When the second shift starts work, there’s never time for a briefing from the day shift. So nagging problems go un- solved and seat-of-the-pants solutions unshared.
As well, working in the Leclerc factory in Williamsport, Pa., Alexandre Leclerc saw that a $ 500- million company had trouble transferring production savvy between plants: “It traumatized me that the new factory couldn’t access all the knowledge we learned in Canada.”
The challenge they faced was how to shift production wisdom and best practices out of individuals’ heads and onto a shared digital platform.
Three years ago, Leclerc recruited his best friend, software engineer Antoine Bisson, to devise a 21st- century solution to these oldschool issues. Their breakthrough was to bring in iPads for each workstation. Workers can use the tablets to document each problem with short videos and track their efforts to fix it. And when workers need training tools or safety information, they can access videos at their machines.
After establishing that their knowledge- sharing platform, Poka, enhances communication and reduces downtime by an average of six per cent, Leclerc and Bisson formed a company to sell their solution. “We knew from experience that all manufacturers have the same issues,” Leclerc said.
Investors agreed. Quebec City- based Poka has raised two rounds of financing from venture capitalists in Quebec and Silicon Valley: $2.8 million in January 2015 to build the engineering team, and more than $4 million in 2016 to build out the customer- success team. The company now has 32 employees, and sales offices in Toronto, Atlanta and Philadelphia.
While Poka does not release sales figures, Leclerc said revenues grew more than 300 per cent this year. Its platform is now in 150 factories, and new projects are coming up in Mexico, the Netherlands, and Russia. Poka, is profitable, he said. “Right now we have plenty of runway.”
Nadeau, who oversees ArcelorMittal’s bar- steel plant in Contrecoeur, east of Montreal, saw his first Poka demonstration last December. Mindful of the communication problems he’s never solved, he gathered 20 of his company’s top executives to hear a sales pitch from Leclerc.
The world’s biggest steel company now has Poka installed in two Montreal-area plants as a pilot project, and expects to expand it to other locations in Ontario and Quebec by the end of 2017. “People are already taking photos and videos of problems,” Nadeau said. At breaks, employees who used to check Facebook on their phones now scan their machines’ profile pages on Poka, he added.
Employee- made v i deos of one of the mill’s key machines have already reduced repair times from seven hours to just 15 minutes. “The system changes people’s mindsets,” said Louis- Philippe Péloquin, communications director for ArcelorMittal Long Products Canada. “It encourages them to react to a problem and come up with solutions.”
Po kai sal so a really powerful tool for employee attraction and retention, Péloquin said. In an aging plant in a century- old in- dustry, “Young people want to work with us because we have new technology.”
Simplicity is the key, Leclerc said. “When you look at enterprise software, it’s so complex and ugly, and costs a fortune.” Poka has a familiar, Facebook- like feel, and costs companies only US$15 a month per employee.
But the payback can be rich. Given that downtime on a production line costs many companies $15,000 an hour, a company with 100 employees can cover its annual Poka bill by saving just two hours on a single repair.
Leclerc said Poka’s goal is to create extraordinary value. “We want to encourage full rollouts. We want to become the standard in the industry.”