schneiderism

Last month I took my team on a three day innovation tour, the goal of which was to spend time with and survey a diversity of businesses that had overcome significant challenges. The commonality between them is that they achieved this by creating and supporting a culture of innovation, by thinking far beyond their typical model. The results in each case was that these unrelated companies had accomplished incredible change in relatively short periods of time, and these changes were game changing events within their respective industries. With all of the companies we were fortunate to spend generous time with senior leadership and really begin to understand what it took to ideate, support and execute such significant reinvention. We visited a total of six companies, but there are two that I want to focus on as their stories are especially compelling, and this is the first in a two part series. This was our messiest stop, and we had to go to Iowa to see it:

Robotic Brickworks
Bricks just aren’t that sexy anymore. They are still desirable as a building material and various designers have come up with some cool and innovative applications of the brick, but really… a brick is a brick. Historically, they were made at smallish family-run brickworks that were distributed around the country and served the brick laying needs of an immediate area or region. Like many other manufacturing industries, brickworks have been disappearing altogether or have been bought up and merged into larger industrial conglomerates. This has become an incredibly competitive business, and brickworks located in the southeast, northeast and midwest vie for the same customers all of the time. Typically, because a brick is in fact a brick, this comes down to a competition on price.

United Brick decided to get aggressive and dig into what it really means to be competitive in their industry. Business as usual in the brick business did not bode well for their future. They knew that they had to continue to manage costs effectively, but their approach needed to be innovative as compared to the labor management solutions of their competitors. The leadership of United Brick trekked to Europe and toured manufacturing operations looking for opportunities to innovate. They landed on one immediately. Robots. This is a significant opportunity, as serious contributors to the cost of manufacturing brick is labor and the rate of flaws in the manufacturing process (and how those two are linked…). Typically, a brickworks with a traditional human manufacturing line will have a failure rate between 10 and 20%. They believed that with a robotic production line they could shrink this failure/flaw rate to well under 10%, which would be a significant reduction, and reduce labor costs dramatically in the process. The second opportunity they found was by accident while visiting a factory facility in Spain looking at fuel alternatives for firing their gigantic kilns. Traditionally, the kilns had been fired by coal or natural gas… both very expensive and coal obviously being incredibly damaging to the environment. A factory manager at this facility in Spain mentioned in passing that they should explore petcoke as a fuel alternative. Petcoke is a waste product from the petroleum industry and it is typically dumped in landfills. This idea had serious promise.

The team returned from Europe and set about investigating the options they had uncovered. They partnered with a French robotics company, after intensely interviewing several from around the world, for designing both a fully robotic brick manufacturing facility and in creating the world’s first petcoke fired brick kiln. The United Brick facility in Iowa would be the test case for the technologies they created together. The French robotics company dispatched a team to Iowa to begin what would become an intense and valuable partnership. At the same time they began intense research into creating the world’s first petcoke fired kiln, and again partnered with the French robotics company to both fully automate the firing process AND provide this alternative, efficient, cost effective, and more environmentally friendly fuel alternative. The plant opened this last spring, and to great success. First, the plant is achieving its production goals with one shift, though the robots would not complain if they were asked to work more. Second, the failure rate for the bricks produced has dropped below 10%. Lastly, the prototype petcoke fired kiln is working incredibly well, and the cost savings here alone contributes significantly to United Brick’s competitive edge.