Ep. 175: Greg Hoggard - IT & OT. The Accuracy of Technology for Change

Contact Greg Hoggard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-hoggard-cma-9a201b9/

Counting Eggs With AI: https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/february-2022-counting-eggs-with-ai/

Full Transcript:
Adam: (00:04)
Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. Kicking things off for you again is your host Adam Larson and I'm excited to introduce our featured guest for today's episode, Greg Hoggard. Greg is CFO and VP of finance and IT at Rembrandt Foods where he is responsible for all aspects of finance and accounting, IT, and grain purchasing. Greg co-authored an article in Strategic Finance to show how computerized vision and AI adoption can create significant value for an organization. In this episode, he discusses the value of aligning IT and OT and getting everyone in the company speaking the same language. Keep listening to hear how the intersection of AI and technology with finance leads to improved strategic performance.

Mitch: (00:57)
So Greg, in your opinion, what is the value of, or really maybe even the need for information technology or IT and operational technology or OT to report into the same group.

Greg: (01:11)
So for those that may not work in manufacturing, operational technology, so operations and technology, which are usually called a controls group, for those who work in manufacturing, they're the ones who deal with the hardware that collects the data. They have a little bit of a different talent than the IT group. They're data. They're not data miners necessarily, but they they're the ones who collect the data from the machines. They're a little bit of electrician, a little bit of, I hate saying maintenance. They're not maintenance, but they understand all those things. They understand how the operation is supposed to work and where the data's coming from. Think of those screens that you see in those old buttons and the really big, old manufacturing steel mill or just old manufacturing. When you see it on a television show, something, all of those buttons, all those controls, that's all done by operational technology groups.

Greg: (02:14)
Whereas on the IT side, they really are the ones that control the data and the servers and the data bases, they make that data consumable for end users, and govern that data so that it's trustworthy and reliable. I think what we're seeing, these days in the last few years, especially, is that this whole internet of things push where everything is communicating with everything, those lines are starting to cross much more often than they used to, between like the operational technology groups and the information technology groups and what I've seen especially here at Rembrandt is that when those two teams work together, it becomes an unstoppable force. when those two teams are working separately and disparately, it can become a little confusing and unmanageable. So the need to have them report together, I think really it just drives change a lot faster and it gets you to the right answer much quicker.

Mitch: (03:26)
So it sounds like, I would assume you mentioned this, you know, really being in manufacturing, but majority of businesses, they most likely require some additional change, right? Some new alignment to really implement this kind of strategy. So as far as change management goes, what are some of the key considerations for making this shift with the technology that we're talking about? The reporting. And really, I think it comes down to getting everybody from maybe two different sides to speak the same language. So, you know, what kind of steps would you recommend for that?

Greg: (04:01)
So on the change management side, it's crucial that everybody understands their KPIs and their OKRs. So objectives, key results, and key performance indicators, really the goals that they're operating under, or goal posts, I guess you could say, I like to be a little more open-ended sometimes, but I think if you don't have that, then good luck with change. You gotta have that good starting point where everybody's working towards the same goal. I think that clear communication cross-functionally and just within the singular departments is necessary. And then I think that once you establish those clear metrics, you have, well at first you have to have something that, that can be measured, right? I mean, you can't have a metric that's not measurable. So having something that's accurate and objective to measure that goal is needed. And then really, I think these data visualizations, are much better tools to report feedback and then to measure against these goals than traditional scorecards and numbers.

Greg: (05:19)
Most people don't like to look at numbers, I don't know if I should quote a book here, but I'm actually reading a book right now called Making Numbers Count, which, is a really good book by Chip Heath. And he's talking a lot about how most people really aren't wired to speak the numbers language. And I think as a accountants, we are wired to speak that way. At least we've learned that language and we wanna share the numbers down to the 10th decimal point to show that, to prove that we did the work and to prove that this is a real number, but other people get lost. so these visualizations that we're showing now with these tools like Tableau and power BI, those speak so much louder than the numbers that we wanna share. So I think this leads to accountability and acceptance of change. I don't think you can have change without that accountability and that doesn't come without that clear feedback. And then the objective measurements of clear objectives and key results and KPIs,

Mitch: (06:25)
You know, with these metrics and, you know, the communication, everything you just mentioned with change management. I think, you know, the underlying theme here for both sides, you know, both languages, if you will, is the technology itself. I think that's causing the need for change and where people need to potentially, you know, learn a bit more or improve a bit more in their, you know, speaking capabilities, I guess you could say. So if we could just kind of shift from the human side of things and focus on the technological side of things and those resources for a moment, when adapting or implementing technology and, you know, increasing the need for this change management, what should our listeners really be most aware of when it comes to technology implementation?

Greg: (07:14)
So I'm reminded of an experience during this, that I've been on with the company Rembrandt that I work for now and the team that we're working with. We, so I'll take a little bit dive into the story that was published as well at this point, but we have these analog counters. It's just an example. And these analog counters are just old technology. I mean, analog counting has been around since what the probably thirties, forties, maybe even before that, but anytime anything passes under this analog counter, it's counted as an egg in our case. So we have these counters on every single row of every single column of every single barn in our facility. And these counters, like I said, count anything that passes under that, their measure, their scope there and what we found, at the very beginning of this journey, we wanted to know if the measurement was accurate.

Greg: (08:18)
So we performed an audit of the counters and we lined a hundred eggs up behind each of these counters before the start of the day. And then we turned them on and then afte...