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...