Category: Field Notes

In many industries, especially the automotive supply chain, the pace can be unrelenting. Projects move quickly, customer demands shift, and teams often find themselves moving straight from one challenge to the next. The cycle becomes familiar: meet the deadline, breathe for a moment, and move on.

What often gets missed is the pause to recognize success. Documenting and celebrating wins, no matter the size, turns fleeting moments into lasting momentum. Recognition reinforces what worked well, gives teams confidence, and builds a culture that values progress, not just problem-solving.

Here are a few simple ways to build recognition into the rhythm of operations:

Pause with purpose – Taking time out of the daily grind to stand still, even briefly, creates contrast that people remember. When operations stop to share a meal or mark an achievement, it signals that success isn’t just part of the chaos, it’s worth noticing.

Make recognition easy – Awards don’t have to be elaborate. A small token, a gift card, or even a framed certificate handed out in front of peers can carry outsized weight. The key is to make it feel intentional. There are easy-to-implement programs and services that can be woven into any culture to make this process effortless.

Keep momentum rolling – Recognizing effort daily or weekly keeps the “car in motion.” It’s far easier to keep a moving vehicle rolling than to push one that’s stuck. Small, frequent acknowledgments prevent appreciation from stalling out and help teams sustain energy through the long haul.

Celebrating achievements doesn’t mean taking your foot off the gas. It means giving the team fuel for what’s next. In a business that often shifts from urgency to reset without pause, even a small acknowledgment can change how the next challenge feels.

Celebration doesn’t always need a stage. Sometimes it just needs a fork.

Uniting perspectives from operations and IT to drive toward a shared reality.

Last winter, I was brought in to help a client whose operations were feeling the strain from technology challenges and process inefficiencies. The symptoms were visible, but the causes weren’t — different teams saw different realities, and no one had a single, consistent picture to work from.

Because I work hands-on with my clients — often right alongside their teams on the floor — I already understood what a “normal” day looked like. That meant I could design measurements that reflected their real work, not just what the system reports said. I pulled together counts of various daily activities from multiple sources, focusing less on perfect numbers and more on consistent, trustworthy trends.

Some of the most useful data came from unexpected places. For example, overrides — process deviations that stalled work — weren’t easy to extract from any system. But I found that each one generated an email to subscribed end-users. By analyzing thousands of these emails with AI, we could categorize them, identify root causes, and prioritize fixes.

This opened up a second opportunity: while the business waited for technology improvements, some identified root causes could be addressed immediately through targeted training or operational adjustments — freeing supervisors and keeping work moving.

Once we layered business activity data, override patterns, technology error logs, and key project milestones into one visual view, people across both operations and IT could see the same story. We could connect spikes or drops in performance directly to changes in technology or process and measure the impact of each improvement.

The takeaway: You don’t always need perfect data to solve complex problems — you need consistent data that reflects reality. When you combine that with a willingness to dig into unconventional sources, you can uncover solutions that make a difference right now, not just after the “big fix” is deployed.

It’s easy to get caught up in what’s still left to fix. That’s the nature of this kind of work — always looking for the next constraint, the next improvement, the next fire to put out. But once in a while, it’s worth pausing to look back at how far things have come.

This photo is from a new distribution facility in Laredo, where we’re nearing go-live after months of operational planning, systems design, infrastructure implementation, validating, and adjusting. What started as an empty floor and a long list of decisions has taken shape — and the racks going up felt like a quiet milestone. The cherry on top will be watching it all come to life when operations start flowing through next week.

There’s still work ahead (there always is), but this is a good moment to mark.