Featuring Roy Vasher, Steve Dunlop, Ananth Iyer, and Dr. Angus McLeod, all affiliated with Purdue University. Hosted by Mark Graban from KaiNexus.
SMART MANUFACTURING THE NEW NORMAL: A TP3 Strategy
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This panel was built around a single framework and a single refusal. The framework is TP3 -- Technology, People, Process, Product -- a way of thinking about manufacturing competitiveness as a whole system rather than a set of separate problems. The refusal is the panel's insistence that safety, efficiency, and Lean are not trade-offs to be balanced against each other. The pandemic made the case unavoidable: it broke supply chains, shifted workforce availability overnight, and voided operating assumptions that had held for years. The panel's response is that protecting people and staying competitive are not opposing goals -- they are interconnected, and a holistic operating strategy can hold all of them at once.
The four presenters are affiliated with Purdue University and its Dauch Center for the Management of Manufacturing Enterprises, abbreviated DCMME -- a center, as Roy Vasher noted, that had been helping manufacturing companies improve productivity for over 32 years. Each presenter took one element of TP3. The session is framed for manufacturing, but the panel was explicit from the opening that the concepts apply to almost any industry, and that the manufacturing examples are illustrations rather than limits.
Mark Graban hosted as moderator. The panel grew out of a suggestion from Roy Vasher, whom Graban had first interviewed on his Lean blog podcast more than a decade earlier.
Roy Vasher is an Assistant Professor in Purdue's EMBA program, a Purdue-WHIN education consultant, and a Lean consultant. He is a retired executive of Toyota Motor Manufacturing and the author of a book on Toyota supply chain management.
Steve Dunlop is Managing Director of the Dauch Center for the Management of Manufacturing Enterprises (DCMME) and the Global Supply Chain Management Initiative (GSCMI) at Purdue.
Ananth Iyer is Senior Associate Dean at the Krannert School of Management and holds the Susan Bulkeley Butler Chair in Operations Management. He is also the academic director associated with the center.
Dr. Angus McLeod has worked in transformational roles across a wide range of industries, holding 13 main-board directorships, and has consulted for blue-chip companies including Glencore-Xstrata, J&J, and Deloitte. At the time of the webinar he was consulting in association with the Purdue center.
This was an external-presenter panel. The four were, at the time, in the final stages of a book on the TP3 approach, which they expected to publish the following month.
Steve Dunlop opened the substantive content with the Product element, framed around capacity utilization. Traditional capacity utilization, he said, trends fairly level or rises steadily as a company makes incremental adjustments. The pandemic broke that into three distinct stages.
Stage one was the first shock -- what companies needed to do to operate and keep operating as the pandemic hit, including sorting out what counted as an essential business. Stage two was the shutdown period -- what activities to take on, what planning to do, how to anticipate the return. Stage three is the restart, and the implications that come with it. Dunlop noted that organizations were spread across these stages, some still in stage two, some in stage three, and that a particular stage-three problem is dependency: a company can be ready to restart while its suppliers are not.
On products specifically, Dunlop's central point was that managers need to fully understand both the current and the future supply chain, because the supply chain as it was known is going to change. Companies that made Product A were shifting to Product B -- the obvious example being the move into PPE -- and that shift brings new operations, methods, and processes. He walked through a series of moving pieces: supplier diversification and the open question of whether companies that pivoted to PPE would stay there; a demand side made genuinely difficult by changing customer mixes and the problem of forecasting demand when you do not know what is being sold; new tactics for production development; workforce upskilling done during the shutdown so people return better prepared, against the reality that some of the workforce will not return at all; reshoring, with the pandemic increasing the push to bring production back domestically; and tool development, which he framed as a real opportunity -- a moment when integrating new tools and technology, for employees and for production, becomes both possible and necessary.
Angus McLeod took the People element, and began by reframing communication. Communication is not just the message, he said -- it is the building of trust, which underpins everything. His two rules: under-promise and over-deliver, meeting or exceeding expectations; and always follow up, never letting an action or a contact point slip. The goal is to stay ahead of concerns -- for staff, that means the reliability of infection controls, clarity on job losses, clarity on whether part-time work still means full wages; for customers and suppliers, it means keeping ahead of fast-moving news so they understand what is happening and how the company will mitigate it.
McLeod made an unusual argument about families. During the pandemic, some workers were going home but not into the family home -- sleeping in a car, a garage, or a camper van because they were afraid of infecting their families. Involving families makes sense beyond the pandemic, he argued: when a worker is reluctant to come in one morning, a family that understands the worker is valued and has real purpose at work is what gets that worker back out the door. He also sketched the changes coming to the workplace itself -- more shifts, staggered shifts to thin out the flow of people through doors, and more non-operations staff working from home, which he framed as an advantage, including roughly 16 days a year of commuting time returned to people who work from home.
His broader point was about moving from firefighting to strategy. US manufacturing had been firefighting even before the pandemic, largely because of the difficulty of getting and keeping skilled staff. The moment was a good one, he argued, to stop firefighting and move toward structural, strategic management -- advancing agile adaptation, getting ahead of the curve, making good decisions for the competitiveness of the business rather than just reacting. Part of that is having a crisis strategy and learning deliberately from this period, and involving the supply chain in that learning to give them confidence -- a point he extended to other disruptions, noting predictions that the next pandemic is only ten years away, and that tornadoes and severe winters threaten businesses too.
McLeod's central tool was a skills matrix for multitasking to cover unexpected absences -- whether from furlough, infection, or simple reluctance to come in. The matrix is visual, so when someone is missing it is fast to see who else can fill the role. Each person's capability in a skill is shown as a circle filled in quadrants: an empty circle means no knowledge; one quadrant means some knowledge not yet applied; a half-filled circle means actively working in the role; three quadrants means fully capable with limited supervision; a full circle means able to do the task and to supervise and mentor others. A square around a symbol indicates the person can also do repair and maintenance. The left side of the matrix, in blue, covers skills. The right side, in green, covers behaviors -- and McLeod noted that over the last 15 to 20 years, major companies, including the world's biggest mining company and GE, have added behavioral norms to these matrices: things like infection control, questioning, and accountability now sit alongside technical skills as things a company calibrates and certifies.
He closed with bite-sized learning -- showing one of his own apps for staff retention training, designed for furlough periods, delivering daily sessions on a phone or iPad that combine reading, video, sometimes a quiz, and a brief reflection shared on a social platform so people stay connected. And he ended on a glass-half-full framing of the recovery as an opportunity not just to recover lost business but to compete better and grow -- through remote expert support, agile teams able to move fast in a volatile and ambiguous environment, and a genuine commitment to valuing people through training, pay, reward, and recognition.
Roy Vasher took the Process element and introduced the panel's most concrete original contribution: VSMI -- value stream mapping with infection risk mitigation added as an element. Value stream mapping is a methodology Toyota used for years to eliminate waste and make improvements, and it is now a standard tool for Lean practitioners worldwide. VSMI extends it to give a visual representation of the plant floor that surfaces potential infection-risk areas.
Vasher walked through the construction. A logical value stream map shows the flow through the factory -- processes as rectangles, a smiley face where a worker is present, no figure where a step is machine-only. Data is added to each process: cycle time, number of workers, scrap rate. A timeline distinguishes value-adding from non-value-adding time, which is how the map exposes the seven wastes. The VSMI step is to add infection risk. Vasher turned the logical map into a top-down, to-scale view of the actual factory, laid over a grid showing aisles and dimensions, then superimposed the process flow onto the real physical layout so the actual locations of processes and the actual positions of workers become visible.
That physical view is what makes infection risk legible. Reddish circles mark workers standing less than six feet apart. A mobile worker or roaming supervisor, by definition, crosses paths with others. Narrow aisles become identifiable risk zones. The map then drives mitigation: move a worker to the other side of a cutting machine to break a proximity risk without major disruption; have the supervisor wear a proximity sensor -- Vasher noted Ford had adopted a wristband for this, and Purdue's electrical and computing department was developing a badge sensor that buzzes within six feet; deploy a Purdue-developed sensor that tracks part-quarantine time and turns green after the set interval; convert two-way aisles to one-way.
Vasher's stronger recommendation was to do the VSMI map in CAD software rather than by hand. CAD gives accurate machine and workstation placement, supports a 3D view, and allows simulation -- you can simulate relocating machines and workstations without physically trying the move, and analyze traffic patterns to redesign flow that keeps people six feet apart, for instance by creating one-way routes on either side of aisles. He acknowledged the obvious tension directly: a Lean expert will see that some of these infection-risk mitigations look like they hurt efficiency in the short term. His answer was the long view -- a factory redesigned to be both safe and, through strategic layout and smart technology, more efficient can recover the efficiency lost to risk mitigation and potentially go further.
Ananth Iyer took the Technology element, and his core argument was not about specific gadgets but about economics. With the pandemic, he argued, it may now be economically feasible to adopt technology at much lower volumes than before. He specified three characteristics the relevant technologies share: they are scalable -- you can try them in one part of the plant, learn them, then expand; reconfigurable -- the rules on whether distancing is 6, 8, or 3 feet may change with CDC and WHO guidance, so the technology must adapt; and able to be either decentralized or centralized depending on whether a firm wants to simply alert workers or actively track them.
Iyer then made the break-even argument explicit. Plot cost against volume. A technology costs a roughly flat amount per unit time. Before the pandemic, you compared that against labor cost as a function of volume; the intersection point, call it A, is the break-even -- below A you use labor, above A you adopt the technology. Then two things shift. First, the infection-mitigation tools the panel described -- VSMI changes, extra shifts, more people, slower production -- raise labor cost per unit of volume, which moves the break-even point left, from A to B, so technology becomes worth considering for a band of volumes where it previously was not. Second, as more companies adopt the technology, the technology providers achieve scale economies and lower their prices, which moves the break-even point left again, from B to C. The combined effect: rising labor cost per unit to protect employees, and falling technology cost, together make technology worth reconsidering across a much wider range of operations.
Iyer then made it concrete. More frequent facility cleaning could mean hiring more custodial staff -- or deploying autonomous cleaning robots, the industrial cousins of the ones people already run at home, now used by retailers too. Assistive robots, or cobots, help where moving people around for distancing leaves a person doing a lifting task alone; they are easily programmed by physically moving them to teach them. Sensor-based tracking and alerts use Bluetooth, RFID, or cameras. Surface and object quarantines matter where shared tools can no longer be handed directly from person to person. Virucidal cleaners and new far-UV technologies address surfaces. Omni-channel interaction -- the webinar itself being an example -- replaces the conference room. AI, machine learning, and video analytics underpin the autonomy. He stressed that all of these share the scalable and reconfigurable properties, and pointed to two further ideas: the digital twin -- a simulatable virtual model of a facility, popularized by GE, now buildable with easier tools, so a company can verify in advance that employees are protected and work can be done on time; and augmented reality for training and onboarding at a distance, citing technicians from ASML in the Netherlands walking Intel employees through equipment repairs remotely -- maintenance provided as a service.
Iyer added one element the others' tracking of people and surfaces did not cover: the air. At Purdue, in anticipation of students returning, fresh air was being recirculated into every room every eight minutes, on the logic that fresh air dilutes the contaminants people would otherwise breathe -- which makes HEPA filters and HVAC systems worth attention. And as an educator, he closed on remote learning, of which the webinar was itself an example, as something likely to become a norm without removing the eventual value of being in a room together.
Iyer pulled the four elements together. The one thing to remember is the acronym -- TP3, Technology supporting People, Process, and Product. It matters because it is how an organization gets agility: people who have been treated well, and whose families are confident they will be cared for, are the people who help a company compete -- who identify which products to target, execute the process, and put the technology to use. The second theme is agility itself, the supply-chain demand-and-supply flexibility Steve Dunlop described, with TP3 as the way to think holistically about bringing an organization back. And the third, from Angus McLeod's framing, is the glass-half-full perspective -- recast by Iyer as: if capacity utilization is at 50%, that is 50% of capacity available to fill. The panel's slide image was four people emerging successfully from whitewater rafting, the four components of TP3 on their paddles.
The Q&A drew out several threads.
On reshoring, the panel framed it as a way to reduce supply chain risk, while being honest that it may not be the economic answer for 100% of volume -- a business still has to be run. The reshoring decision, they noted, predated the pandemic, driven by trade frictions and tariffs. One pattern: local manufacturers that lost volume invested in technology, so a reshored supply chain may involve greater automation alongside domestic production -- 3D printing was the example, its changing economics making it realistic to consolidate many components into a single complex printed part. The answer, as with much of the session, was "it depends," but it is worth considering both as risk management and as a prompt for agile product redesign. Mark Graban added a specific resource: the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit (reshorenow.org) founded by Harry Moser, which offers an online total-cost-of-ownership calculator -- and noted the Initiative's finding that companies often overestimate the benefits of offshoring and underestimate the total supply chain costs and risks.
On sustainability and COVID-19, the panel said the relationship cuts both ways. Sustainability as a recycling loop and careful waste reduction aligns well with quality and doing it right the first time -- careful waste reduction makes existing supply go further. But infection control pushes the other way: if more packaging reduces transmission across cardboard, plastic, and metal surfaces, packaging increases. Iyer's broader observation was that lower traffic had given the general population cleaner air, and people may come to expect it -- which led him to advocate voluntary compliance with environmental standards, both because it is good business and because it signals to customers that a company manages smartly. Graban added the single-use-versus-reusable tension, and the possibility that the answer is compostable or plant-based materials rather than a simple choice between the two.
Asked what software generated the VSMI example, Vasher was candid that he had simply used an Excel grid because he did not have CAD on his desktop -- Visio would be more illustrative, and CAD more accurate.
Asked about settings where six-foot distancing is simply impossible -- steel fabrication was the questioner's example -- the panel pointed to shields between workers and face guards, as in meatpacking plants, and described a company that minimized the number of people who had to work together and, when they had to, used hazmat-style suits with built-in breaks so no one spent a full day in the suit. The deeper point: people often have to work close together only because robots and assistive tools are absent, and rethinking the process can reduce how many people genuinely need to be adjacent. Graban raised the possibility that distancing pushes manufacturing toward classic Lean U-shaped cells where one person does all the work in a self-contained cell -- requiring many copies of the cell to hit volume. Vasher agreed it is part of the redesign, again recommending a CAD system to simulate whether one person can run two or three machines, and noted Purdue's work on a reconfigurable sensor for temporary product quarantine -- a metal surface gets a button-press and a red light that turns green, a plastic surface a different setting -- updatable in bulk by walking the floor with a laptop pushing Bluetooth updates, so solutions are not hard-coded and can be recalibrated as the rules change. Iyer added the distinction between respiratory and surface threats: respiratory infection happens both through proximity and through viral loading of the air in a space, so mitigation means both reducing the number of people in a space and increasing air changes -- easier in summer, when windows help.
The final question covered total cost -- the cost of technology plus implementation and training, and the cost of robots plus maintaining, programming, cleaning, and disinfecting them. Iyer's answer: total cost matters, but the economics genuinely changed, because protecting employees stopped being a choice and became a given, which raised cost. The question is whether technology providers will adapt with new price points -- pay-by-use models, as with cloud computing and software-as-a-service. Total cost of ownership has to include maintenance, and one improving factor is predictive maintenance, where machine learning lets equipment flag issues to the supplier. Graban added the final reframe: the costs are not only the known ones but the risk of potential costs -- what is the risk-weighted cost of a major COVID outbreak in a facility. And Iyer closed on competitiveness as a top-line argument, not just a cost one: if you cannot supply and your competitor can, you lose market share -- which means much of this technology investment makes more business sense when the top line, not just the cost side operations people usually watch, is brought into the calculation.
This panel is a strategy framework from four academics and practitioners, and most of it -- the break-even economics of technology, the redesign of supply chains, the air-handling engineering -- sits well outside what any improvement platform does. KaiNexus is not a sensor vendor or a CAD tool. But several threads in TP3 are improvement-infrastructure threads, and they are worth naming honestly.
The clearest is Roy Vasher's VSMI. A value stream map -- with or without the infection-risk layer -- is an improvement artifact, and its value depends on what happens after it is drawn. A VSMI map identifies proximity risks and proposes mitigations: move a worker, reroute an aisle, add a sensor. Those mitigations are improvements that need an owner, a status, and follow-through, or the map becomes a one-time diagnostic that decorates a wall. The same is true of the seven wastes the underlying value stream map exposes. Infrastructure that captures the improvements a mapping exercise generates, tracks them to done, and keeps the map's findings live as the floor changes is what turns VSMI from an exercise into a sustained practice. Vasher's own point that the map should be revisited as virus knowledge and regulations change is, in effect, an argument that the improvement work the map drives has to be tracked over time.
Angus McLeod's skills matrix is the second connection. A visual matrix of who can do what -- updated as people gain skills, calibrated across technical capability and behavioral norms -- is exactly the kind of artifact that loses its value the moment it goes stale. McLeod's argument for it is speed: when someone is absent, you can see at a glance who can cover. That speed depends on the matrix being current and visible to the people who need it, which on paper is hard to sustain and across multiple shifts or sites is harder still. The behavioral norms McLeod described -- infection control, questioning, accountability treated as things a company calibrates and certifies -- are improvement-culture data, and keeping that data current is a tracking problem.
McLeod's larger theme, moving from firefighting to structural strategic management, is the panel's strongest tie to what improvement infrastructure exists to do. Firefighting is what happens when problems are invisible until they are urgent. Structural management -- getting ahead of the curve, deliberate learning from a crisis period so nothing learned is lost, agile adaptation -- depends on problems and improvements being visible early and on the learning being captured somewhere durable rather than living in the heads of people who may not return. McLeod explicitly called for structuring what is learned in this period and not missing any of it. Capturing improvement work and institutional learning so it survives turnover and disruption is precisely the gap infrastructure fills.
And Ananth Iyer's emphasis on scalable, reconfigurable technology -- try it in one part of the plant, learn it, then expand -- mirrors how improvement itself spreads. A mitigation proven on one line, a process redesign that worked in one cell, should be visible and adoptable everywhere it applies, rather than re-solved plant by plant. That is the spread problem, and it is what cross-organizational visibility addresses.
None of this changes the panel's message. TP3 is a way of seeing manufacturing whole -- technology serving people, process, and product, with agility as the goal. The framework, the economics, and the engineering belong to the panelists. What improvement infrastructure does is hold the part of TP3 that is improvement work: the mitigations a VSMI map generates, the skills and behavioral data a matrix depends on, the learning a crisis produces, and the proven changes that should spread -- so that the shift from firefighting to structural management the panel called for is something an organization can actually sustain.
What is the TP3 framework? TP3 stands for Technology, People, Process, and Product -- with Technology supporting the other three. It is a holistic framework, developed by a group affiliated with Purdue University, for managing manufacturing competitiveness after a major disruption. Its central argument is that safety, efficiency, and Lean are not trade-offs to be balanced against each other but elements of a single operating strategy. The framework is presented for manufacturing but the panel stressed it applies to almost any industry.
Why does the panel say protecting people and staying competitive aren't opposing goals? Because designing work with safety, clarity, and trust in mind often surfaces new opportunities to improve flow, reliability, and performance. The panel's view is that the two goals are interconnected: a workforce that is protected, well communicated with, and confident their families will be cared for is the workforce that helps a company compete -- identifying products to target, executing processes, and putting technology to use. Treating safety as a cost to be minimized against competitiveness misreads how the system actually works.
What are the three stages of capacity utilization Steve Dunlop described? Stage one was the initial shock of the pandemic -- what companies needed to do to keep operating, including defining what counted as essential. Stage two was the shutdown period -- planning, anticipating the return, deciding what activities to take on. Stage three is the restart and its implications, including the problem of being ready to restart while suppliers are not. Dunlop noted organizations were spread across these stages rather than all in the same one.
What is VSMI? VSMI is value stream mapping with infection risk mitigation added as an element. Roy Vasher introduced it as an extension of traditional value stream mapping -- the Toyota-origin method for eliminating waste. A VSMI map converts the logical process flow into a top-down, to-scale view of the actual factory floor, overlaid on a grid, so the real physical positions of processes and workers become visible. That physical view makes infection risks legible -- workers less than six feet apart, roaming supervisors, narrow aisles -- and drives mitigations like relocating workers, converting aisles to one-way, or adding proximity sensors.
Why does Roy Vasher recommend doing VSMI mapping in CAD software? Because CAD gives accurate machine and workstation placement, supports a 3D view, and allows simulation. With CAD you can simulate relocating machines and workstations without physically attempting the move, and analyze traffic patterns to redesign flow that keeps people appropriately distanced. Vasher acknowledged he used an Excel grid for his webinar example only because he lacked CAD on his desktop; he noted Visio would be more illustrative and CAD considerably more accurate.
How does the skills matrix help cover unexpected absences? Angus McLeod's skills matrix is a visual chart of who can perform which tasks, with each person's capability shown as a circle filled in quadrants -- from empty (no knowledge) through half-filled (actively working in the role) to a full circle (able to do the task and to supervise and mentor others). Because it is visual, when a worker is absent it is fast to see who else can fill the role and how to shuffle people to keep production moving. McLeod noted the matrix now also covers behavioral norms -- infection control, questioning, accountability -- not just technical skills.
Why does Ananth Iyer say the economics of technology have changed? Two shifts moved the break-even point. First, infection-mitigation measures -- extra shifts, more people, slower production -- raise labor cost per unit of volume, which makes technology cost-competitive at lower volumes than before. Second, as more companies adopt a given technology, providers achieve scale economies and lower their prices. Together, rising labor cost and falling technology cost mean technology is worth reconsidering across a much wider range of operations than the pre-pandemic break-even analysis would have suggested.
What kinds of technology did the panel discuss? Autonomous cleaning robots for more frequent facility cleaning; assistive robots (cobots) for tasks where distancing leaves a person working alone; sensor-based proximity tracking and alerts using Bluetooth, RFID, or cameras; surface and object quarantine sensors for shared tools; virucidal cleaners and far-UV technologies; omni-channel interaction replacing in-person meetings; AI, machine learning, and video analytics for autonomy; digital twins for simulating a facility; augmented reality for remote training and maintenance; and HVAC and HEPA attention for air quality. The panel stressed these technologies should be scalable and reconfigurable.
Is reshoring a good solution to supply chain risk? The panel framed reshoring as a genuine way to reduce supply chain risk, while being candid that it may not be the economic answer for 100% of a company's volume -- a business still has to be run. The reshoring decision predated the pandemic, driven by trade frictions and tariffs. A reshored supply chain may involve greater automation alongside domestic production. Mark Graban pointed to the Reshoring Initiative (reshorenow.org) and its total-cost-of-ownership calculator, noting its finding that companies often overestimate offshoring's benefits and underestimate the full supply chain costs and risks.
What should manufacturers do when six-foot distancing isn't physically possible? The panel suggested shields between workers and face guards, as used in meatpacking plants, and described a company that minimized how many people had to work together and used hazmat-style suits with built-in breaks when proximity was unavoidable. The deeper point is that people often work close together only because robots and assistive tools are absent -- rethinking the process can reduce how many people genuinely need to be adjacent. Distancing may also push manufacturing toward classic Lean U-shaped cells where one person does all the work in a self-contained cell.
How should leaders think about the total cost of new technology? Total cost of ownership matters and must include implementation, training, and ongoing maintenance, cleaning, and programming -- not just the purchase price. But Ananth Iyer's key point is that the economics genuinely changed, because protecting employees became a given rather than a choice. Providers may adapt with pay-by-use price points, as with cloud computing. Predictive maintenance, where machine learning lets equipment flag issues to the supplier, is improving the maintenance side. And the panel stressed including the risk-weighted cost of a potential outbreak, and the top-line cost of lost market share if a competitor can supply when you cannot.
Does TP3 apply outside manufacturing? Yes. The panel was explicit from the opening that, despite the manufacturing framing and examples, the TP3 concepts apply to almost any industry. Communication and trust, workforce skills and behavioral norms, process mapping, and the reconsidered economics of technology are all general. The manufacturing examples are illustrations rather than limits on where the framework is useful.
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