Arne Smolarz, Project Director IT Rollout at Bosch, shares lessons learned from successfully deploying Poka across global sites. He provides recommendations on balancing corporate governance with local priorities and requirements, and how to rapidly onboard new sites—even during a pandemic.
Bosch is a massive business with over 440 locations and 260 production facilities worldwide. Their business sectors include automotive, building technology, consumer goods, and more.
Innovation is at the core of everything Bosch does. It’s no surprise that the company is a leading example of how to leverage a Connected Worker platform to drive productivity improvements. However, given the scale and diversity of the company, their chosen solution had to meet their enterprise needs.
The story of Poka and Bosch began in 2018 when Robert Bosch Venture Capital, the investment arm of Bosch, became an investor in Poka. That was soon followed by a stellar pilot at one of the company’s largest power tools plants in Malaysia. In under a year, Arne, Head of Manufacturing IT at Bosch, shared that “the plant reported a 54% increase in Mean Time Between Repair and a Direct Productivity gain of 8%. So we planned to have Poka in all 12 manufacturing divisions of Bosch."
Arne said that tracking and measuring the KPIs during the initial pilot was crucial for getting buy-in and corporate approval to expand the use of the software as a preferred solution across geographies and divisions.
Equally important was gaining alignment at the leadership level and choosing the right pilot plant. Keeping upper management looped in throughout the rollout process and reporting on progress provided a sense of trust in the results and outcomes.
These and other best practices shared by Arne during Poka’s recent Empower User Conference will serve the company well as they deploy Poka across the additional divisions and 260 manufacturing plants.