If your company is a small to medium manufacturer with some amount of automation, you are in a similar situation to many of the companies that reach out to us. You might even be frustrated with your current integrator and equipment vendors.

You might even have some of the same frustrating challenges:

• The custom code you paid for is locked down and impossible to maintain yourself

• The support services you’ve paid for aren’t reliable or are unavailable from vendors, past/current integrators

• Your company is told to wait for months before they can get on the schedule for future project roll-outs

• Other integrators will just assign any available employee on a given week to work on the project, not engineers who already speak your language and who know your operations inside and out

• Once a project is rolled out, the integrator or vendor’s training for your team is inadequate or unavailable

• Your current integrator or vendors have no knowledge or experience with the new technologies you need help with or are interested in implementing

Sadly, the list of complaints above grows every day. Since starting out in 2011, we heard these frustrations far too often. We decided there had to be a better way so we created one: the Corso Systems DRIVE Framework!

The Corso Systems DRIVE Framework

Every project we tackle follows our DRIVE Framework. This is a simple 5 step process we use to define the overall vision of where you would like automation to take you, refine the vision into the plan required to get there, collectively invest in the time, technology, and people required to execute the plan, validate what we collaborated on in each step is working, make adjustments to the execution or vision as needed, then enhance the capabilities of your system and expand your vision as you get more mileage with your new tools.

1. Define

   Starting a new relationship means getting to know one another. From our side of the table this means we need to learn to speak your language, understand your operations, meet your team, and provide the specific solutions to solve your problems. Likewise, you can meet our team as well as vet our skills and results against our marketing. We want you to know that your investment in time and money will have a great return.

   To accomplish these goals with the least risk, we like to first work with you to define your overall vision. This isn’t just “what do I need right now?” it is what you want the end result of working with Corso Systems to look like.

   This gives everyone a roadmap of where we are going, and helps us figure out the route we will take to get there.

2. Refine

   With our roadmap in hand we first need to figure out the turn by turn directions to get there. Typically this means we break down the overall vision into phases or projects we will implement along the way. These will be smaller than the overall vision, however they are geared towards providing the maximum impact as your company adopts new technology and experiences a culture shift.

   In the Refine step, we work with your team to understand their needs, and which integrations would have the most impact right now (and what comes next). This step will set you up with forward momentum in the future, and helps us assemble a plan together to make it all a reality.

   Starting with a small project quickly gets you a useful system without a large cost up front. During the first project we will get to know each other without waiting months before you see results. We’ll learn how to best communicate with your company, and it all gives us time together to plan out where to focus next to have the maximum impact for your investments.

   Even if you added a few zeroes to your budget, brought in the smartest manufacturing minds in the world, and had no technology limits, without the understanding of how a project fits into your company culture, your achievements would still be limited.

   Refining the vision into phases or smaller projects lets you see an ROI more quickly than a large-scale project up front, gives your team time to learn and adapt, and gives everyone more frequent check-ins to ensure we are on the right path.

3. Invest

   This step is where the rubber meets the road. You are making an investment in your company’s future, we are investing our time, skills, and expertise to help you execute your vision.

   Here is where we build out the overall infrastructure for your vision including software, hardware, network infrastructure, and invest time with your people to understand their needs, wishes, and even fears about the company bringing in new technology.

   As we determined in the Refine step, starting with a small project quickly gets you a useful system without a large cost up front. During the first project we will get to know each other without waiting months before you see results. We learn how the whole team functions together. We’ll learn how to best communicate with your company, and it all gives us time together to plan out where to focus next to have the maximum impact for your investments.

   The word automation might be scary for your staff. They might worry that you’re planning to replace them with robotics, or ruin your data management processes. Your IT team will worry that your network and infrastructure will be wreaked with havoc, and someone will be coming in with suggestions on how to improve things that might expose problems with how your team is performing their tasks.

   We are all on the same team, working together to help you do what you do better. Yes, some of your team’s fears may come to fruition through the course of a project, however in most cases those fears are overblown and effective communication throughout the project will help put everyone at ease.

   By understanding your current cultural landscape and investing time with your team to understand their needs, wishes, and fears we can help you figure out what needs to change to support your investments. What got you here won’t get you to where you are going, and we can help make the transition as easy as possible.

   Investing in automation technology helps make your team more effective. It also makes their jobs easier, less stressful, and simplifies communication across your company. It helps you get to where you want to go.

4. Validate

   As we complete more projects together, we have a great opportunity to validate everything is helping you do what you do better, spend time with your team to train them on how to use the tools, and get feedback on how to improve the things. This Validation step allows everyone to dive into a continuous improvement cycle as we continue to work together. We will keep improving what we’ve built in the past as our relationship with your people grows, more data becomes available, and as everyone on your team becomes familiar with the possibilities.

   We may be engineers, however we take a scientific approach with our DRIVE method. The initial vision and refinement give us a hypothesis to work from. “Here’s what we think will make things better.”

   Validation is where we put those hypotheses to the test.

   Is what we built making your processes better?

   Are there things we can improve?

   Now that you have more information from putting some miles on the system do you need to adjust the overall vision?

   By validating our assumptions and hypotheses along the way we can make adjustments as we continue to invest more time into developing the foundation to execute the vision. We can further refine project steps and plans to increase the value you get along the way.

   This is where the continuous improvement cycle begins. Take where you are at now, with a better system in place, and figure out how to improve the overall plan and execute on it more successfully.

5. Enhance

   Corso Systems’ goal is to deliver the solutions you need to run your business most effectively. In the final step of our DRIVE framework we work with you to enhance your business.

   This may mean simply providing ongoing support for what we built originally, improving the new systems you have in place to better meet your team’s new needs, or even continuing to develop and deploy new technology across multiple facilities.

   We work with you to continue developing and executing the long term roadmap for future projects and implementations. Not only does this help you plan out future possibilities, it helps you manage your overall budget, needs, and expectations over time.

   This map always includes how we will support everything we have built so far, and everything new we will deploy over time.

   From the very first project on to the next steps, we will continue to prove our value to your company, and help you get to the next level.

Ready to get in the driver’s seat?

Keep reading to learn more, or contact us to get started right away