OEMs Need a SWAT Team to Keep Improving

This post first appeared on GenAlpha blog

Do you feel calm and relaxed when you walk out to your car in the evening? When you get home, are you ready to deal with the typical family and household issues, or do you want to be left alone in a quiet corner? If you have a bad day in the office, it is usually the latter.

How different would things be if you had a cross-functional team of problem-solving experts ready and willing to attack the complex issues that arise in any part of the business? Instead of you feeling like a fireman running around putting out fires, the team would come to you with one or two viable alternatives, and you would select one and have it implemented. Welcome to the SWAT team!

Team Mission

The Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs defines SWAT as:

“A SWAT team is a group of selected police officers trained to handle certain crisis situations (e.g., snipers, barricaded subjects, hostage situations, ‘heavy’ arrests) beyond the capacity of regular police units.”

In a business, the SWAT concept is:

“A SWAT team is a group of selected subject matter experts trained to handle certain unique and important situations (e.g., manufacturing problems on an important shipment, persistent quality or customer experience situation with a high impact, major software crashes, and breeches, supply chain shutdowns, business conflicts with key dealers) beyond the capacity of the regular employees to solve within the necessary timeframe.”

The mission of the SWAT team is to employ their unique knowledge and experience to either solve high-value problems or work with the local business team to identify new possible solutions, methods, or procedures that someone can implement quickly.

The SWAT team is an independent group of three or four dedicated generalists from different organizations reporting to a single executive. The individuals may be from any organization in the company. Some examples are:

• Quality

• Engineering

• Human Resources

• Manufacturing

• Service

• Finance

• Sales

• Marketing

Why the SWAT team works

Most internal experts can handle most problems in their area “with their eyes closed.” They know the ins and outs of all the equipment, processes, and procedures that make their part of the business run. However, they are not trained to solve problems in other business areas because most people had to make significant decisions about their lives when they were young. They had to decide whether to be generalists or specialists.

• A generalist knows a little about a lot and ultimately knows nothing about everything. Like the crossbar on the T.
• Specialists know a lot about a few things until they eventually know everything about nothing. Like the stem on the T.
• The people you want on your SWAT team are T-shaped. They know something about a lot of things and a lot about a few things. This combination prepares them to help solve complex problems in many areas.

An example

Suppose the business uses an eCommerce system to help end users select, purchase, track shipments, and download documentation on replacing a defective part and returning the faulty item for partial credit. Further, suppose that the call center, technical support, or inside sales notices a few situations where angry users could not do what they wanted to do with the eCommerce system. Each of the three customer contact groups individually notifies the Director of Aftermarket Sales about what is happening. The Director collects all the data for three months and decides this is a big problem that will quickly annoy the end users and their dealers. The Director asks the SWAT oversite executive to send SWAT in and help.

The core SWAT team in this company consists of people from quality, manufacturing, and aftermarket service. The team quickly agreed the Aftermarket Service rep owned the problem. That person asked the Quality rep to help determine when the problems first started and how often they occurred. It turns out that the problem began six months ago when the eCommerce system was upgraded to accept payments.

The software supplier told the team that the payment system interfaced with the order entry system. IT got involved and discovered that the order entry system started having a problem six months ago. With that information, the order entry system supplier could quickly identify the cause of the problem. The fix took all of 20 minutes.

The critical piece of data that helped solve the problem was the start date of the customer complaints. The SWAT team’s presence cut a few days off the timeline.

Conclusion

The SWAT cuts the time to solve unusual problems by days to weeks, depending on the issue. In the long run, the whole OEM and partner ecosystem is much happier now.