Dale Taylor remembers the day he received the call like it was yesterday. “It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon when my phone rang, and that call changed everything. On the phone was my Director of Maintenance and Engineering for GBC, and his news was not good,” Taylor said. GBC Metals, the leading producer of copper-based strip products experienced a motor failure on a key piece of equipment.
Dale Taylor, C-Level ROI Performance-Optimization Executive
The root cause of the failure was not known but what was known was this important piece of equipment was not running and all flow through the operation and to customers was going to be shattered. Every part of the company was impacted from sales to manufacturing, to production – the whole supply chain. Worse, GBC shareholders were alarmed because the prior year GBC had successfully initiated an IPO on the New York stock exchange.
“My first step was to quickly alert the CEO of GBC. I then drove four hours to convene an ‘all hands-on deck” meeting to access the situation and start a plan for recovery.” It was during this drive time that Dale realized the full impact of this disruption could be significant to customers, employees, and stakeholders. However, it became paramount that Dale remained calm, and exhibit poised leadership to prevent unnecessary hysteria and just like Apollo 11, simply “work the problem”
Meeting with the team that Sunday night, Dale led the team to brainstorm the best solution for minimizing the impact. Key components of the plan were:
- Repair the motor by establishing dedicated engineering resource at the vendor.
- Secure additional capacity from the industry to offset downtime.
- Establish with the Marketing team a system to prioritize customer orders.
- Develop and execute a daily employee / customer communication plan.
A failure of this magnitude would typically last between six to nine months, however, Dale and his team executed on the plan and in six weeks the new motor was installed, and normal flow was re-established to the value chain. “Many of our customers felt GBC had performed admirably during this unfortunate event, given the potential downtime was dramatically reduced. I also put in place steps to invest in redundancy on key long repair time motors and enhance our vendor control process. “I felt a strong sense of pride and relief for the team, for a job well done, and the role I played in saving the reputation of the company,” said Taylor.
Watch full video interview below.
Contact Dale Taylor via LinkedIn or his Career WebFolio.
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