Robert Coppenhaver - From Voices to Results-- Voice of Customer Questions, Tools and Analysis: Proven techniques for understanding and engaging with your customers

Early in my career, I was given a rather unique opportunity that would have a profound effect on not only my professional career, but my life. My employer at the time, Rockwell Automation, was trying to expand into other international markets where our market share was still very small. One such market, Japan, was in the middle of a manufacturing renaissance, as epitomized by the book The Machine That Changed the World, by James Womak. The book presented how Toyota and many other Japanese companies had embraced the teaching of Edward Deming to completely revamp their manufacturing processes. Where Japanese products and manufacturing were once regarded as junk, they were now manufacturing the highest quality and most efficient goods in the world.

My employer, Rockwell Automation, was a manufacturer of industrial automation and control equipment under the brand Allen-Bradley. Allen-Bradley had a very good reputation for quality in most of the world. Even the Allen-Bradley logo proudly exclaimed "Quality".

At Rockwell Automation, we prided ourselves on the quality of the products we produced and, recognizing the rapidly expanding market of Japan, we struggled to understand why our products did not enjoy more commercial success in the Land of the Rising Sun. During this same time period, we also entered into a partnering agreement with a company called Nippondenso.

Nippondenso was originally a part of Toyota but later became an independent company after World War II as the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers reshaped the Japanese automobile industry and Toyota was forced to spin off Nippondenso, although Toyota still maintained a sizeable minority share in the company. Nippondenso was, and still is, a large automobile parts supplier creating much of the components in a Toyota automobile. It would later expand to servicing the vast majority of automobile suppliers. While Nippondenso, now called simply Denso, was then largely an automobile parts supplier (with roughly 98% of their 2016 revenue of $40B coming from automobiles), they continued to explore other market opportunities and segments, creating divisions for robotics, data acquisition, and a division whose responsibility was to use expertise acquired from new technology in the automobile sector and apply it to OEM/ODM (Original Equipment Manufacturing/Original Design Manufacturing) markets.

It was a highly agreeable relationship between Rockwell Automation and Nippondenso. Nippondenso was looking for ways to expand their business by providing OEM/ODM design and manufacturing services and Rockwell Automation was trying to expand their product portfolio while setting up a sales channel for Japan. Rockwell Automation would contract Nippondenso to create products for the Japanese market based on the Rockwell Automation specifications, and Nippondenso would create a joint venture sales channel in Japan called AB-Denso to help sell both the newly designed products as well as the legacy Rockwell Automation products to the Japanese market. In particular, Toyota and Nippondenso's own manufacturing entities were seen as a significant opportunities.

After 3-4 years, Rockwell Automation had smaller, less expensive products produced by Nippondenso that were a better fit for the Japanese market, but still did not generate the volume of sales anticipated through the joint venture. Nippondenso explained that the new products were a great improvement over the original legacy products, but were still missing many of the features and the responsiveness exhibited by the Japanese competitors. Additionally, the quality was found to be substandard for the Japanese market. Rockwell Automation believed that they had more than enough of the key features to be successful and did not have a quality problem. They believed the issue had more to do with a lack of understanding how to apply the products in real-world applications than with any features or quality issues.

To resolve this issue, Rockwell Automation decided to send a member of their applications team to live in Japan and work with Nippondenso for three years to help train the Japanese staff and work with key customers such as Toyota on how best to use the Rockwell Automation technology in their applications. I was presented the opportunity and jumped at the chance to embark on this new adventure.

It took me very little time to realize that the Nippondenso view was the correct one. The Japanese engineers and staff, especially at Toyota and Nippondenso, were very well versed in applying automation technologies to solve real-world manufacturing challenges and they were every bit as good, if not better, than the engineers I had worked with in the USA. Rockwell Automation products were and still are considered world class with respect to quality, but were not at the same level of the Japanese competitors for the Japanese applications. Additionally, many of the features found on the Japanese-based automation products were missing from the offerings by Rockwell Automation, as they opted to focus on alternative feature sets required by other markets and customers.