Scale with Sergio MarketScale

No matter how much experience or expertise a manufacturing company has, expanding operations is never easy. Even if they’ve done it before. Javier Gallegos, General Manager for Trans-Matic Precision Metal, shared the company’s journey in opening a new facility in Monterrey, Mexico.
Trans-Matic specialized metal stamping capabilities required additional support. They had previously opened a factory in Suzhou, China, but working in Mexico was different. Gallegos said, “I started the planning and process in 2014, and we opened two years later. Change was necessary and hard.”
Employees were initially concerned about losing their job, but Gallegos said the company approached the change with transparency. “We were open and transparent with employees. We let them know we were keeping everyone on board and presented them the new capabilities and business drivers for why we were opening a new facility,” he shared.
That facility boasts 55,000 square of space and has 23 stamping presses. From the location, employees manufacture, develop tools, prototype, and more.
In the process of launching a new location, Gallegos provided some key insights. He stated, “Be clear with intentions. Plan for what you need throughout the process.”
Since the successful opening of the factor, Gallegos has also established innovative ways to track and monitor production. He added, “We focus on several metrics. Safety and quality dashboards are included as well as metrics on production and how they connect to goals.”
For any company, taking on such a massive project can be daunting. With the right leadership, approach, and strategy, companies can find success no matter how they expand.

On this segment of Scale with Sergio, host and Marketscale’s Executive VP of Operations, Sergio Reyes, visits once again with Dr. Raymundo Arróyave. Boasting a BS degree in Mechanical & Electrical Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estuidios Superiores de Monterrey, and an MS and PhD in Materials Science from MIT, Dr. Arróyave is currently a Professor of Materials Science at Texas A&M University. This Scale installment is not only a follow up of a previous episode where Arróyave and Sergio discussed the critical role a secure supply chain can play in a company’s success, but today, the two long time friends also talk about the positive and lucrative implications 3D printing can have on that supply chain.
Crucial to any business that makes and sells products, a supply chain represents the steps it takes to get a product or service from its original state to the customer. It’s the vital link between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product to the final buyer—covering everything from inventory to sales—and includes different activities, people, entities, information, and resources.
Organizations are always seeking ways to optimize their supply chain and gain a competitive advantage, however, in today’s world, supply chains have not only been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but trade agreements and other current world events are affecting the cohesion of global and domestic supply chains on a daily basis. 3D printing technology (or additive manufacturing), though, can provide these organizations with the edge they need to keep supply chains intact and remain competitive in an uncertain world.
For those that don’t already know, additive manufacturing is the process of making three dimensional (3D) solid objects from a digital file. By incorporating additive manufacturing, supply chains have the flexibility to scale inventory at will while decreasing a business’ reliance on warehouses. Simply put, when a part or product is required, the order is sent to the 3D printer and produced on the spot, reducing complexity, saving on production costs, enhancing lead times and improving time-to-market.
With an area of expertise that covers everything from computational materials science and simulation to machine learning-assisted materials discovery and design, Arróyave’s recent focus has been on the design of metallic alloys and processes for additive manufacturing. As such, he and Sergio discuss how the creation of an efficient and flexible supply chain is critical, how it can differentiate an organization from its competitors, and the many advantages to a supply chain that can be gleaned through 3D printing.

Supply chains are the backbone of any operation, and that’s particularly true in the fashion industry, where sourcing, manufacturing and delivery are quite literally make-or-break.
To help host Sergio Reyes dive into visibility, management and more when it comes to supply chains in the fashion industry, Smartwool Head of Operations Aloke Mishra joined this episode of Scale with Sergio to share his insights.
To begin, the duo touched on the key elements of supply chains and what makes them so critical to the operation of businesses the world over.
“You really need to understand and have visibility into your supply chain from end to end,” Mishra said.
In particular, Mishra said sheer financial impact, time to market, production efficiency and end-of-life management are the core aspects of supply chains that make them so critical to the successful operation of a business in quite literally any industry.
Reyes and Mishra dove into each of those aspects, providing insights regarding how to best manage each and maintain visibility throughout the entire supply chain, not just a portion of it.
The pair also explored how scale and growth can affect supply chain management, noting that getting larger often means navigating new supply chain challenges.
Fortunately, solutions exist if you’re willing to do the work to identify areas where efficiency can be boosted, such as in the leveraging of raw materials.
“The bigger the company, (the more) silos, and each silo is creating its own product not knowing that each silo could be sharing 60% of the raw material,” Mishra said. “This is where I think supply chains have another part to play.
“When you really start to look at your raw materials much more closely, you are actually also going to embed yourself with R&D and say, ‘Hey, by the way, this particular component of yours and that component of that other one are like 98% similar.’”

On this episode of Scale with Sergio, host Sergio Reyes was joined by Dr. Tyson Browning, TCU professor of operations management.
The duo dove into a topic that’s been thrust into the spotlight in light of the spread of the novel coronavirus and the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic – how to best manage operational risk and uncertainty.
How well organizations were prepared for the unknown – or not prepared at all – has been revealed by the current period of uncertainty. But how, even if an organization came up short in this instance, can they prepare for the unknown that lies ahead?
First, the pair said, it’s key to outline some key distinctions.
“It’s important to distinguish uncertainty, which is all the stuff out there in the future that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out … (from) risk and opportunity. There are a lot of uncertainties, but only some of them could have a negative impact, potentially, on our operation, supply chain, or project,” Browning said.
“We call these threatening, negative potential outcomes risks.”
While uncertainty and risk are certainly words that come with highly negative connotations, there are ways to navigate them.
“Overall, I like to use the kind of classical, standard five-step process for managing risk and opportunity,” Browning said. “It’s very general, and people use it more or less in many cases. It’s a good starting point.”
Those five steps are identifying risks and opportunities, assessing them, prioritizing them, responding to them, and continuing to monitor them.
To get a more in-depth idea of what goes into each step, listen to the entire episode.

Scale with Sergio, a new MarketScale podcast, will offer MarketScale Executive Vice President, Operations and host Sergio Reyes a chance to engage with experts to deliver critical insights, discuss trends and lead the conversation on what’s happening on the cutting-edge of their industries.
On this premiere episode, Reyes gave listeners an in-depth look at his journey to MarketScale and the idea that spawned Scale with Sergio – a desire for a true open forum where the best and brightest any given industry has to offer can educate and engage listeners.
Reyes was also joined by Highmark Health Senior Vice President of Operations Mike Tracy, who helped Reyes dive into the tenets of optimizing operations, which are particularly relevant during the current period of uncertainty and the push toward what’s likely to be a new normal in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It should always be the goal of any organization to proactively look at optimizing the operation, always challenging the status quo and continuously evolving,” Reyes said.
Though Reyes and Tracy admitted that operational efficiency can devolve into a bit of a rabbit hole due to the extensive nature of the topic and ongoing search for innovative solutions and best practices, the duo distilled their decades of combined knowledge into a handful of key insights.
“We could talk about the 950 different things that make up optimizing operations, and it would probably be the last ‘Scale with Sergio’ that exists,” Tracy said.
“(There are) three critical things that, really, everything else falls under. I like to look at optimizing operations from a people, process and technology perspective.”
Reyes and Tracy outlined each of those umbrellas at length, providing a thorough look at how this threefold mindset can boost any business’s operations.