FEDA News & Views

34 FEDA News & Views groups synthesize their findings and tease out future trends, trends that are prepped but not dispatched until sales determines there is a need. "We do a lot of targeted mar- ket research and what we've found is that if you want to identify pain points and emerging trends, it's not about what customers are telling you, it's about what you're seeing," says Schlitz. Letting the Customer Lead More than anything, customer- back innovation is about focus. ITW targets the top 20 percent of its base that generates 80 percent of its sales, funneling its investments into developing a deep understand- ing of those customers' needs and pain points. Schlitz says trust in the company's decentralization model is key in acquiring this knowledge. Meaning, ITW relies on the expertise of individual brands to best serve its unique markets. "We can't be all things to all people," says the segment head, "so we want to know the customer segments that will benefit the most from our differentiation. And, we want to identify the ideal organiza- tional structure required to maintain that closeness with the customer but also have speed to market. "Our engineers create innova- tions that are close to the ground and solve customer's unmet needs, so our solutions are probably never going to be groundbreaking or sexy. We want our innovations to solve customers' current problems and future problems." Santi calls it being good at "com- bining known technology to create clever and robust solutions." Based on what ITW Food Equipment Group is seeing and hearing, their custom- ers' pain points fall under four cat- egories: "Quality and Performance," "Food Safety," "Total Cost of Ownership" and "Sustainability." ITW's goal is to out-perform its competition in all four but, currently, it sees the greatest opportunity to deliver the most value in helping customers reduce their operational costs over the entire life cycle of their equipment. The logic is part of its long-term strategy to create sustainable customer value and dovetails into how most of the larger chains and institutional customers quantify value, says Schlitz. "Product cost is only one element, but we need to understand custom- er's long-term thinking and value," she says. "When we talk to a CFO of a large chain customer, they want to talk about utility costs, labor, main- tenance. Does our product break a lot? What can we do to help them with their productivity and increase profits over the long term?" She rattles off two standouts from Hobart that delivers the kind of ROI that chains covet. According to cus- tomer feedback, the HS9 Slicer has saved retailers and others anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per slicer/ per year by reducing food loss and improving efficiency. "Because of our CleanCut™ Knife technology, our slicers have fewer shavings, allowing our customers to generate more meat," says Schlitz, touch- ing on operators' growing desire to reduce food waste. Foodservice operators that invest in Hobart's Ventless FT1000 Advansys flight type dishwasher can recoup the cost for the dish machine in a little over a year. Its ventless technology and Automatic Soil Removal (ASR) system offers savings of more than $40,000 a year. Circling back to an earlier conver- sation about straddling the divide between current and future innova- tion, Schlitz points to the rollout of the ASR as an example of how ITW introduces its brand of problem- solving to the market. "Once we identify a future customer trend, we test concepts with a global custom- er base and get them to an almost- ready state. Then, it's up to the local marketing and sales team to say now we have a need," she says. The Europeans were the first to adopt the technology. Two years later, the ASR system was absorbed into the American market after a few small adaptations, namely increas- ing the size of the strainer and upgrading the material from plastic to stainless steel. Those two small changes—responsible for trapping gunk that hampers performance— account for a chunk of the more than $40,000 operators can save annually. To get there, ITW's team had to spend a lot of hours being a fly on the wall. "It was interesting," says Schlitz, a mechanical engineer by trade who enjoys wading through the process- es to sift out the non-value adds, and then pinpointing the areas in which their equipment is contribut- ing to the bottlenecks. "We spend a lot of time watching those videos, trying to see how we can save our operators time and money," adds Schlitz. "You are sup- posed to prewash heavily-soiled dishes before putting them in the dishwasher but what we observed was that during peak hours, there's no time to prewash. So, the kitchen staff would load the dishwasher with lots of gunky dishes. A normal dishwasher can't handle that. It gets clogged, requires multiple clean- ings and eventually affects perfor- mance." The interesting part was the reac- tion from engineers, who noted that the equipment was not being used properly. Schlitz's response: "We had to get over that hump," she says. "Our customer's environment is their environment and our dish- washer was not going to solve their problems. So, we had to go back to the table, brainstorm, and gener- ate ideas for a new generation of machines that would. Our purpose is to provide innovation that our cus- tomers will value." ■

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