For many companies, process improvement means automation, integration, and standardization. But as Dana Korf explains, systems don’t exist in isolation. They’re built, broken, and bent by people. And if you don’t understand how those people work together – or don’t – no amount of technology will fix what’s failing.
Amtech CEO Jay Patel sat down with Dana, a veteran of engineering leadership and systems transformation across global manufacturing operations, to understand what really happens when companies try to modernize. At the heart of every successful modernization effort is a cultural shift. Transformation comes from how people communicate, coordinate, and carry knowledge between teams. The systems and workflows can only go as far as the culture that supports them. That’s where things tend to break down, and where organizations can make the most progress when they’re willing to look inward.
Siloed Teams, Siloed Thinking
Manufacturing relies on interdependent teams like sales, engineering, production, purchasing, logistics. But too often, these teams don’t actually work together. They work next to each other. Dana calls this “tribal operation.” Each group operates in a bubble, focused on its own goals, using its own tools and terminology. This leads to:
- Sales closes a deal without checking lead times.
- Engineering releases a design that purchasing can’t source.
- Production improvises a workaround that never makes it back into documentation.
- Finance reports margins that don’t reflect the real cost of rework and delays.
“No one is malicious,” Dana says. “But they’re optimizing for their own metrics, not the company’s success.”
The Illusion of Process
From the outside, it may look you have strong processes. People follow steps. Orders get entered. Parts get made. But when you dig deeper, you find those steps depend on individuals. Who they know, what they remember, which spreadsheet they update.
Productive process means repeatability. Dana describes one plant where a machine only ran properly when a certain operator was on shift. There were no settings documented. No maintenance history. Just a guy who knew the quirks. That isn’t a process. It’s a personality.
This shows up most clearly during turnover, illness, or rapid growth. Suddenly, the “system” doesn’t work. Not because the steps changed, but because no one can explain them. What passed for a process was just tribal knowledge in disguise.
Ownership Is Everyone’s Job (Which Means No One’s)
One of Dana’s sharpest insights is how often companies lack clear ownership of core processes. He tells the story of a major rollout that failed not because the system was bad, but because every department thought someone else was responsible for how orders flowed.
“They built a system to support a process that didn’t exist,” he says.
You can’t automate ambiguity. When it’s not clear who owns which part of a workflow, or how those parts connect, any new system just amplifies the confusion. And without ownership, there’s no accountability when things break.
Communication as Infrastructure
We often think of infrastructure as physical or digital. Machines, networks, databases. But Dana pushes leaders to think of communication as infrastructure, too.
- Who talks to whom when something changes?
- Where does critical information live?
- How does a planner know a new part number was released?
When communication depends on hallway conversations or buried emails, failure is a matter of time. A missed part number here. A duplicate drawing there. A six-week delay because the person who knew the workaround was on vacation.
Dana’s advice is to design communication the same way you’d design a production line. With intention, structure, and redundancy.
Resistance Isn’t Always Stubbornness
It’s easy to frame resistance to change as fear, laziness, or ego. But most resistance is rational, at least from the person’s point of view. If someone’s job security depends on being the only person who knows how something works, why would they share it? If a new process exposes flaws in an old one, what incentive do they have to cooperate?
“If people don’t feel safe raising problems, you won’t fix anything real. Because then what happens is everybody just works around it. And those workarounds become the system.”
In one case, a company tried to streamline a workflow only to discover that the “inefficiency” they were fixing had been deliberately introduced to protect a fragile upstream process. What looked like a design flaw was actually a defense mechanism.
“You have to understand the human reasons things are the way they are,” Dana says. “Otherwise your fix will get rejected like a bad organ transplant.”
What Makes Culture Workable
Culture isn’t soft. It’s not about motivational posters or pizza Fridays. It’s the set of default behaviors that govern what people do when no one’s watching.
There are some signals that a company’s culture is healthy enough for improvement:
- People feel safe raising problems without fear of punishment.
- Teams share knowledge instead of hoarding it.
- Leadership asks why before assigning blame.
- Processes are documented and regularly revisited.
- Improvements are tested and measured, not just announced.
These sound simple. But they require daily discipline and often, a fundamental shift in how success is measured. From individual efficiency to collective effectiveness. From local wins to system-wide outcomes.