Manufacturing IT Support: Real-Life Advice from a Seasoned Leader

A lot of people that aren’t in IT get frustrated with IT because they feel like when they submit a ticket, it just goes out into the ether. And then there’s this magical wizard behind the screen that is fixing this stuff. And I want you to know that the people on my team, team, they’re actual people. They’ll hang out with you. They’ll go on the company golf outings. They’ll go have drinks with you after work. They’re gonna be at your kids’ baseball game because their kids are on your baseball team. Welcome back to another episode of Unraveling IT: Expert Tech Talks. I’m Garrett Wiesenberg, VP of Solutions Consulting here at Corsica Technologies, and I’m joined today by Nick Holliday, IT Divisions Manager at Nucor Steel based out of the Waterloo, Indiana facility. In this episode, we’re going to be looking into what it takes to run a modern IT environment in one of the most advanced manufacturers in the United States. In a modern manufacturing environment, they don’t have the luxury of ever being down. Nick here is responsible for ensuring that their operations stay online and that the mission critical systems don’t go down. Nick, it’s great to have you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah. No problem, man. So, Nick, does a typical day look like for you? So typically, we come in and each of my team has a has a core set of hours that we work and try to, you know, fit the needs. We do have mills and plants that run 24/7. Mhmm. And so when we come in, you know, first thing in the morning, we’re checking for immediate fires that are going on. My team’s responsibility is a lot of the operational stuff, a lot of tier 1 and tier 2 support. So it could be anything from simple help desk issues or computers not turning on to major network issues that are happening on-site. So they kind of come in if they haven’t heard anything, check the ticket queue. That’s usually the first landing point for a lot of my techs and admins and making sure everything is going well. And then from there, usually we’ll have some meetings throughout the day. We do have a daily stand up where they kind of report in the progress of projects. At least for my team, we’ve got well over 100 different projects in action right now that’s outside of the ticket queue. And that’s across, you know, all of the 22 different sites that I help with. Mhmm. And, you know, just checking up on progress, because those situations change on the daily. So making sure that everything is moving along, and it is a lot of it’s a lot triage work. For me personally, I’m in a lot of meetings. I spend a lot of time interfacing with controllers and and GMs at the facilities Mhmm. That I work with, hearing from them. Usually communicating a lot of the projects work and seeing where we’re Like status updates essentially. Right. Yeah. And obviously with that, there’s a lot of funding questions and so they wanna know, you know, why am I paying for this and what’s the best way to spend this money. Mhmm. You know, ultimately they wanna make money and kick tons out the door. Yeah. And so with that, they kind of lean into me for my thoughts and opinions on what they should be doing. We also do spend a fair bit of time talking through personnel things going The teammates that we have on-site at each of the divisions are a part of that division. And they see these people every day. And so usually, that’s a good place for us to talk about, like, hey, how’s this person doing Yeah. Personally. Because that’s really important. It is it’s cliche to say, but this is a high stress environment and making sure that our people are doing well mentally is incredibly important to myself and local leadership. So I work pretty normal hours considering the workload that we’ve got going on. You know, it usually ends for me around 5 or 6 o’clock and I usually go home. Beyond that though, we do have second and third shifts that just run throughout the entire night. We all keep our phones on loud because that call sometimes does come through when we’re needed and we are happy to get out of bed and do what needs done either remotely or driving in if we have to. So that’s usually a day in the life. You know, one point during that description, you called out that the controllers wanna kick tons out the door. I’m assuming you don’t mean money. You mean physical steel tons. Yeah. Thanks for thanks for clarifying. Yeah. I appreciate that hazard of the business. Their job in manufacturing is to kick steel tons out the door Yeah. And get that injected into the industry. Yep. And so that is our primary focus is Mhmm. To get more tons out the door. And in IT, we wanna make sure that they’re doing that as efficiently as possible. We’re not making any money. You’re a cost center. We are a cost center. Exactly. And that’s true for anybody that’s working on an IT team in manufacturing especially. So you are looking for ways to save money. Mhmm. You’re looking for ways to make the process more efficient. Sometimes that means standing over the shoulder of an operator on the line and watching him do what he needs to do and saying, I think I can automate that, what you do. Or I can save you some time here so you can work on more important stuff that you have to put hands on. Another big win, Nucor’s big drumbeat is about safety. Yep. We work in a very dangerous business and we wanna make sure people go home the same way they came in. And if IT can help be a part of that and as technologies evolve, we are having a bigger voice in the safety conversation where we can come in and say, hey, if somebody crosses this red line, we can have a camera there that’s intelligent enough to have an alarm go off and say, woah, woah, you can’t be in here. Yeah. Or even something that will shut a machine down if you cross that red line. We’ve even been looking at some stuff that will show people if they’re not wearing the proper protective personal equipment. They’re missing a helmet, they’ll have something that’ll go off. So not even just like cyber security, you’re talking more physical security on like the shop floors where you’re actually producing steel or manipulating steel in one way or another. Correct. Giving plant floor managers the tools to ensure that they stay as safe as possible. Correct. Yep. Know you talked about your tier 1 tier 2 team members and sort of the break/fix nature of their day to day as well as running projects. How much of that is just keeping the shop floor machines you know running? Because I would imagine shop floor machines are gonna differ from your typical office worker. Right? So like what’s their split look like typically? And that varies by site. So that’s a challenging question. But typically what that will look like is my teams are responsible for making sure that those PLCs or those HMI computers that are out there actually operating the machines Mhmm. Have the connections that they need, either back to the vendor, and a lot of times vendors are in other countries or making sure that they can access local resources such as a file server or a database so they can pull, you know, for example, part information that will populate onto that. That is my team’s responsibility to make sure that they always have that. Now you start getting into the weeds on there. There are some of our larger mills that have entire automation teams Mhmm. That their responsibility is to really get into the nuts and bolts of that. And a lot of those teams too are responsible for programming, actually the PLC programming of those to make like, hey, when you hit this button, it does this. When you hit this button, it does this. Wow. So, yeah. So how do you keep everything stable when downtime is really just not an option? We do that through a series of notifications and updates to the shop leadership when we need to do maintenances or patch systems. And one of the best ways to do that is to just compare it with cost. Nobody wants to go down ever. But the reality is that you’ll either go down soft or you’ll go down hard. And talking to leadership about that is that one of those costs a lot more than the others. And we need to spend money to make money. And so that really small minimal cost of going down for a couple hours to do some patching is going to save you that downtime of like having to send a shift home in the middle of the night. Yeah. I mean there’s a drastic difference between going down to your point for two hours for a planned outage versus two days maybe. Yeah. You know, who knows how long you’re gonna be down depending on what fails, so. Correct. Just staying proactive, it sounds like, is really where you spend most of your day just trying to sell the value of what IT is trying to do to the organization. Correct. And they’re gonna be much more open to that when you communicate that way ahead of because I expect myself and my teams to be so good at our jobs that when we’re able to look forward and forecast, hey, I know on this date in six weeks, I’m gonna need to shut things down for two hours. Yeah. And that we’re communicating that with them and they’re working it out or we’re looking at their schedule and saying, oh, you guys are already down this shift. We’re gonna monopolize on that. That means the world to them. So yeah. I mean, that’s a great next question is, you know, how do you communicate effectively? And I think you just touched on at least one point being proactive in that, you know, identify are there potential shifts that are already gonna be down where you could do maintenance. But what else, you know, have you done or seen in the past that’s worked effectively? Yeah. So and outside of the shop and the business side, even working with our finance teams and saying, hey, when are you guys doing all your month end reports? We’ll try to stay away from during there. It’s a quick way to get people at your door. Yep. And we try to avoid those moments. So that’s another way. I’ve even asked like production managers for shift schedules Mhmm. And plan down days or if the maintenance team is already going to be taking machines or an entire line offline, I need to know about that so I can plan my stuff. Can this maintenance wait until this window? If it can, that’s wonderful. Mhmm. And typically, some divisions even have a shutdown week where they shut everything down and they repaint, redo the lines on the concrete, clean stuff up. Just general TLC essentially. Correct. Yeah. And those are usually good moments for us to jump on. Yeah. So and I think you’ve hit on my next question in a few different ways, but it’s maybe a little more nuanced. You know, manufacturing typically, we see outdated equipment because of the fact that they don’t like to go down, they don’t like the downtime. How do you manage, you know, from an IT leader’s perspective dealing with older equipment as well as newer equipment in the same environment, you know, kind of coexisting together? I mean, how how do you manage that effectively? Yeah. That’s a hard one because a lot of those shop machines are meant to last for decades. Yeah. It’s not like you buy a washer/dryer every couple of years and that’s totally acceptable. Yeah. You buy a plasma cutter, you hope you’re gonna have that plasma cutter for the next ten plus years. Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up. You know, so the plasma cutter at a particular site that we had had for probably a few decades at least had a really state of the art, you know, Windows seven embedded operating system on it, or excuse me, Windows XP. And it was very challenging to work on. The parts were all very old, at least some of the newer parts that had been replaced were about twenty years old. So my team had to really think on their toes when that would go down. Another thing we really lean into is having vendor support. Mhmm. What kind of hardware or software support can you give us for this machine because we’re not gonna be out here trying to tape things together. Sometimes we literally You can’t be experts at everything. Correct. Yeah. We need like if you’re gonna sell us this thing, we we need to have some type of support. What’s the key to prioritizing when everything feels urgent? We liken it to triage scenario or an emergency room where, you know, you might have a guy that walks in with a splinter or a seemingly minor issue. And you might have a guy that walks with a gunshot wound or something more severe. And we need to obviously, we’re gonna treat the guy that has the most severe thing. So the the the balance in prioritizing sometimes though is you could have, you know, somebody with a broken bone or somebody who is, you know, really sick coming in, and that guy with the splinter is just gonna sit there. Even in IT, we find like you let that sit for a while, that splinter, that minor issue will get infected. It’ll get worse. And so you’ll have people that’ll be like, hey, I’ve been struggling with this thing. It’s been weeks. Yeah. And I’ve been patient, and now it’s really affecting my work. And they would have said like, yes, this is a minor issue. And so there’s that delicate balance of helping with those small little splinters Yeah. That will eventually become a bigger thing. But also if something’s down, we need to help with that down. Yeah. So prioritizing that. And I always tell my teams that I’m your best friend and your worst enemy when it comes to prioritizing stuff. Because I’ll be the first person that’ll say, hey, that’s not a priority, you need to push that off, and then come back to you and say, hey, don’t forget about this. Like, you gotta push this forward. Because we still do have projects that are going on, but then you have the day to day tickets are popping up as And so That’s a difficult balance. That is a difficult balance because a lot of that is talking through it with my techs and admins of, hey, what do you need? Or like what’s the backstory on this? Because it’s easy to look at like ticket stats and say, what you’re working on is not a priority. But to hear back from them some of the backstory, that that always that always helps me make, you know, pretty decent decisions. And then the other part to that is I can help prioritize stuff if a controller or a general manager is saying, hey, this is a priority. Mhmm. But that’s a pretty easy one. Like, okay, that is an actual priority to get that going. So how do you combat the maybe the age old IT sort of perception that you know if you don’t hear from IT what are we paying you for? If we do hear from you simply because something’s broken what are we paying you for? Right. You know how do you combat that you know both yourself personally but also with your team. And I I think you may have touched on it a little bit, you know, effective communication, but ultimately, it’s still a a a very real perception. Right. We challenge our teams to do what’s called mill rounds, and we want them to be physically visible at the different plants and mills. Even just to get up and walk around and talk to the guys and the gals on the floor and go through the office and just see how things are going. And if someone submitted a ticket in the last week, even if it’s been closed, following up with that person, even if you know the answer. Mhmm. Hey, how’s that going for you? That means the world to them. So the power of the follow-up is huge in my book and being physically present. I think a lot of people that aren’t in IT get frustrated with IT because they feel like when they submit a ticket it just goes out into the ether and then there’s this magical wizard behind the screen. The Wizard of Oz, yeah. Yeah. That is fixing this stuff and I want you to know that like, no, the people on my team, they’re actual people. They’ll hang out with you. They’ll go on the company golf outings. They’ll go have drinks with you after work. Gonna be at your kids’ baseball game because their kids are on your baseball team. Yeah. They’re actual people. And so building that relationship is a is huge part of the social networking that we So your team doesn’t just sit in the back corner of some random cubicle somewhere tucked away in the office. You’re visibly out there trying to build those relationships. Absolutely. Now, they do sit in those cubicle tucked way far back in the broom closet, but it is good for all of us if they come out and talk to everybody. Right? So let’s dive into your leadership and you you’ve already spoken a little bit about leading with empathy, but I wanna briefly pivot and talk more about what does it look like to you to lead when you aren’t necessarily the one controlling the budget or necessarily even controlling some of the decisions? I find in those in those situations to be really empathetic with my team. It’s easy to say, hey guys, this is what’s happening. Deal with it and just go do it. It’s another thing to say, hey, this is what’s being asked of us, and I’ll be very honest with you, I don’t maybe understand why this particular decision was made, but I trust this person to make that decision. And so this is how we’re gonna go about this, and this is what they want to do. It’s we do across Nucor, and I’ve been very blessed to have this, is really good solid leadership just across multiple divisions that I work with. The leaders are making good decisions like that. And sometimes there are decisions that are made for reasons that maybe some of the on-site IT maybe don’t understand fully or they say, well that’s more expensive than something else I would have chosen. And to help them say, you know, maybe that’s not the decision I would have made either, but we trust this person. Yeah. This is a good person, and we can follow their lead and trust them that there’s a reason behind it, and there’s and to be honest, leadership at a division isn’t saying, hey, do this and don’t question me. They’re very open with me on those decisions which is really makes my job easier when I have to explain it. Yeah. Exactly. It empowers you to then take that to your team and be like, hey, this is why. I mean, for me personally, that was something I always struggled with is just, you know, go do this. Yeah. Why? You know, help me understand the why. If I know the why, maybe I can find a more efficient way to achieve the outcome that you’re looking for. Right. But without understanding the why, it’s just it’s an order and you know that that can be really difficult for especially engineers to just follow. Correct. Because engineers typically are really good at designing solutions or you know figuring out solutions to problems. But if they don’t know why a decision was made they could be solving for the wrong problem. Right. So And from the top down, we’re told I’m glad you brought up the why and we’re told that all the time. Especially on new initiative rollouts or when we’re synchronizing on one technology, they say, did you explain the why to the division about why we’re doing this? Because we can’t just roll in and just start kicking down the doors. Even if it has something to do with something serious like cybersecurity Yeah. It’s really important that everyone, including those on the corporate IT side, understand the why behind it. Hey, we’re saving money. Hey, this makes us more secure. Hey, this will help with physical safety. Whatever the case is. So they’re very good about communicating that, and that just trickles down. And again that makes my job easier. I don’t have to fight the system. Yeah. And you don’t just want to go into your point and kick down doors. Right. You know? And IT I feel like in in a lot of ways lends itself to that method more often than not. Mhmm. I can’t tell you how many organizations worked with where IT just says we’re doing this and that’s gospel. Yeah. Don’t question me. We’re we’re just gonna do it. And and from my perspective that’s always been a bad way to to go about things. Yep. And you don’t see the adoption that you would really need to see in order for that change to be effective. Correct. We want the change but we want the buy-in behind the change. And, you know, we talk about top down, you know, from the top we need to have bottom down but a lot of times we need bottom up as well. That’s something I don’t think that gets talked about often enough but it seems like that’s really the culture that Nucor is trying to adopt. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, Nick, I think you’ve talked on this a little bit already. But what soft skills has really helped you to build trust across departments? Caring about people. That’s it. Because when you care about the people that drives you to do better at your IT Mhmm. Job. Because I wanna solve this for people that I care about. I mean, not just a faceless customer. Yeah. So that that drives that, you know, in working with leadership and not just the controllers and the GMs that we talked about, working with local department leads, people that are working with the systems on the ground and getting feedback from them and being proactive and following up on projects. That is how you build that just checking in with them. So a lot of my job too is checking in with group leaders and other supervisors. Mhmm. Hey, how’s this going from your perspective? So talking with like an engineering supervisor about what they need from me or why their CAD software’s not working, getting that immediate feedback. That means the world to them that IT cares about that. Yeah. It kinda breaks down that That perception Yes. Like we kinda touched on earlier. Correct. You know, I think that’s a valid point because so often IT is just focusing on how quickly we can get tickets done, and they have all these KPIs and different metrics that they’re trying to hit. Mhmm. But at the end of the day, you can close out tickets as fast as humanly possible. But if you don’t have that care or that, you know, desire to really build that relational aspect with whomever you’re helping. It’s like teaching to the the test. Right? Yeah. You’re trying to achieve these numbers. You might hit those numbers, but if you hit the numbers, great. What does that truly mean for your organization? Right. It sounds like caring about people and caring about the outcomes for those people probably enables you, your team to be more effective and more efficient. And also it really probably extends some grace to your team when things do go wrong and they are more severe and people are down for a long period of time, they’ll remember all of those times that you were kind to them and you built those relationships and they’ll be more understanding. Yeah. Even though it’s a tough time for them and they are down, they’ll be like, hey, I understand. They actually have change in Yeah. Their pocket for you. It’s that piggy bank. Right? Just keep adding into the piggy banks when you need a withdrawal, you’ve got money there. There’s something there. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We all have to work together. We all have to get those steel tons out the door. We just do it in a different way than maybe some of the other people do. Yeah. That’s still our responsibility. So And, you know, Nick, I really appreciate you coming on today and and being here. I think I’ve learned quite a bit at least about manufacturing and what it takes to kind of keep things running and leading with empathy. But my final question to you is what advice would you have for someone who wants to step into a role like you or get into manufacturing or IT and manufacturing? And what’s your best advice to them? My best advice to them is don’t be afraid to make mistakes. There is a perception that in order to get into leadership and IT, you gotta have all the right degrees and all the right certifications and that you walk in and you just know stuff. And it would shock most everybody how little I know in some situations. But that ability to walk into a situation and figure stuff out quickly and understand a system while connecting with that person on a relational level is huge, including the manufacturing sphere. Mhmm. So don’t be afraid to make mistakes. If you’re looking to step into an enterprise leadership role, own those mistakes, learn from them, and then do better next time and stay humble in that in those moments. So be teachable and be humble. That has been some stuff that has served me well and as things have come up, those have been things that have kind of driven my career. Genuinely, I do appreciate you coming in today. I find it very valuable and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. No problem.