Chris Richner signed on as CIO of Norco Industries with a clear mission: To guide the US-based manufacturer through wholesale digital transformation.
“I was brought on board to be a change agent,” says Richner, who is now 18 months into the job. “The first order of business was to get my infrastructure shored up, because the end goal in my five-year plan is to bring digitalization to the shop floor.”
Norco manufactures a range of recreation vehicle (RV), industrial, and automotive products under seven brands, including Adnik (seating systems), Bal RV (RV components), Norco Professional Lifting Equipment (floor jacks, clutch jacks, transmission jacks), Flo-Dynamics (fluid maintenance equipment), Nortool (machining and tooling equipment), Norcoat (e-coat and powder coat finishing), and Freedom Industrial Hydraulics (industrial lifting equipment).
The manufacturing industry is undergoing seismic change due to increased digitization and other IT advancements, and CIOs are at the center of this, with 86% of manufacturing IT leaders saying their role is becoming more digital and innovation focused, and 84% agreeing that the CIO is becoming a changemaker, according to the 2023 State of the CIO survey.
At Norco, Richner is stepping up with an aggressive plan to transform the company’s technology infrastructure within his first five years. But embracing new technology wholesale is a tall order. So Richner hit the ground running with a plan to use robotic process automation (RPA) to free the company’s staff from time-consuming, repetitive tasks, giving them the bandwidth to embrace broader change.
RPA uses technology, business logic, and structured inputs to automate business processes. Richner sat down with Norco Industries CEO Michael Tallman to discuss how the company could leverage RPA and to determine possible use cases to prove its utility. Together they decided the finance department was the perfect choice.
