The Great ways of working in Supply

Nauris Dorbe
Nov 4 · 7 min read

I am a data and artificial intelligence architect, and lead working on robotics, ai and data solutions for Ericsson smart factories. We are rethinking how smart manufacturing should be done and how we could work together with machines. I like to design and develop solutions for Smart Manufacturing myself and most of my time is spent focusing on technology and business values. Over time I have noticed that because of technology and what business demands, we are required to change our ways of working. In this blog post, I will briefly describe some of my observations and ideas.

Like any large organization, Supply in Ericsson is not just one or three things — it’s many together. And together they are creating complex relationships and challenges. It is obvious that I will not be able to address all different aspects at the right complexity level of Supply in this blog post. I will also try to avoid speaking of specific solutions and narratives as they highly depend on the local organizations, problematics, and teams.

That being said. I will address the topics which are closest to me, transformative and globally applicable right now in Supply and which does affect our ways of working. I will give a brief intro of what they are, how they affect our ways of working, how to benefit from them and ideas of how to implement them:

  1. Technology — next generation of the supply chain
  2. People — automation and efficiency

The second industrial revolution brought machinery to manufacturing which transformed supply all around the globe. Then the third industrial revolution brought computers and it was time for digitalization in factories. Now we are entering the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 and it does bring a lot of opportunities and challenges. On the bright side Industry 4.0 promises:

  1. That we can leverage the advances in computer vision and machine learning to bring robotic systems to the new level of automation;
  2. We can work more efficiently by guiding people and machines using big data and analytics advancements;
  3. We can be much more cost-effective by predicting the future using easily accessible predictive algorithms.

On the other hand, it’s full of challenges:

  1. Factories haven’t yet been properly digitalized (industry 3.0) which is a requirement for Industry 4.0.;
  2. Industry 4.0 is something we are still defining, we are the pioneers — it’s not well communicated with all the people working in the field. Some technologies are overhyped;
  3. As with any new innovations — it’s not very clear what is the most cost-effective move organization can make at this point.

Industry 4.0 changes the way we think about Machinery and Digital systems. It sits in the intersection between OT and IT (operational and informational technology). See figure 1. Suddenly hardware and software teams previously worked in silos, must work together to bring the best solutions to Supply. It does affect organization structure. Instead of assigning managers to newly created teams we might want to build competence pools and then distribute the people to multifunctional teams. In this scenario teams have product owners and competence pools have competence managers, who are the most senior e.g. developer, an architect with great people skills. See figure 2.

Figure 1. The intersection between IT and OT
Figure 2. Competence pool organization setup

There are a couple of principles that must be considered when organizing teams as shown in 2. Figure:

  1. Professionals from different pools dedicate their attention 100% to the team they are in. The team is where priorities and tasks are being decided. Pools are for educational, alignment, support, and career-related topics;
  2. People always should try to work only in one team because splitting their attention to multiple teams will reduce efficiency. This is not always a possibility but has to be considered;
  3. Team size can vary from 1 (starting something from scratch) to 8 people but not more to reduce communication overhead. Following the thinking of Brooks Law;
  4. Teams are led by product owners, but product owners do not necessarily have to be trained as product owners, sometimes, especially in the early phase of project/product Architect, Analyst or similar people can take the product ownership;
  5. In perfect conditions teams should not be disassembled when product/project phases out or new priorities are coming in, they have learned ways of working together and do understand each other so that they can perform the best. That being said — switching teams and introducing new members must be allowed when needed (e.g. priorities or team members interests have changed);
  6. Competence managers and leaders must have a broad overview of all the different teams and products/projects going on in the organization so that they can better allocate the people and create the growth plan.

This kind of organization does solve/improve the following things:

  1. Improve the alignment within the organization through competence pools — alignment in the organization is very important and time-consuming (projects, technology stack, ways of working, culture, etc.);
  2. Reduce the communication overhead between different levels and do encourage flat hierarchy thinking in the organization — I will speak about that in the People section;
  3. Reduce the number of managers required to run the organization and introduce new ways of thinking about what a manager is;
  4. Give more flexibility, encourage innovation and possibility for professionals easily learn and grow in their field;
  5. Make teams more efficient;
  6. Alignment in common goals and targets.

Implementing such an organization is no easy task. It requires that people are well informed about why and how to achieve that. Big changes like this should be done starting with the department that clearly wants and embraces the change and then from there the structure can be tuned and improved.

No setup is perfect including this one, it does bring its own challenges which, because of limited space, is not the scope of this document. This kind of organizational structure will not be the best fit for all Supply areas and needs but it seems to be the right recipe from where I am coming from — manufacturing. There’s always room for improvement.

This way of working is not new, but I think that execution is important and could be improved based on the principles mentioned before. In my limited experience, I haven’t seen this kind of execution. Technology is changing rapidly, and existing ways of working should be at least challenged.


Important topics like personal growth, collaboration, team culture, motivation, etc. are being popular for a long time and they are important nowadays. In this section, however, I will focus on areas changed by Industry 4.0. This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list.

It’s no secret that people are the biggest asset any organization can have. For me, people are not a resource but human beings who can be indeed the biggest asset, but they can also do a lot of harm to the company, if not guided properly.

Opposite of what it may seem in the era of automation it’s even more crucial to invest in people as the impact of what people can do becomes bigger thanks to technology. It’s worth noting that automating office workers’ repetitive (and not only) tasks are easier than factory worker tasks as to automate tasks in the factory we also require hardware but for office work, it’s just software. It is a huge opportunity to focus on complex topics instead of focusing on mundane tasks.

Not everyone is prepared for their job (partly or fully) to be automated. It requires a new way of thinking. It feels to me that thinking about the core of the problem and reducing everything to the fundaments is somehow a requirement only for upper-level management, leaders and senior engineers. These kinds of skills will be required for most of the people at different levels because machines can and will do the work. We must ask the right questions and search for solutions. People in this new setting should take ownership of their work which is not that common.

To think about problems at different organizational levels we must have the possibility to communicate easily within the organization and this brings me to the next topic — Chutzpah. Inspired by how many Israel startups and army think about hierarchies. Chutzpah means flat hierarchies because everything is up to debate. It’s more of a mindset than an organization structure. It means that everyone can challenge anyone in the organization no matter their level of seniority. It is not the only possibility to express but also the ability to listen and understand. This kind of organization and thinking should bring down the cost of communication and increase the velocity of progress.

Currently, most of the initiatives in manufacturing internally are being executed as a project. A project means that it has a start and end date. The end date usually is when something has been successfully deployed and then most of the people spread out to other projects. This way of working brings challenges:

  1. It requires a lot of time to deploy the solution into production because everything is based on RFQ and it’s hard to deploy a half-baked solution and benefit the business right away;
  2. hard, expensive, time-consuming or impossible to introduce new features and resolve bugs;
  3. hard to integrate with new systems because expertise scattered around or non-existent;
  4. at some point, it will be legacy and it’s hard to predict when and how to deal with the system;
  5. the team putting a project together is not necessary which will be taken accountable for whatever is going to happen in the future of a few years which does not fit together with long term planning.

I would like to introduce the idea that most projects with similar traits should be considered as products for which continuous work (similar to continuous learning) is required and therefore stable team working on it. In this way, it’s possible to develop the solution in an agile way and bring something to production whenever it’s ready. It’s much easier to introduce new features and solve the issues as well as predict and prepare for the future.


Summary. Industry 4.0 is not well defined yet. It does create new opportunities and challenges. It changes the way we work and how we look at the solutions. Automation requires us to rethink what skills are useful. We are living in amazing times — full of open research and endless possibilities. To take full advantage of this we are required to rethink our ways of working.

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