Western Sugar Cooperative

Operational turnaround is often described in dramatic terms: new strategy, major capital investment, restructuring or a sweeping cultural reset. My experience has been much less glamorous. Most struggling operations do not need a speech. They need clarity. They need basic systems that are understood, followed and reinforced every day. People need to know what good looks like, what matters most and what happens next when something goes wrong.

That lesson has followed me through both military leadership and industrial operations. As an infantry officer, I learned that capable people can still perform poorly when information is late, standards are unclear and leaders are reacting instead of anticipating. The same is true in manufacturing. At Western Sugar Cooperative, I stepped into a warehouse and packaging operation with experienced people, demanding production requirements and the realities of operating in a legacy industrial environment. The opportunity was not to reinvent everything. It was to make the operation more disciplined, more visible and more reliable.

Start With a Clear Operating Picture

One of the first lessons military leaders learn is that good decisions depend on shared understanding. In the Army, we talk about maintaining a common operating picture. In a plant, the idea is almost identical. Production performance, downtime, maintenance priorities, staffing issues, quality concerns and unresolved problems have to be visible enough that people can act on them.

At Western Sugar, that meant improving shift handoffs, making reporting more consistent, creating visual management tools and increasing visibility into performance and downtime. Before a process can be improved, it must be understood. Too often, organizations have plenty of data but very little shared awareness. Information lives in software, spreadsheets, emails or one supervisor’s head. The floor experiences the consequences without seeing the whole picture.

The goal is not more reporting for its own sake. It is getting the right information to the people who can do something with it.

Reliability Is More Than a Maintenance Problem

Equipment reliability is easy to frame as a maintenance issue, but in practice it is often a coordination issue. Maintenance cannot prioritize effectively if operations does not clearly communicate what is failing and what the production impact is. Operations cannot plan effectively if maintenance work is invisible or constantly reactive. The solution is not for one department to blame the other. It is to create a shared rhythm around priorities.

That became a major focus for us. We improved how maintenance needs were identified, discussed, prioritized and followed through. There was no single breakthrough project. The improvement came from a series of smaller changes that reduced ambiguity and increased accountability.

Over time, those changes contributed to roughly a 40 percent reduction in unplanned downtime and a 30 percent increase in packaging throughput. More importantly, the performance proved sustainable. Combined production improved from the 13th-highest yearly average in our historical data in 2024, to sixth in 2025 and fifth in 2026 year-to-date, while individual packaging lines also began setting some of their strongest monthly and annual production marks.

The numbers matter, but the more important lesson is what produced them. Sustainable improvement came from better habits: clearer communication, stronger follow-up, more consistent standards and addressing small failures before they became large ones.

Discipline Should Make Work Easier

The word discipline can sound rigid outside the military. I do not use it to mean micromanagement. I use it to mean consistency. A disciplined operation is one where people do not have to guess how work gets handed off, who owns a problem, what the standard is or whether an issue will be followed up.

That is one of the most transferable lessons from military leadership. Good units build routines because routines preserve decision-making capacity when conditions become difficult. Rehearsals, standard operating procedures, battle rhythms and after-action reviews are designed to reduce preventable confusion so leaders and teams can focus on the problems that actually require judgment.

Industrial operations benefit from the same principle. Standard work, daily briefs, clear escalation paths, visible metrics and structured follow-up are not bureaucracy when they are designed well. They remove friction. The best systems make good performance easier and make problems harder to ignore.

Turnaround Is Never Finished

One of the dangers of improvement work is believing that a few good months mean the operation is fixed. They do not. Equipment ages. People change roles. Production demands shift. Old habits return. A turnaround that depends entirely on one manager’s energy is not really a turnaround; it is temporary overperformance.

That has been one of my most important lessons at Western Sugar. Leadership is not about personally solving every problem. It is about building an operation that becomes progressively less dependent on heroic intervention. The real test is whether the systems still work on night shift, during a difficult week, when the manager is absent or when production is under pressure.

I still believe in ambitious targets and high standards. But I have become more skeptical of big transformations that skip the fundamentals. Most operations improve the same way strong teams do: one clear standard, one reliable process, one honest conversation and one solved problem at a time.

Turnaround is not a moment. It is the accumulation of disciplined decisions until reliability becomes normal.

Dakota Nettle

Warehouse and Packaging Manager

Wester Sugar Co-op