Nordic’s Managed Services team recently brought Andy Mueller on board as director of operations.
We sat down with Andy to get to know him a little better, including where he hails from, what he loves about process improvement, and the details of his family’s Christmas tree farm up north.
Q. Tell us a little bit about your background.
Andy: I studied industrial engineering at UW-Madison, so I have always had an eye for process improvement and operations. I love figuring out how we do things today and how we can do them better tomorrow – quicker, more efficiently, and with better quality. Coming out of college, I’d been doing a master's-level course working with Motorola down in Chicago and took a job with them coming out of school.
I started out with Motorola about 14 years ago in their manufacturing operations as a process engineer. I was concentrating on running multiple radio production lines and putting tools and systems to increase throughput, decrease lead times, and drive quality improvements. I did that for a few years, then moved into a corporate function within the global supply chain, where I did project work as a Six Sigma Black Belt. I worked on varied projects – from lead time reduction to quality improvement to implementing new processes or standards across facilities – and got to travel the world working with different sites. I’ve been to Europe, Asia, Mexico, and all over the U.S. doing project work with Motorola.
When Motorola sold off its cell phone division and began dissolving some of its businesses, I jumped into the government and public safety division as part of the new product introduction PMO. It was more traditional project management, helping to launch hardware, software, and service products that were targeted at first responders and mission-critical communication systems. I got great exposure to a lot of different product lines that all had unique requirements, and it was fun to be part of the design from the ground up – designing different global supply chains, securing enough capital and equipment to launch the product, running through cycles of prototypes, and putting IT systems and infrastructure in place to support product launches. During this time, I also went back to school part-time and got my MBA from Northwestern.
I moved from a leadership role in our PMO into a role where I was running our North America business operations for our business and consumer lines of radio products. That role was more sales and finance facing and focused on understanding our quarterly financial forecasts, ensuring we had an operational plan in place to support those targets, monitoring progress toward those goals, and mitigating any risks throughout the quarter with the appropriate teams. On top of that, I was living and breathing an ERP implementation across all worldwide sites that came with a number of challenges and continuing optimization efforts after launch.
Q. You did a lot of global travel at Motorola. What was your favorite country to visit?
Andy: I’ve been to over 30 countries throughout the years for work and fun, and I think my favorite trip was a personal one to visit New Zealand. It’s the most beautiful place on earth. My cousin was studying abroad, and we rented a car and just drove around the south island – we’d stop and stare at something for 15 minutes and say, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” And then we’d get back in the car, drive around the next turn in the road and say, “OK, no, this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” I love nature and being outside, and it was a spectacular place to hike around. We also managed to carve out some time to get our adrenaline fix with some bungee jumping and skydiving.
Q. What brought you to Nordic?
Andy: I’ve known [President of Managed Services] Vivek Swaminathan for years, so I have followed Nordic’s tremendous growth from early on. Vivek shot me a note that Nordic was opening up an operations role that was potentially a good fit with my background and suggested that I throw my hat in the ring if I was interested. I’ve admired the growth and culture that Nordic has built through the years, so I jumped at the opportunity to join the team.
Q. What drew you to Managed Services in particular?
Andy: From a mission standpoint, Managed Services really appealed to me. At Motorola, we were driven to help people connect in the moments that matter and have a hyper-critical focus on our customers. First responders’ equipment and communication systems need to be working. That was something that got me out of bed in the morning. It’s something that carries over here at Nordic, where we’re driven to maintain, improve, and optimize mission-critical EHR systems that provide healthcare to our population.
Managed Services is also poised to be explosive in the marketplace. When I was doing my homework on the role, I talked to a few different health IT industry experts and Bellin’s CIO. One message that came through in my conversations with them was that it’s hard to attract full-time employees and keep them on board, especially in a support and maintenance role. That’s where the Managed Services space provides real value to the market – we can do it with better quality and at a better cost than customers can on their own if we grow it right and scale it correctly.
Q. What is your role on the Managed Services team, both long-term and day-to-day?
Andy: The primary long-term role is helping us design the processes, metrics, and management systems that we’ll use to drive our business. A secondary part of my role is to make sure that we have the right tools and systems in place to run efficiently and grow. Finally, I’ll be a liaison to the business for a lot of our shared services, and I’ll help to be an escalation point back to the home office, ensuring that Managed Services ties smoothly back to greater Nordic.
One of the big projects I’m going to focus on initially is the implementation of a centralized ticketing system, Cherwell, which will be the backbone of Managed Services in the future. This will allow us to look at our data more holistically, work smarter as an organization, and be able to better monitor performance across customers.
Q. What do you find compelling about process improvement for a service business like Nordic Managed Services?
Andy: I always say that everything’s a process, whether that is building a physical product or working on a business function, which means there’s always opportunity to improve. I’ve led a lot of different process development and improvement projects. There’s a lot of power in pulling people together to frame a problem, understanding how things actually work day-to-day across an organization, and using data to generate ideas to improve. You may get very different views on how things currently work or how they should work, but I love the process of figuring out the best path forward and showing results. Let’s design processes that produce good and repeatable results and then challenge ourselves to figure out how we can do it even faster or with less effort or with better quality.
Q. What do you like to do outside work?
Andy: My wife Anja and I have two children – Mason, 3, and August, 1 – and two dogs – Ketchup and Wrigley – so we’re completely outnumbered by the creatures who live in our house. They keep us running around and busy. We love to get up to our cabin, which is 60 miles north of here, in the same area where my grandma grew up in an old family farmhouse.
When my dad and my uncle were building our cabin, they started a Christmas tree farm to help pay off the land and the construction. So, when I was growing up, my jobs would be messing around with the Christmas trees throughout the year – planting, shearing, harvesting, selling. We’ve scaled down the volume, but we still do 200 to 300 Christmas trees a year that my Dad sells from his front yard. It’s always a fun time around Christmas because everyone’s stopping by to get a tree.
