Cover Story
Making adjustments
How Thomas W. Swidarski drove change at Diebold Inc.
Smart Business Cleveland | September 2009
Thomas W. Swidarski, President and CEO, Diebold Inc.
Thomas W. Swidarski had a clear message after being named president and CEO of Diebold Inc. in December 2005.
“We cannot change what has happened in the past, but together we can change the future,” he said of the provider of integrated self-service delivery and security systems. “We start by focusing on how we, as a team, can better serve our customers and build customer loyalty. Customers want quality products surrounded by outstanding service. We built this company on customer service for many years — and we’ll keep doing that.”
While Swidarski launched a new company brand and improved communication methods, one of his most notable accomplishments is transforming business processes. Prior to Swidarski’s current role, Diebold’s development teams worked in a serial fashion with “handoffs” of parts of projects to other groups once they completed their parts. Under Swidarski’s innovative and strategic leadership, product development at Diebold became more collaborative as groups of employees from various disciplines were pulled together into multifunctional teams. This dramatically improved all processes involved in product development and resulted in improved quality, efficiency and speed to market.
Swidarski also led the transformation of the company’s manufacturing footprint and supply chain. Previously, the company’s supply chain had multiple production and warehouse facilities around the world. Swidarski made it one of his top five priorities for the company to attain a strengthened supply chain.
Launched in 2006, the initiative was an internal campaign designed to deliver $100 million in cost savings by 2008. Well on its way to attaining this goal, Swidarski and the leadership team expanded the initiative to save an additional $100 million by the end of 2010.
Since its inception of the initiative, Diebold has met the first goal of saving $100 million by 2008 and is making significant progress toward saving an additional $100 million — $70 million is expected to be saved by the middle of 2010.
In 2009, for the third consecutive year, Diebold was named one of the world’s top 100 outsourcing service providers by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals and was ranked within the 10 best outsourcing providers within the services industry.
How to reach: Diebold Inc., (800) 343-2653 or www.diebold.com
