Aurorium’s TRACtion Success – From Spreadsheets to a Single Source of Truth

Aurorium is a global manufacturer specializing in high-performance specialty materials used across various industries. With continuous improvement ingrained in its culture, the company drives productivity enhancements and cost reduction initiatives across all of its 12 sites. However, managing and tracking hundreds of projects across locations around the world was a growing challenge, leading to many missed opportunities for the organization.

Lack of Visibility and Standardization Created Several Challenges

Before adopting TRACtion, Aurorium relied on spreadsheets that varied in format, stored across personal and shared drives with no centralized structure. This lack of consistency made it difficult to track organization-wide project progress, measure impact, and share best practices across sites.

Reporting was especially burdensome. Compiling information from all of the different data sources often required hours or even days of manual effort. Leadership had limited visibility into ongoing process improvement initiatives, making it challenging to evaluate the return on investment to the business. Not only that, without a unified system, some improvement efforts remained stalled out, deprioritized, or abandoned altogether.

Kim Koning Aurorium

The absence of a shared project repository also meant that teams unknowingly worked on similar issues in different locations. Valuable process improvements developed at one site were not easily accessible to others, leading to duplicated efforts and missed opportunities for best practice sharing.

“As the saying goes, ‘If it’s not measured, it’s not managed.’ We had no single source of truth, making it nearly impossible to track project impacts or drive accountability,” explained Kim Koning, the deployment lead at Aurorium. The company needed a solution that would streamline tracking, enhance visibility, and ensure that improvement initiatives delivered measurable results.

Implementing TRACtion for Standardized Project Tracking

Having previously used TRACtion at another organization, Kim recognized its potential to address Aurorium’s challenges. After considering other options and finding no comparable solutions, Aurorium chose TRACtion for its ability to:

• Centralize project data into a single system, eliminating scattered spreadsheets.

• Provide real-time tracking of financial savings, milestones, and project progress.
• Offer flexible roadmaps tailored to different types of projects, including Lean Six Sigma initiatives, quick wins, and capital projects.
• Automate reporting and notifications to reduce administrative burden and increase accountability.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing across multiple sites, ensuring that successful projects could be replicated elsewhere.

Approaching Implementation & Adoption of TRACtion in Phases

Aurorium rolled out TRACtion in a structured, multi-phase approach:

1. Pilot it with the Lean Six Sigma training participants – The first users were employees undergoing Yellow Belt and Green Belt training, who were required to enter their projects into TRACtion.
2. Training sessions for key stakeholders – finance teams, project managers, and engineers participated in hands-on training sessions.
3. One-on-one coaching for users – to ensure adoption, Kim and his team worked individually with new users, guiding them through project entry and reporting.
4. Expanding to other continuous improvement projects – over time, TRACtion became the default tool for tracking all improvement initiatives, not just Six Sigma projects.

“One-on-one coaching was key. Instead of just showing people how to use it, we had them lead the process, share their screens, and enter projects themselves,” Kim noted. “That built confidence and ensured adoption.”

Resistance to the change was minimal. Since there was no previous standardized system in place, employees quickly saw the value in having a centralized approach using TRACtion.

Key Benefits & Impact

With TRACtion, Aurorium experienced immediate and measurable improvements:

1. Dramatic Time Savings: Kim estimates TRACtion saves the company at least one full-time position’s worth of effort by eliminating the need for manual data consolidation and report preparation. “Before TRACtion, if our CEO asked for an update on savings, it would have taken days. Now, I can provide that information quickly.”

2. Enhanced Visibility for Leadership: Executives now have instant access to real-time project data, eliminating delays in decision-making.

“Our CEO was visiting a plant and remembered a past project at another site. Instead of scrambling to locate a slide deck, I was able to share the full project details directly from TRACtion within minutes,” Kim shared.

3. Cross-Site Knowledge Sharing: TRACtion enables seamless sharing of improvement projects across locations. When a project at one plant successfully improved a vendor onboarding process, another plant was able to replicate it without reinventing the wheel.

“Right now, we’re building momentum. We used to struggle with having good project examples to share. Now, with every White Belt, Yellow Belt and Green Belt wave, we build up a stronger library of successful projects that can be referenced and reused.”

4. Increased Accountability and Project Management: TRACtion’s past-due notifications and milestone tracking help teams stay on top of project timelines. “Before, projects sat untouched on a spreadsheet for years. Now, we have visibility into what’s on track and what needs attention,” Kim noted. The ability to track savings and project ROI also ensures that improvement work remains a priority for leadership.

Lessons Learned & Future Plans

Aurorium has seen significant improvements with TRACtion, but Kim believes they are still only utilizing about 20% of the platform’s full capabilities. Moving forward, the team aims to expand KPI tracking beyond financial savings to include operational metrics like Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and on-time delivery. Enhancing A3 usage is another priority, providing more structured problem-solving and ensuring that key learnings are captured and shared across teams.

Sample data for demonstration purposes only.

Further integration with SAP and other internal systems is also on the horizon, with the goal of creating a seamless data flow between platforms. Another focus is reducing the reliance on PowerPoint presentations by fully utilizing TRACtion’s built-in project storyboarding features, which will streamline reporting and improve efficiency.

These next steps reflect Aurorium’s commitment to continuous improvement—not only in its manufacturing processes but also in the way it tracks, manages, and optimizes those improvements.

Advice for Organizations Considering TRACtion

Kim’s advice for other companies exploring TRACtion? “Don’t overcomplicate it—just get started. It’s incredibly intuitive, and you can adjust roadmaps as needed. Having strong coaching and emphasizing critical thinking over just ‘filling out boxes’ makes all the difference.”

For Aurorium, TRACtion has become more than a project tracking tool—it’s a system that empowers employees, drives accountability, and accelerates continuous improvement.

Kim Koning is the Global Director of Operational Excellence at Aurorium. He brings nearly 40 years of experience in manufacturing and Lean Six Sigma. A certified Master Black Belt, Kim holds a BS in Management from Purdue and an MBA from Western Michigan University. He is known for driving global process improvements and operational efficiency.