During high school, Sarah Mauraugis read an article in Seventeen Magazine about women in STEM, which set her on a course towards engineering. Today, she heads Continuous Improvement at Flow-Rite Controls, a manufacturer of fluid control devices based in Byron Michigan. 

Ben Merton talks to her about the advantages of being a woman in a male-dominated world, how she builds and manages Flow-Rite's Kaizen funnel, and some fascinating insights into methods she uses to build a culture of continuous improvement.

Episode Summary

• Why being a woman can give you an advantage over men to come up with creative ways to solve problems that men often overlook.
• How Flow-Rite's has boosted innovation by adopting a rule that every employee must submit at least one continuous improvement idea each year.
• How Sarah builds and maintains Flow-Rite's Kaizen funnel using Excel sheets and whiteboards to address the 8 wastes, reducing wastage of scrap, energy and other resources
• A deeper insight into the result of a Kaizen into how the company was using its inventory management system, and the problems that result from band-aid software customizations that often add unnecessary steps to repetitive computer-related work.
• Why the current and future shortage of labor in manufacturing will hopefully drive efficiencies in communication and team management.
• Automation needs a human touch: it's not good enough just to invest in the latest and greatest machine. You need to understand how your employees will interact with new equipment to avoid waste.
• How measuring the success of a Continuous Improvement project does not just come down to savings and improved material flow. It's when new ways of doing things come from within and happen without coercion.
• Continous Improvement is about shepherding from the rear. There's no such thing as a Continuous Improvement manager; you're really just a facilitator and cheerleader.
• Women should strive to overcome stereotypes and break the mould because manufacturing desperately needs diversity to solve its problems.

Deacon Wardlow is a self-described ‘New Tech Nerd’, who has spent a lifetime at the intersection of technology, manufacturing and continuous improvement. After leaving college in the US, he moved to Japan and was exposed to Toyota Kata, Kaizen, and Ishikawa.

• How Vantage LED was able to build a culture of continous improvement using Agile and Scrum in a manufacturing environment.
  
  
• Why manufacturers really struggle with disruption and innovation: there is an inherent fear of failure, which is seen as part of the process in the technology world.
  
  
• How the decline of US manufacturing is a function of a collective failure to embrace disruption in manufacturing
  
  
• Contrasting the efficiencies delivered by the Japanese culture of ‘sameness’ and equality across the organisation with the American mindset of ‘craftsmanship’.
  
  
• Why American individualism might inhibit the team building necessary to a well-run manufacturing operation
  
  
• While technology has already displaced certain jobs, this is something that will lead to faster improvements in people’s quality of life and work.
  
  
• How leadership is about helping people achived goals and giving them credit for that achievement
  
  
• Why continous improvement is not a 9-5 job: it’s a mindset about helping people.

Gerald Heitmann, President of SDG Global and formerly General Manager of Quality Operations at Panasonic Energies North America joins Ben Merton to talk about how people like Edward Deming, Kaouru Ishikawa & Dr. Wheeler shaped his understanding of Quality and Continuous Improvement, and why they are still relevant today. 

Gerald further explains where Lean Six Sigma falls short of helping people understand their own 'system of profound knowledge', and why AI is not going to bring about disruptive change in manufacturing. 

Episode Summary

• Why certain elements of Lean Six Sigma are diametrically opposed to the principles of Edward Deming: Lean Six Sigma is focused on cost and not building a system of profound knowledge
  
  
• How Lean Six Sigma specifically fails to adhere to Deming’s 8th Point: “Remove fear from the system”. By dividing everyone into black belts, green belts and everyone else, it creates organizational boundaries that propagate fear
  
  
• Why sub-systems like purchasing and finance are so important to your understanding of your organization’s system of profound knowledge…areas that are often outside the scope of a Six Sigma project
  
  
• How to implement SPC without spending millions of dollars on complicated software 
  
  
• Why AI is just another tool (“A high-tech knob turner”). It is not a replacement for conventional quality improvement, which should remain in the control of humans
  
  
• How 85% of all quality improvement problems are caused either by decisions or indecisions by management
  
  
• The future of processes is ultimately about humans enabled by a combination of software and Deming’s principles

 Starting his career in engineering as a Whitworth Scholar, Chris Sidney has spent more than 10 years managing quality and continuous improvement initiatives for the Winbro Group and Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery. Ben Merton talks to him about the cultural differences between how people handle change and leadership in the US & UK. They also discuss how personality testing can be a useful part of creating the right environment for change, and how the Future of Processes will be driven by the need for more ethical and environmentally friendly processes and products. 

Episode Summary:

• The decline of UK manufacturing from 25% of GDP in the 1970s to 10% today and hopes for a resurgence as the government tries to bridge the skills gap by advancing STEM subjects and offering BTech qualifications instead of GCSEs.
• The differences in effecting change at a plant in South Carolina vs the UK: Americans are less suspicious of change than the British, and less likely to question leadership decisions.
• An overview of how Chris and his team used data to solve a challenging problem involving machined parts that were jumping in and out of tolerance.
• How analysis-paralysis is often the result of not defining the scope of an improvement initiative correctly in the first place.
• Why it’s important to have people with different personalities in the room to create the right environment for solving problems. Using online personality tests to understand your own personality and those of your colleagues can prevent building an echo chamber.
• How the previous experience of a given company's leadership with Lean and Six Sigma is the primary determining factor of whether it will be successfully adopted in any new initiative.
• The differences between Lean and Six Sigma: solving the same efficiency problem from different angles (waste and variation reduction).
• Advice for Lean Six Sigma enthusiasts: most people don’t care about your deep statistical and technical knowledge. Break it down for them into something they understand.
• How the Future of Processes is likely to be shaped by the need to solve ethical and environmental dilemmas. The removal of waste won’t be driven by greed and cost but by external regulations and changing consumer demands for greener products.

Originally from Kenya, Robert Odhiambo came to the US over 15 years ago and has made a career of driving change and continuous improvement at companies like USPS, Ingersoll Rand, and Spectrum Chemical, an FDA-registered manufacturer of chemicals and lab products. Ben Merton talks to him about how to build trust with mid-management employees who are resistant to change, and the importance of coaching upwards to senior leadership on new initiatives. 

Episode Summary:

• Why creating ‘flow’ is the key to creating customer satisfaction, whether you are in a Fortune 500 organization like USPS, Ingersoll Rand, or in industries as diverse as chemicals, pharmaceuticals or building materials.
• The importance of mapping ‘information flow’ as part of your Value Stream Mapping. Continuous improvement is not just about how material moves through the shop floor.
• How changing mindsets is the key to creating the right behaviour for implementing continuous improvement. To do this, you need to build relationships and trust outside of the work environment, especially with apparently difficult or intractable people.
• Coaching upwards: people often forget the importance of changing the mindsets of senior leadership at the beginning of a continuous improvement initiative.
• Where you are most likely to see resistance to change: mid-level management. To overcome this, you first need to listen and understand where people are before you start talking and making assumptions.
• Moving OEE from 52% to 88% in a plant by empowering a mid-manager who was previously resistant to change and building engagement with daily huddles.
• How the future of quality management will be about better usage and application of programming tools like Python to day-to-day requirements, more automation and better visualisation of continuous improvement KPIs.

Tudor Saroiu talks to Ben Merton about the challenges that he’s faced in driving quality and continuous improvement in food processing companies as diverse as Campbell’s Soup, Club Coffee, and now at Steam Whistle Brewing. We learn about the importance of employee happiness, how to win leadership over to continuous improvement initiatives, and what to do with people who are resistant to change.

Episode summary:

• The challenges involved in driving continuous improvement across an organization with people from different geographic, educational and cultural backgrounds
• Bringing alignment to continuous improvement objectives in production, packaging, marketing and sales.
• Specific ways in which he was able to get cross-functional teams to collaborate, including process mapping and building consensus.
• Ways to manage people who are resistant to change and how to make them feel that their voice is being heard.
• Why it’s so hard to get sales teams to cooperate on continuous improvement initiatives.
• The differences in building a culture of continuous improvement in large vs small companies.
• How to recruit people into quality and continuous improvement.
• Focusing on the ways that continuous improvement impacts the bottom line as a means to get buy-in from the C-Suite on new initiatives.
• Examples of how Steam Whistle was able to reduce fermentation time by 10-15% and free up tank capacity.
• How the future of processes will move towards automation without the need for layoffs because humans will focus more on areas where they add value.