GA 127 | How to Apply Lean to Different Industries with Gary Beaudette

You're listening to episode 127 with Gary Beaudet. Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Perera. Hey there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now I want to give a quick shout out and say a special thank you to the folks that have already taken part in our podcast survey. As we mentioned a couple episodes ago, we were looking at making a few format changes to the show. Nothing radical, so don't worry. But we want to make this show better and so we need your feedback. So we've created a very, very short survey over@gembapodcast.com survey1. That's the number one. So again, gembapodcast.com survey1 and once you're there, there's just a handful of questions. You should be able to do the survey in a matter of a minute or two. And at the very end you can leave your email address if you'd like, it's optional and be enter the opportunity to win a free Gemba Academy subscription valued at $1,995. So definitely a great prize. There's several people have already helped us out. I don't have your full names, but just I'll rattle a couple off here. Chacon, J J Menard C. Norris B. Walner W I S A M. Thank you to those folks that have taken time to to give us your feedback because it's really helpful. And I'll tell you, the folks that have given feedback have been extremely detail oriented. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Now today I'm excited to welcome Gary Beaudet to the show. Now Gary is a longtime listener to the podcast and he's got a heck of a lean background. Now today he's helping companies with Lean as a consultant, but he's got a lot of practical real world experience that he shares with us. And as it turns out, Gary actually works alongside with Dalton Prather, who was just on the show. By the way, we had great feedback on the episode with Dalton So want to say again, special thank you to Dalton for coming onto the show. If you don't know, Dalton is pretty new to the Lean journey. So it was a different type of episode, which was really fun to record, and I'm glad so many people liked it. And as a matter of fact, some of the feedback that we got on the survey was that they liked that type of format where it's maybe somebody a little newer to Lean and maybe they have some questions and I could offer some coaching or heck, we could bring folks like John Miller, Kevin Meyer onto the show, Steve Cain onto the show and kind of do a coaching roundtable. So if stuff like that sounds interesting, go over to the survey and let us know. Again, that's GembaPodcast.com survey one. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Gary, well, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

I'm from Modesto, California. That's Northern California.

Very nice. Very nice. My. My business partner, Kevin, lives up in Morro Bay. Do you know where that's at?

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's really nice over there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So beautiful. Beautiful part of the. Of the country, that's for sure. So. All right, well, Gary, let's kind of get things started with you telling us a little bit about your background, maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement.

All right. Well, I was working with Parker Hannifin at the Racor division, and I first learned about continuous improvement through someone asking me to label my telephone telephone.

Okay, so how'd that work out?

I'm like, what is this all about? I have all these other things that I'm doing. I'm extremely busy right now. And, you know, there. There was some resource that came up and said, yeah, you need to label your telephone telephone. So to say the least, I didn't really care for Lean too much when I first joined Parker Hanifin, Ray Corps.

Well, let's explain. I can't help but explore that a little. Obviously, labeling your telephone telephone isn't. I guess they were attempting to practice 5s or something like that. But what happened? Did you do it?

No, I didn't do it at first. I asked. I asked the reason why, and they said, well, in case someone, you know, borrows things at your desk, you'll know where to put them back. I'm like, well, this phone has a cord in it. It's not going anywhere.

Yeah.

So to me, I just. I didn't see the value of taking time to label telephone. Telephone. So, yeah, it was through 5s office. But I just think during the audit, this person was noodling and they were kind of just checking the box.

Yeah.

Going through. Going through the motions.

Yeah. Yeah. My friend Mark Graben, I don't know if you know, follow Mark, but he has the famous acronym L. Lame Lean as misguidedly executed. I think that's a good, definite good example of lame. But not to be mean, because I'm sure that person was doing their best and maybe they still had to learn themselves. So I don't want to be beat that person up too bad.

I ended up working with this person. I later joined the lean department and this person, great person, but they were new, and I think they were kind of put in a spot not to succeed. They didn't really get the TWI treatment.

There you go. There you go. All right, Very good. Well, I can't wait to dig in more about your journey here. So let's. As you know, Gary, we like to start all of our shows with our guest sharing a quotation or two that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

Yeah, I have one from Doug Smith. It's team Share the burden and divide the grief.

What's that mean to you?

It means when, just through some of my problem solving experience, when something bad happens, people want to point fingers instead of all kind of take responsibility for it. And when we succeed, we like to celebrate everyone. But when there's a problem, we don't like to share the burden too much. Wow.

Good stuff. All right, well, real fast, are you still with Parker or what are you up to these days?

Okay, so, yeah, about two years ago, I left Parker. I learned a lot from Parker Hannifin. I had a great mentor in Tyson Burnett. He came over from Bosch. So I learned a lot. And when he came over, he really taught me the value of lean. I was in the human resources department training high performance teams, and that's when I got my first lean experience, when I had to label my telephone telephone. But then as I started talking to Tyson, he was letting me know about how to use common sense and how to apply lean. That makes sense. And to really understand the concepts before we go out checking the boxes. And through him, I just got really interested because he showed me how lean management would help make my life easier. And, you know, I think we're all kind of little selfish at work. We want to, hey, if it's not going to help me, then you really have to convince me to do something extra. And he convinced me it started making my life easier at work and I just got better and better and I kept asking for more until I joined the Lean department there at Racort. So now he gave me the confidence and the skills where I started going out and I help businesses implement Lean. So I'm a. I'm a consultant in Northern California where we have a lot of agriculture. So that's something I wanted to explore, applying Lean to the agriculture side of things.

Very cool. Did you. We did an episode a few, a few weeks ago where I've, I do so many episodes, the name is escaping me. But anyhow, I'll find it and we'll put it in the show notes where it was Agriculture in California. So pretty interesting.

Was it with Dalton?

That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's Dalton. Yeah.

Okay. I hired him as an intern.

Okay.

Yeah. I got him straight out of college to work for my consulting business as an intern. And he didn't really know about Lean, so I. He job shadowed me at Agriculture at Duarte Nursery in Houston.

Very good.

All right.

Yeah, it was dalton. Yeah. Episode 125. Yeah, just. We just released it, so. All right, well. Very good. So. Well, let's talk a little bit about more. So you've. You've obviously worked in a little bit in the agriculture space, but what other industries have you. Have you worked in and seen continuous.

Improvement work in the retail industry, which I thought was interesting. I haven't applied too much Lean in retail, so it's actually auto parts store. It was O'Reilly's and my father worked there and he's worked there for years and years. And yeah, we just started implementing some Lean concepts over at O'Reilly's. I was just helping him out with a few things. I asked him what his biggest headaches were. He said, on our battery carts, we always lose our tools, we can't find them, they end up missing. So we just made a little shadow box for his tools to see if that helped with missing parts and wasted time looking for items. And it helped a lot.

Nice. What else are they doing?

We put just a lot of visual management up for different keys for their safes. They would have employees kind of jump over to different stores. So it was real confusing on, hey, where does this store keep these things? In the back room. So we just really 5s'd it, got everything visual, made it really easy to understand. And then I helped with their inventory management as well, too. The way they do orders and overstock and just try to level Everything out for them. So there wasn't as much overstock. Set them up with a little Kanban in the back.

So I wonder how does it work for a big chain like that? Let's say you guys come up with some best practices. Are they able to share that across the, across the world of O'Reilly parts kind of thing or.

That's a great question. So the district manager got involved. He saw because they go around and then do audits. They do organizational audits. So he saw at my father's store, this 5s, this the shadow box. And he's like, whoa, I want to get more. So I made his whole district the same thing. And, and they got really high scores on their audits. And so I started with one district. So right now he said, hey, wait until all these audits are done, but then I'm going to pass your name along to corporate offices and then try and work something out with them based on the results that we had.

So that's awesome. Very good.

Exciting.

Very good. Any other industries.

A gym, a fitness gym helped get them organized, set up, you know, just taught them a lot about customer value and surveying and get more information from the customer and then using that to make business decisions. And we 5s their gym big time. I've also worked in law office. I helped do standardized work for a law office and help with their onboarding program and some of the TWI and JI concepts. So I've been doing a few different things.

It's funny you mentioned a gym. I've kind of converted barn into a big CrossFit gym at my house here. So I don't actually go to a CrossFit box, but I have gone to them in the past and kind of went through when I was first learning how to do it to take some classes and learn all the movements and whatnot and, and I remember thinking to myself, golly, I mean, it's a great box, right? I mean it's a really successful gym here in the, in my town. But there were so many things I saw they could be doing better, like namely with the customers. You know, if you have a, you know, you know, 55 year old person who is overweight and out of shape versus a 21 year old strapping lad walk again, you know, it's like, you know, kind of, they're very different, right? And how do you hear that voice of the customer? And you know, obviously all the, that stuff is there, but just that the human side of it, I was like, goodness gracious, there's so Much opportunity here to apply lean thinking. So it's funny you said that.

Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, lean applies everywhere.

Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about some best practices from what you've seen from these various industries.

Since agriculture is so huge here in Northern California. I just think it's a different world. But looking at how labor intensive some of the processes are for packaging food or for, you know, just harvesting for planting, I think their willingness to make the job easier for their employees. So I'd say definitely there's a lot of willingness out here. They're interested which farming seems kind of old school. Like they don't use technology. But that's really not the case as these, these younger, the younger generation is coming up in farming and starting to take over. So they're interested in concepts on how to make things more efficient and make things easier for their employees. So I think it's their willingness to learn more. It's kind of a pull system. They keep asking me for more help and trying to understand some of the best practices and really about the culture.

Yeah. The thing that's always. I've always wondered about with farming is, you know, if you look back at the history of the, of the world really and where did this batch mentality come from and, and this working in batches and what we've tried to get away from with lean to get one piece flow. But you know, a lot of these early farming and agriculture and grains and silos and whatnot, and this is where this stuff. So I'm wondering, like, how do you. There's some things that you just have to batch. You have to plant a field full of stuff. Right. I don't know how you get it past that. You know what I'm saying? Like how do you balance that?

So it is hard because. Right. It's what the customer values and the, and the customer does value things growing all the same and coming out at the same time, whether it's grapevines or whether, you know, whatever it is, they wanted to batch things that all look the same. So of course in agriculture if you plant something earlier than its little brothers and sisters, it's going to start growing first.

Right.

So how I did it, because it's hard with high junka and to level things like that. But, but there's operations and processes within the production where they don't need a batch. We could do one piece flow, for example, where they're, they're grafting grapevines. You don't need to batch all the raw Materials, you need to just graft one and move one. So we do, we do apply one piece flow, but looking at the large scale batch, I've dug into getting a tolerance as far as, okay, do I have a week to play? If I plant these on Monday, could I plant the rest of these on Friday and they'll still grow pretty much the same for the customer. That's still fine for the customer. So I've had to really work getting some, you know, whether it's a few different days, that way it could help with high junka and just leveling out the. The word.

Yeah, very good. So one thing that you mentioned earlier in the show, I wanted to circle back and kind of touch on a little bit. You mentioned high performance teams. I guess it was at your time at Parker.

Right.

Talk a little bit about what are high performance teams, and then maybe how does that kind of tie in with the whole TPS Lean movement?

Okay, so what that was, they took a bunch of us from Parker Hannifin and they took us through. It was actually Disney. Walt Disney did this thing on high performance teams where they really focus on empowerment and kind of the respect for people and just getting everyone. Every single individual is a part of a team. And within that team, they're going to have a purpose statement, they're going to have smart goals, and each, each person's going to have some accountability and responsibility. So they're empowered to make some decisions. So it's something I learned. They sent me to corporate to learn it. I really enjoyed it. So they started sending me around to various locations at that same time. I was getting into Lean and I just noticed a lot of the concepts merged together. You know, the charter, whether it's for a Kaizen event or for a team. So they're both using the Kaizen charters, but just the respect for people, which I think at first, and I've, you know, I've listened to your podcast and I've heard you talk about it before where we, we kind of skipped over the respect for people. And, and I think what happened was when I started doing these high performance teams and they just drilled that home about empowerment, communication, there was almost the missing piece to the way we were doing lean at that time.

Yeah. Yeah. I wonder why it's so easy to pass over respect for people. Because I've done it. We've all done it.

Right.

And maybe I'm wondering why that is. You know, it's like, why would you care more about, you know, putting tape on the floor or labeling your Phone. Telephone versus being kind to people and listening and showing compassion or, you know, even getting after people. So, you know, holding people accountable. I've always wondered why we all struggle with that.

I think it's because in America, we're impatient and we like quick results. And I think a lot of the businesses, they just say, all right, tell me about the cost savings that, you know, what are ways to just get rid of cost?

Yeah.

So I think there's a lot of pressure from that. Just for me, going to various locations and businesses, there's a little bit of that pressures. We want results and we want them now. We don't have time for the respect for people. So, yeah, unfortunately, that's the case sometimes.

Yeah. So the last question I have for this section before we jump into the reflection section, with all of your experience over the years, what lean concept do you see people struggling with the most? Perhaps you struggle yourself. I don't know.

I guess it was probably 5s and I know I keep mentioning it, there's so much more to lean.

Yeah, that telephone. Just go do it, Gary. Just go put the label on it and be over with.

Well, I think it's because it's hard to. As a consultant, it's hard to go 5s someone else's place. And one of my clients, Jeff Duarte, he says, yeah, I get why people don't like it because you don't go into someone else's house and start moving their furniture around.

Right, right.

Yeah, no one would like that very much. That's a good point. So it really takes a team for an outsider and the individuals involved. So I don't want to go in there and start sorting people. I don't know what they need. I don't know what's valuable. So.

Yeah, yeah, got it, got it. So talk a little bit about your website. Is it, what is it, bcilead.com?

Yeah, it's bciline.com and we're just, we're revamping it, continuously improving it, getting more information on there. I'm just. I want to start putting some of our success stories on there and just sharing some inside tips on things that we've done. And hopefully it could help some other people out there who, who are struggling with some things or maybe have some ideas. And I love getting feedback, anything that could help me learn something new and get different perspectives, so.

Right, yeah. And what's BCI stand for?

It's Bodette Consulting Incorporated.

Got it, got it. Yeah. Nice looking website. Well, looking at it right now, so, all right, well, hopefully everybody checks that out. Bcilean.com so. All right, well, Gary, let's jump into the reflection section and we kind of touched on it a little bit already. But I always ask the question what respect for people means to our guests because, you know, it can be a little bit hard to define. So what's it mean to you?

I think it means to treat employees and even suppliers the same way that you treat your most important customer. It's just because you don't want to push concepts onto people. You want them to pull and want to learn more about Lean. And I think that shows respect if we treat them like our most important customer and just to involve them, listen to them the same you do your customer and just be there for them and see what, see what really adds value to them, to your employees. Yeah, that's how to show respect.

What's the best advice you've ever received?

I think simply is make work easy. Ritz Oshingo, he came out as part of the Paul Akers tour. He came out to Doherty Nursery with my main client and he just simplified things and said, look, don't use the word efficient. Don't use the word make things more productive. Just if you make things easy, it's going to improve quality, it's going to increase delivery speed and it's going to drop safety incidents. So just make make work easy for employees.

Along those lines of making work easier. Do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

Yeah, and I learned it from my high performance team days of I use a time architecture, I break it down into hours. So I just, I have my purpose, my BCI purpose, I have that posted and then I have certain performance goals, my KPIs that I want to reach. But I'm always using my time architecture and it's just a weekly planner basically. But that just helps me align myself to not only my purpose statement, but to my goals and to the tasks that I have.

So it's handwritten or electronic.

I use it electronic, but sometimes I like the handwritten. I know it's the double work sometimes, but it lets me kind of brainstorm and scratch things out. So I first I type it up electronically and then I print it out and then I'll make changes on it because things happen. Yeah, but, but at least I have a game plan for the week and then in pen I'll have to cross some things out and move things around.

Now do you go back and kind of reflect on and see how you did or how does that work?

That's a good point. I think I need to do more of that, but I do. I'll look at it and be like, wow, you know, I could have planned a little bit better or I couldn't squeeze that in there. But yeah, I just, I put in my time architecture on Friday evening to make next week's time architecture. So I just, I just have a habit of planning, making sure that I plan.

Yeah, got it. So has there been anything over this past year as you've been practicing and implementing Lean that surprised you?

I guess just from visiting various industries, just how much really applies to, to various businesses And I think that's because they have one common denominator which is people. So I really learned about change management and just psychology where it just, I think about 80% of the time I'm dealing with more of psychology, change management, culture change, and probably 20% of the time I'm only dealing with Lean tools. And I was, I didn't think that would happen going into the consulting business and I have my mba, but maybe I should have got my master's in psychology. That might have helped too.

No, I'm fascinated with psychology. So I'm interested. Can you give me an example of, I mean, I don't names or anything like that, but of some of that work?

Yeah. Yeah. So even if you go into a process and even to contradict my quote of make work easy. Well, not everyone likes easy. The strongest individual of a group who are doing hard work, that person, they like sticking out, they're strong. Well now if I go in and I make everything easier for everyone else, they're going to blend in and to them that impacts, they're no longer the star, they're just equal to everyone else. So even if you have good intentions to make things easier, you know, you're still going to have some people who are not excited about change.

So how do you overcome that? How do you counter that?

Really talking with the person first before any changes get implemented. But as you're talking, knowing when to have a group meeting versus a one on one. So if I'm in a group meeting and I see someone concerned, I'll ask to talk to them after that meeting, get a one on one with them and really listen to their concerns on, on what's going wrong and then I kind of find out that it is, they're, they're scared to blend in with everyone else and then I just have to tell them one on one. My intention is to make sure that it's safe for everyone. They're not going to hurt their back. That's why we're making it easy for everyone. So just really sharing my intentions and then getting their input or their feedback and then asking them, hey, you know what? For this new process, you want to help me do the standardized work for it? Let's get some of your ideas.

Yeah.

So making them stick out and shine in another area.

Yeah, interesting. So let's say that you're going through your week and things just aren't going well and maybe you're after a bad start or it's just been a rotten week altogether. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow to kind of get back on track?

I kind of stop and reflect and instead of thinking negatively about the mistakes because I make mistakes like everyone else, I really try and learn from them and I really try to get feedback from the things that I did wrong and the people that it affected or might have an opinion on it and just trying to. Trying to see how I could improve. So I like to take. Take a few minutes just to reflect and learn and then kind of strategize on how to make that not happen again, whatever mistake it was or if I'm just needing a little breather.

Well, obviously you got a heck of a background and lean and continuous improvements. But I'm curious, is there a knowledge or skill area that you still feel you need to improve in order to become a better lean thinker?

Probably. Probably the psychology of it. I took the electives, but just because it's so involved in what I do, but also applying lean concepts to my own business, such as making sure I'm adding value to my customers and I have constant communication with them, just how to continuously improve and make sure if their changes, if they just have different needs that I'm there and I'm flexible and I could adjust to those.

I know how hard that is. You know, we make training videos for Lean and Six Sigma and Editor and so we so many times we still struggle ourselves here. I'm like, goodness gracious. You know, we teach people how to do this. Why aren't we doing it ourselves? And, and, but yeah, it's. It's a lot easier to help others than it is to do it yourself, isn't it?

Oh, yeah, it is. And then you had so to stop and reflect and yeah, we, we really like your videos. I have them at Duarte Nursery. I have them. They're on the. The free trial right now and they, they really like the videos and the tests. And everything. So good. They're. They're interested in the Spanish ones as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Northern California agriculture. The Spanish ones really help because there's nothing else like that out there.

Yeah. Anna and Francisco over here right now hammering away at more. They're doing value stream mapping this week, so everything's coming, coming together really nice. They're doing a great job. So.

Awesome. There's a demand for it, let me tell you.

Yeah, good, good. Well, that's, that's why we're doing it, so thank you. So, all right, well, how can people connect with you, gary?

I'm on LinkedIn at. Gary Bodette.

Spell your last name.

Yeah. You're not the first person. B as in boy, E, A, U, D, E, T, T, E. Okay. And then. Or the website bcilean. Calm.

Got it. All right. So are you. Are you into conferences? Do you go to Ame or anything like that?

I want to. I need to start going. It's on my to do list for this year.

Man, you need to come. This is going to be the best one yet in Dallas because we don't have to get on an airplane. That's why it's the best. You got to get on an airplane. But it's going to be a great show year, so. Yeah, hopefully you can, you can make it out here. I'll send you some information over email, get you signed up.

Appreciate it. Yeah, I'll be there. I'm gonna go to one, so that's, that's, that's.

If you're gonna go to one, that's the one to go to. So there's some other great ones out there, but if you only have one, I would say go to Ame, so. All right, very good, Gary. Well, hey, thanks again for taking time to visit with us and, and I look forward to meeting you in person one day.

All right, Ron, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. All right.

You take care.

All right, you too.

Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free, no strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma. Over at Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos free of charge@gembaacademy.com Sam.