GA 291 | Understanding Your Suppliers with Denise Meredith

So basically, how do you think differently? How do you think more radically? And that takes some hut spot. That takes somebody that's going to be a little bit fearless. It takes someone that's going to be a little bit challenged Today.

I'm excited to welcome Denise Meredith to the show. Now, Denise has over 33 years of experience practicing various forms of continuous improvement. So she comes with a wealth of experience and knowledge and wisdom and really enjoyed chatting with her. We kind of began with just a little bit more about her background and how she first got involved in continuous improvement. And then we talked a lot about how she spent quite a bit of time working with suppliers for the various companies that she's worked with. And so we talked about how she's approached that, how her and her team have gone in and evolved from kind of traditional training to more kind of just in time type training. We then got into some fun stories of some various crazy engagements, if you want to call it, that, that she's experienced over the years. One of them was at Batesville Casket, which is very, very famous Lean thinking organization where they make, you guessed it, caskets. So she shares some fun stories there. And then we kind of wrap our conversation up by talking a lot about automation and the role of automation in Lean and then some of the challenges that we might face with automation, namely that we might sometimes have the tendency to maybe automate some waste. And that's definitely not what we want to do. So again, really fun episode. Denise has a lot of passion and excitement for Lean and I think that's going to through for you. Now a show notes which will include links to everything we talk about can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 291. 291. Again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 291. And as always, if you'd like to have a free trial, three day trial to Gemba Academy, simply go to gemba academy.com scroll to the bottom of the of any page and you'll see a link there to sign up for a fully functional three day trial. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Denise, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm great. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, I know we've been trying to organize this podcast for a while and then I got sick and all this kind of crazy stuff. So thanks for your patience and thanks for taking time to come on.

Not a problem. Sometimes the logistics is baffling.

Yeah, I know, I know. I know. All right, well, Denise, as you know, we kind of like to begin our shows with our guest sharing a favorite quote. Do you have one?

I think my favorite quote, and I've heard it attributed and used by several people, but I think originally I'm going to attribute this to Ken Blanchard, and that is all of us are smarter than any of us. I work with a lot of smart people, and I don't think that they realize that the power of putting smart people in a room and getting the uber smart is so powerful. Mm.

Good. Good. I like it. I like it. All right, well, let's kind of just jump right in. I know you work for a defense contractor, so we're gonna. There's a lot of, you know, obviously some things that we need to keep confidential and all that. So maybe let's talk a little bit about how you first became involved with continuous improvement. And then if there's anything else you. You need to say, logistically speaking, feel free.

Sure, Ron. Thank you. Well, first off, I have to say that I've been in this field of continuous improvement, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma years, and the opinions that I have are basically my own. I have had 390 separate cycles of learning at God knows how many different factories. And I'm not speaking for anyone that I work with now or have ever done. So I just want you to know that these are my opinions and these are my observations. So I first got into continuous improvement when I was a very small child back in the day, before we had how it's made. Every once in a while you tune into the TV and you'd see a factory and there would be things moving in the factory and there would be automatic things happening. And I used to just sit in front of the tv, just mesmerized with this. So I started working for Boeing in 1985, and I started out doing continuous improvement in the office area. I was what was called an organizational advisor. Then I had the chance to go into lean manufacturing, and it fascinated me. I had taken the just in time module for the apex society, and it fascinating me how simple this was, yet how hard it was for a lot of American companies to grasp and hold onto. So I've been doing this for a long time, and for me, once you learn to think like a value stream, think sideways, it's kind of hard to not think that way. And I tell people that after doing this for 33 years, I am totally useless when it comes to a real job. But what I can do is I can affect change. And I can work with people and I can come with a better outcome.

Yeah. So speaking of people, in your opinion, what makes people good at just continuous improvement?

That's an interesting question, Ann. It was when I first, when I took my most recent position, I was talking to one of my colleagues and I thought, you know, I really haven't ever written down the kind of things I think that make you good at this. I think there are three levels of things. There are things that are innate, personal things about people. Are you intuitive? Are you logical? Are you fearless? Can you be an honest broker? Do you really have a desire to help? Will you put yourself in different situations over and over and over and acquire cycles? So those are the kind of innate sorts of things. Then there are some things that you can get with experiential learning, and then there's some things that you can be taught, you know, self taught. So I think it's a combination of those things. But I know a change agent when I see one and I could make anybody an expert or a black belt, but I can't make anybody a change agent. So I think they have to have the right stuff to start with. And I think those are some of the elements of the right step.

What is your thoughts on like the difference between say, like, you know, kind of a Myers Briggs type thing, and we talk about the difference between say, an extrovert and an introvert. How does that play into it?

It's kind of, it's kind of bifurcated in my opinion, because you have to be extra extroverted enough or able to operate in that square, if you will, to work with people, but you have to be analytical as well. And not all extroverts are analytical. Some of them are almost the inverse of that. So it's a combination of being logical and being able to ask the right questions. When I was getting my master's in business, I had a teacher one time that said the secret to leadership is asking the right questions. And you know, we talk about being an expert or being a lean black belt or being a team leader, which is what they called it, called us at Boeing. And you don't have to be the subject matter expert. Your subject matter expertise, I have found, is around working with teams and getting the best out of those teams. So you have to do some kind of analysis, if you will, because the data has to align with itself, if nothing else. But you can't spend all your time focusing on the 14th decimal place and locked in a closet somewhere doing analytics. It has to be a combination of those kinds of things. So you need to be logical, I think, and you need to be fact based and very fact driven. But you don't necessarily have to be the analyst. You can have those people in the room.

Yeah, no, I like that.

And I recommend them highly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's even like, you know, when you look in a business perspective, they talk about, like, salespeople. A lot of people would think, oh, extroverts have to be the best salespeople. And what they found through a lot of research is that's actually not true. And it's. But it's not the hardcore introvert either. It's almost like kind of being able to sit on that fence and kind of balance back and forth. And when you do need to, you know, get energy from people, you can kind of put that extrovert hat on. But then when you need to kind of, you know, stay a little bit reserved, get a little bit more analytical, you can do that as well. So maybe being able to pivot between the two might be the best of both worlds.

Well, when you talked about the Myers Briggs, when it comes to the Myers Briggs, I straddle the ft. Okay? So I straddle the F and the T. And if you look at one of those types, one of the types is a charismatic leader. That's the app, that's the person that's following their feelings. But I'm also very time focused and time driven. And when I get in, what my sister's friend used to call Sergeant Meredith, being on maneuvers, and I get into my T hat, then I'm the field marshal. So that's one that lends itself well because sometimes you want to be the touchy feely leader, and sometimes you just got to get it done in the amount of time provided.

Yeah, got it, got it. So I know and our earlier conversations before we started recording and some dialogue back and forth that you, you know, obviously have done a lot of work internally with internal operations, but I understand that you've also done a lot of work with, with suppliers. So let's talk. What made you want to work with suppliers versus just focusing internally?

The first time I did work with suppliers, we had a program, and the program had a delivery schedule of one a month. And we had several suppliers that were really struggling with that. And our supply chain people did what they did to, quote, manage end quote suppliers, but nobody was actually going out and figuring out what the suppliers issues were, what their constraints were, and what the levers were that they could use to move to become better at what they were doing and actually meet our needs. We also had a customer where we could deliver a will. So some of our customers say, you can only give me 12 widgets a month. I don't want any more than 12 widgets because they're going into my final assembly line. This customer wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. So he said, you can deliver anything you want to deliver. So we tried to go from one to three. And we knew that was going to be problematic because they were struggling to get one. So we took, we racked and stacked the suppliers by basically what we knew intuitively and what we knew digitally and data wise. And we went out and we hit about six or seven different suppliers, which were our high critical suppliers. They were pacing the factory and we knew if we went from one to three, they would have the most trouble. And it was actually amazing because we didn't treat them like they were suppliers and we were supplier management. We treated them like they were the customer. And we were providing lean manufacturing service and recommendations. And it was funny, I had the chance to go back with the colonel on the program later and the one guy that I had my concrete head, his name was Frank. So my concrete head, Frank. And I had to push and shove and drag Frank all the way down, down the aisle to get him to do visual management. So I came back and Frank grabbed my shoulder and he tugged on my sleeve and he says, denise, you know that thing you taught me? Well, I did it over here. And he drugged me over to another area, the factory, and I did it over here. And he drove me to another area of the factory. So he out something that he could do to be successful. And then he became the biggest cheerleader that we had in that whole company for what we were doing. And long story short, we got to three a month. And the law of unintended consequences. We found some parts we were getting so early that we had to bake them out to get moisture out of them. And that had never been a problem before because we were always living hand to mouth.

Now when you say you got three a month, what do you mean three a month?

Three major deliveries, three major antioxidants.

Got it. And you were. And you were doing what before that? You were doing how many?

We were struggling to do one. So we basically tripled production.

Yeah.

Just by working with our suppliers. And then I also worked in several interface positions between businesses and pieces of businesses. And I had come back to the east coast to work with a gentleman that was in one of our factories. And he became a supply chain vice president. And he read the book the Incredible Payback. And he met Dave Nelson and he asked Dave Nelson for help with strategic sourcing. And then he wanted to hire somebody that could hire people and train them to execute in his supply base. So he remembered me from long ago and far away and he had somebody call me and I came in and interviewed for the job. And I decided that, yes, I would build a team of people that could do what I did, that could advocate for the supplier, that could hold them accountable, that could help them improve. And I think the reason that it fascinates me is I've been doing this for 33 years. I've done it 390 times because, yes, I count. And there's something fascinating about being able to walk into somebody's factory and you don't know what they make, really. You don't know how they make it. You think you know what some of their symptoms are, but you really don't know what their issues are. And you have about one day to figure that out. And then you analyze their data and show them beyond a shadow of a doubt what their constraints are, and then you help them relieve those constraints. And not everybody can do that. It requires a little bit of skill, it requires some innovation, it requires a whole lot of determination, just a little bit of stubbornness and maybe a half inch of charm. But not everybody can do that. And I found that very challenging. So my job is to create people that can do that. And I've got some fantastic people that I work with.

What about resistance? Do you ever meet resistance?

I meet resistance internally and externally. So sometimes people will not admit when they need help. There's something about our corporate culture that's pretty macho and kind of. I got this. And so getting people in a situation where they will ask for help and where they will help you move the train tracks rather than help you clean up the train wreck is a little difficult. So sometimes I struggle internally and sometimes I struggle with the supplier because I'm really asking a lot. I'm asking for three or four other people over a three or four day period of time. And a lot of these places are small businesses. A lot of these places just don't have the expertise. And a lot of these places feel like we're kind of invading them when we go in and work with them. And they all think it's an odd, it's not an audit, it is a deep dive based on their Facts and data, helping them understand where their issues are and helping them understand how to fix them. So once we get in the door, I basically team my team of subject matter experts with their team of subject matter experts. And then I like to say I ride them like a 10 cent pony at the fair. When I was a child, you could actually ride the ponies for 10 cents. And basically they have to bond with each other because they have to meet my delivery and they work together very intensely and the next thing you know, you can't tell who works for who because they're all trying to do the same thing. And so they do that and they have a good result and they have, they have a path forward. So I have never had anybody at the end of the day say it wasn't worth my time. But getting past that initial objection of I don't need help by my internal friends and the external objection, like you guys are just going to tell me what to do. And that's not what it's about. It's about actually helping them understand their business and helping them be better and helping them not only be better on my product, but actually they're getting experiential learning that most people will pay for in how to help their business and then they can do it horizontally across their entire business. So they're getting free consulting.

So do you do like formal training with these folks then, like once you've engaged with them and identified some opportunities.

So my company has tried different things. You know, in the past we wanted to do training and so we'd go in and would train them for eight hours or whatever. It's my experience that training needs to be just in time and the training is experiential learning for most adults. And so rather than knowing how to use every tool in the Six Sigma toolkit by the end of the week, what they have experienced is us working with them using the surgical tools that will get to the root of their problem and to help them define solutions. So yes, they learn a lot. In that week. I have had people say, I had no idea, I had no idea that that was going on in my business. I've had internal people say, oh, I can't possibly have that. Yes, yes you do. So it's fascinating to watch people learn and to watch people learn to work with facts and data rather than reaction and emotion and being nose down tactical 100% of the time to figure out how they're going to do this on a consistent and regular basis.

So you've been at this for 33 years, Denise.

33 years.

You must have some fun stories. Can you think of, I don't know, a crazy engagement that you want to, that you'd like to rehash for us?

Well, one of my crazier engagements actually was a global gemba that I did when I worked for Boeing. So Boeing worked with Time Based Management and actually trained me. And so we would go to different factories and we would be team members or team leaders at other people's factories. And the advantage of the factory was that they would host a bunch of people in to look at their process. And the advantage of the consultants was, you know, they got paid for the consulting piece. And our advantage was we got, you know, $30,000 worth of learning in a week. So basically, I went into the Batesville Casket Company.

Oh yeah.

And if you went to this, you went to this Gemba, you had one of three things would happen to you. You would go to the insurance house and look at a paper kaizen, you would go to the hospital house and look at the hospital beds that they also made. They actually had about 40% of the market on hospital beds. Or you could go to the casket company. So I wound up at the casket company. I wound up as a team lead. And my team was called Big Body.

So Big Body, what?

Big Body, so sew. So okay. And what it was was when you. Well, I learned a lot about caskets. I know that on the east coast they like full top caskets. On the Midwest and the west coast they use half top caskets. So, you know, it closes it. And you see, you know, Uncle Fred's upper torso, but you don't see his entire body. On the east coast they tend to have the full body. So the piece we were doing, the big body, is that piece of mitered cloth that goes around the outside of the casket. And then when they enter the deceased, they flip that into the casket, they close the casket, they wind it shut, and they put Uncle Fred in the ground. So what we found out was that we had 11 minutes from the time that casket came off the paint line to select the material and to get that big body ready to go down the line. And their attack time was one minute. And the fascinating thing was I had two ladies, one that was doing the big body. So she was monitoring the material and then the next person did the grommet. And so they sat side by side. They had both been working together for 30 odd years. They were 10ft apart. They handed off parts once a minute every day for 30 years. And I'm watching them, I'm watching them work. And the woman has done the mitering. She gets the mitering done and she turns the piece of material inside out and she hands it to her partner and her partner turns the piece of material right side out and puts a grommet in it. And I said, excuse me, why are you turning this inside out? Because she's just gonna undo what you just did. And it had never occurred to them to actually visually watch what was going on, to see that they were actually had wasted time. So that was interesting. We got to the report out, they told me I couldn't possibly cover that many slides in that little time. My personal best is 82 slides in 35 minutes with eight different presenters. So I'm pretty good at this. And my reflection as the team lead was this is my 20th kaizen. My reflection was the process works. The process works whether you make an airplane or whether you're making caskets. The process of deconstructing the data, looking at all the pieces, looking at the spaghetti charts, looking at the tak time, looking at the cycle time, looking at percent load, all of that works. And once I had that epiphany that no matter where I was, no matter what I was making, the process worked. I lost my fear. So I can walk into anybody's factory, internal, external, and I can look at the data and I can figure out how to make it better. I told one of my bosses that hired me about six years ago, I said, you know, I don't always knock it out of the park, but I've never made anything worse. So that's, that's a lot of freedom knowing that the process works and you can't fail.

Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. So through the, through the years, automation has changed, you know, in industry. And now we, we're seeing it grow even more. So I'm curious to get your, your take, Denise, on the impact of, and maybe two part question, kind of the impact of automation on Lean and then also just maybe the challenges that we're facing with automation.

So automation works very well. If you have a critical mass of parts and you're doing a lot of volume, that's. That lends itself quite well to automation. But no matter what you're automating, my recommendation is you need to lean out the process first and then only automate the value add. And the reason I say that is the first kaizen I ever did at Boeing, I was working on an umbrella linnae machine and we were cutting fan cows for the triple seven, these were made out of composite core, and it took 20 hours. On Monday, when we started this, this was the thing that made me a raving fan of remanufacturing. I'm working with my Japanese counterpart, Mr. Oba, and. But no, it was Mr. Nikao. And by Friday, we were doing that in two hours. And the way we got from 20 hours to two hours was he looked at this and he says, there's way too much spindle dancing. And I immediately understood what he was talking about. He was talking about air cutting. There was all this positioning and repositioning and aligning and allowing, and then it would kind of reach down and cut just a little tiny chunk of composite core off. Then it would go through this gyration again. And the actual time on part was minimal. So he convinced the engineers that were programming the machines to take a deeper cut, and we actually were able by the end of the week to cut one in two hours. So this is a tenfold improvement in four days. And I went, shazam. But it also taught me a very important lesson. It taught me, don't automate waste. If our only intent was to automate that process on Monday, when we got there, we would have made a process that was unattended by an operator that took 20 hours. By waiting until we leaned out the process, we could automate a process that actually took two hours. So I think we have to be careful that we don't automate waste. The other thing we find is that robots aren't as forgiving as people. And we found that we had a supplier that made a part for us, that we made a robot to build the, the top level assembly. And all of a sudden, because the robot was not forgiving, we had parallelism that was a problem, and we had to go back and change our specifications. So it's going to require you to have a better, better group of parts with less variation in them and make sure you do not automate waste and make sure you have critical mass. So I think that there's a time and place for automation, but I don't think it's everywhere. And, and I think that in the particular business we are in, a lot of our work is mixed model, low volume. And so there are a lot of things that we can't automate or it makes no sense for us to automate because the ROI isn't there. But when you do automate it, please make sure you lean it out first.

Yeah. What about, what's your thinking on, like, tpm? If Automation does continue to increase. Do you think TPM is going to become even more important than it already is?

Oh, absolutely. You know, the Japanese were the first ones that ever created a lights out factory. Crashed and burned. Mm. Because you had to have. That's why the Japanese believe in autonomy. So it's automation, but it's with a man involved I think is their definition. So on the one hand, you know, I think the technology is certainly stands to displace a lot of people, but I also think that the smart people will make sure that there's the man machine interface and it's appropriate.

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I love it. Automation with a human touch.

Right?

Yeah. Perfect.

Yep.

So Denise, someone is listening to this podcast right now and maybe they're, maybe they're just getting into this whole field of continuous improvement. They're just brand new. What advice do you have for that.

Person after we go run like the wind. So my advice for that person is basically there are certain books that I think you should familiar with. We learned, talked about learning to see. I kept my teeth on the machine that changed the world and lean thinking and the goal. You know, I had the privilege of being trained by Toyota, tier one supplier, Sensei's, you know, from jits. And they taught me what to look for. But the best thing they taught me is that cycles of learning are important. There's the old story about it looks like a duck, it smells like a duck, it works like a duck, quacks like a duck. If you've done this 403 times, you're much more likely to know it's a duck with the first clue because you've been there, done that. You also realize that everything is basically the same in terms of understanding. Am I adding value in this process? If I'm not adding this value, is it necessary? There are some processes like transportation that are necessary but non value added, but you want to minimize that. So I think that the state my story is get cycles of learning, get do this over and over and over. I remember when I first read the book Blink, I got in on the front end of lean manufacturing in the United States when Boeing did their activity in probably 1990, 95. So I got in on the front end of it. I got a lot of experience. I got experience on different parts, different processes. I got experience outside the factory when we started deploying it on the military side. I got experience in that area, just so get all the experience you can and don't be afraid to try, don't be afraid to Fail, that's another thing that we have in the United States is we don't want to fail. So we don't try and we put ourselves in a little teeny weeny box and the next thing you know, you can't do anything. So what I want you to do is I want you to fail early, I want you to fail often, and I don't want it to be a critical failure. So the Japanese have several things that they do, like with their paper dolls, with their seven different flows to get you out of your comfort zone because you can't keep doing. What you always did was you always, you'll always get what you always got. So basically, how do you think differently? How do you think more radically? And that takes some, that takes some HubSpot. That takes somebody that's going to be a little bit fearless. It takes someone that's going to be a little bit challenging. I'm going through an internal activity this week and there's some resistance. And the biggest reason there's resistance is in the past. You know, they've been taught that if you fail, you will die. And that's not the message we want to give them. It's I don't want you to succeed. Here's the vision for you. What do you need to make that happen? And that's just not how we always tend to manage people.

Yeah. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Denise, for taking time to come on. I really enjoyed the conversation. If folks wanted to connect with you, is there, is there a good way.

If they wanted to connect with me, I'm on LinkedIn.

Okay.

There's. I think I'm out there twice for reasons not only to God. Okay. I'm a Luddite. I was born in 1955 and I do not have control over all my applications. But I think there's one of me with a, with a picture and one of them without. Go to the one with the picture and Denise Meredith and you will find me. And if you want to connect with me, please contact me on LinkedIn.

Okay, beautiful. And we'll go ahead and we'll find out. We'll put it in the show notes for folks. So that'll be. Go to GembaPodcast.com this is going to be episode 291. 291. And yeah, we'll link to that. Denise, thanks again. Are you going to get out to any conferences this year or how's that looking?

Well, my special press agent, Bonnie Perkins, has so far this year had me making any internal video, and now she's got me doing a podcast. I think she's trying to get me into the Massachusetts Manufacturing Women. Women in Manufacturing as a speaker.

So there you go.

Probably got it.

All right, well, I look forward to hopefully meeting you face to face one day. Denise, thanks again for coming on. Keep up the great work. And, yeah, keep having fun. It sounds like you have a lot of fun doing what you do.

Hey, this job, if you're not having fun, just don't try it.

Exactly. All right. Okay. Well, thanks again, Denise.

Thank you.

Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached, fully functional Test drive of Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than a thousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge at Gembaacademy.com.