GA 302 | Continuous Improvement at Halliburton with Chris Rodriguez

Underutilized creativity is the biggest waste within most organizations. There are so many people have phenomenal ideas, but they never have the pathway or the ability to express the ideas.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Chris Rodriguez to the show. Now, Chris is a continuous improvement lead at Halliburton. Specifically, he works in Odessa, Texas, at one of their facilities there. And at this facility, they began practicing Lean about two years ago. So today on the show, Chris and I talk about how they got started, what they did in the very beginning. We talk about really, like the first 90 days of their program. They've been doing it at a Halliburton for a few years before that, but this was the first time that it got down to their facility, and Chris led that charge with a team of other CI folks. And so we really just kind of explore that, and we talk about some of their initial wins, and we definitely spend quite a bit of time talking about some of the lessons learned and some of the things that they would have done differently. And then finally we talk about some of their biggest takeaways as. As it relates to building this strong Lean culture. So it was a really fun episode. I think you're going to enjoy it. Show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 302. And as always, if you'd like to check out all Gemba Academy has to offer, please head over to gembaacademy.com reach out to us, and we'd be happy to really explain what we have to offer and how it might help you with your continuous improvement journey. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Chris Rodriguez, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Good, Ron. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, no, I'm glad. We. We know we've been planning this for a few weeks or maybe a month or so. I don't know how long it's been, but. But excited to have you on. I think it's going to be a fun, fun, fun conversation, a fun story to hear how a big giant company like the one you work at is. Got started with Lean and is leveraging it. So before we. We jump in, Chris, you know, we like to begin all of our shows with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is one of my favorite quotes by Yogi Berra. You can observe a lot just by watching. And I take that to heart because when we first started our continuous improvement journey, the power of just going to Gemba and just watching the work being done without necessarily intervening. There was so much value, and we achieved so much just by doing something as simple as that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to make improvements from. From a conference room, right?

Absolutely. Dictating from a laptop won't really drive a culture at all.

Exactly, Exactly. All right, well, Chris, tell us about your background. Tell us how you first got introduced to all this continuous improvement stuff, and then definitely tell us where you work today and what you do today.

All right, Absolutely. So, yeah, so I went to Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.

Guns up. Guns up. Right?

Yeah, Guns up.

Yes.

S. I got my Bachelor's of science in Mechanical Engineering in 2014. There was exactly seven days from me walking the stage and then going down to San Antonio, Texas, where I started my career as a field engineer for a company called Halliburton. Halliburton Energy Services. It's an oil field company. From there, I was a field Engineer for about 2 and a half years. After that, I went into asset management. And then in April 2018, I started my continuous improvement journey. And currently I'm the continuous improvement lead for our Permian Basin operations out of Odessa and Brownfield, Texas.

Got it, got it. So tell us a little bit about Halliburton just as an organization.

Yeah. So Halliburton has been around for 100 years as of this year. So it's been around for a bit. And Halliburton is a service company, so we don't actually own the wells or anything like that. So we do everything up to four customers like Chevron, Exxon, what have you. We provide cementing services, hydraulic fracturing services, drilling services, wireline perforation, things of that nature.

Pretty big company, too, right?

It's a global company. It's a very, very big company.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right. Well, I guess really the theme of today's podcast, Chris, is kind of how a big company like Halliburton can get started with continuous improvement, really, from ground zero. Because I understand that was. That's been your experience, is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. When we started our continuous improvement journey about two years ago, at least on a local level, there was no other CI. CI started probably about four or five years ago as a whole company, but it actually reached the ground and field camp level. It's only been around for a few years.

Okay, okay, now what was your. Just to kind of put context to the story, what was your. I know from school and all the rest of it, but what was your. I don't know, knowledge level. Obviously not a lot of experience, you know, from just getting out of school recently. But what was. What. What. Where were you at? You know, knowledge wise, experience wise at that point?

At the beginning, I was very, very much in the infancy of my CI knowledge. What got me into it and got me into the position I am today. When I was in asset management, I noticed there was a. A lot of opportunity to like, just improve the processes itself. Not realizing this was actually CI, I thought it was just, okay, this is just a special project. I'll work on something. And over time is just something like I kind of just had a knack for. And then as our CEO was like, okay, hey, this is going to be. CI is going to be a strategic mainstay of our company. We need champions in the local areas. I kind of fed into the role and then from there. We do have an internal CI training program at Halliburton. I used that to learn the fundamentals and just kind of went from there.

Now, how many people are in the Odessa facility where you're at the Odessa facility?

So total operations, you're looking at about 35 to 4,000 people.

Okay, okay, so talk about the very beginning. What did you do? Like, how did you approach it? Was there like a big communication, hey, we're doing this, or did you start small with a pilot group or talk about that first, I don't know, 90 days of the program.

So the first 90 days, the first thing I did is, okay, I'm going to need a team because this is a very big area that ranges quite a bit. Because it's not just, you know, we're in a facility. These are like actual, well site locations that we're trying to improve. Process too. So it was a large range. So I ended up assembling a small team of two continuous improvement specialists. And then myself. And then it was just boots on the ground. I was like, okay, guys, we got to go to Gemba and actually figure out what is our biggest bottleneck. We were mature enough within the company to have a Hoshin strategy. And then pretty much we were trying to figure out what baseline data we needed to kind of build a value stream. But ultimately we just needed awareness. No one knew what we did. They're like, what is continuous improvement? So we went out to the well sites, we went to the maintenance facilities, and we was like, okay, what is the first quick win that we need in order to get buy in for this whole methodology? And we found that it was communication, something that was free. So we didn't imply any sort of, you know, fancy technology is. We found that if we improve communication with certain aspects of our operation. So we developed a standard work about five key points. This is what you need to know in order for the next part of the process to be effective. Just by doing that simple concept, we reduce non value add activities by 25% over a year.

Now how did you measure that? Like how did. Measuring communication can be difficult. So how did you go about that?

So there's a couple days we did have a Gimba kind of scorecard where we could actually determine it. But One of our KPIs was We Track every single event that happens on the well site location. So we actually are able to. We collect that data live and that goes up to a software where we can actually see, okay, were we pumping more on the well. There's this thing called stage transition. So in a hydraulic fracturing scenario, you do a stage and then once you finish the stage, you have to transition to the other well. And that transition from one well to the other, that's all non value add. The customer's not wanting to pay for that. That what they're paying as far as services. They want you pumping on the well. And we're actually able to track. Okay, how long is that stage transition? The more we reduce that, the more we can revert that time to value add activities.

Got it. Now what was the. I don't know, like how did the folks that you were working with receive all this improvement, all this air quote help? Were you, were you welcomed in or were they skeptical? Maybe a mix.

It was, it was definitely a combination. Especially getting out the gate. We got everything from like, all right, this is actually pretty cool to please leave my location. You're just trying to audit me.

Yeah.

So there was a lot of cultural. There was a lot of cultural. This is not an audit, guys. This is an assessment. And it took a bit once we got a couple of quick wins and some of it was just like, hey, we provided a tool or we did something that made their life easier. Over the course of a couple years, it became a lot more receptive. Okay. They actually get excited to see us like, oh, hey, we have all these ideas. What do you think? But yeah, starting out the gate, it was either lukewarm in some aspects, it was kind of negative. They thought we were just a safety or an audit team. And we're going to go out there to tell them everything they were doing wrong, which obviously wasn't the case.

I want to definitely explore Kind of lessons learned here in a little bit. But before then, what about, okay, so you improved the communication across some other areas. Give us some other examples of some things that you. You did early on to have a quick win or two.

MDI was a big one. We really didn't have much of that in any of our areas. And ultimately it was, how do they know they're winning? We come out here and say, hey, these are the things we need to do to improve, to continue to add value to our customer, to add value to the organization. I was like, okay, that's good. You rallied the troops. But how do they know ultimately, especially on the operations level. So starting to implement MDI boards, and I don't want to jump the gun on lessons learned, but there was definitely a lesson learned within mdi. One of the first, I guess, sidesteps we made just being so young in CI is we was like, okay, we know what MDI is. We see it in manufacturing settings. Trying to transplant a manufacturing style MDI board to an oil field well site location was not that great, but it was a lesson learned in the fact that when you develop mdi, make sure the metrics that are being measured have some value to the operator. Make sure that what we're measuring is seen as value to the operator. And what I mean by that is, is if you do okay in a manufacturing setting, you need to get so many wedges out in so much time. Okay, well, that's not really measured very well on a well site. One thing is that we. One of the best MDI boards we've ever had was there was a metric saying, okay, we got. How many times this week did we get to leave at 5pm and that's what they saw value in. So they knew if they followed the standard work, if they followed the process, and if they themselves found ways to improve the process, ultimately they could leave at 5pm every day on time and go spend time with their family because they saw value in that. But ultimately it ended up adding value to the organization.

MDI managing for daily improvement, I assume is what you're talking about, right? I don't want to just make sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of. That's one of my favorite things to. Well, when. When. When I visit a company, if they're, you know, asking for an honest assessment of how they're doing, I often just walk up to someone and on a shop floor or in the office, whatever, in the hospital ward, wherever, wherever it might be, and ask the employee, hey, are you winning? Are you losing right now? Are you winning or losing? And it's really interesting sometimes, you know, immediately they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll respond, yeah, I'm winning or it's tied or, or sometimes, sadly, those, I don't know, you know, and that, know that's obviously problematic because if we don't know if we're doing a good job or a bad job, boy, it could be a frustrating experience just to be at work. Right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, Good, good, good, good. All right, well, let's jump into lessons learned. And so maybe we'll take lessons learned in a few different phases. Lessons learned for that, in that first year of engagement. If you could go back and do something different, would you. Or maybe you wouldn't.

Yeah, I mean, I think I definitely could have maximized the value. We did a few things a little bit differently. One thing I learned real quick is that you can't, you need to really be transparent in what your standard is, because without a standard, you're not going to really be able to improve anything. And then I really wish we would have blitzed the CI knowledge. We do have training at Halliburton. We have a CI bronze class. We also have a CI Red, which is basically just like the low level entry level. We ended up teaching that like within the shops, on the actual oil field sites where we had like little 30 minute modules, whatever. I wish we would have blitzed that a little bit faster and we probably would have been able to drive the culture a little faster. But not to say there wasn't significant wins, but I think we would have done that. We probably could have, you know, really gotten some great, great, great wins over the course of a year.

Well, when we get done with the interview, I'll sell you a subscription at Gemba Academy and we'll really get, we'll really get things going. Okay, sounds good. Yeah. So, so what other lessons learned did you have?

Lessons learned. It didn't necessarily happen, but one thing that I learned quickly is when you build a CI team is to make sure you have the right people. Ultimately a CI champion, CI engineer, whatever you want to name it with. An organization needs to be an influencer. And if they can't influence people and show them, hey, why does this mean anything to me? Then ultimately a couple of things are going to happen. One, you're just, just going to delay projects. And if you delay projects, you won't get the process improvement you need. If you can't show a process improvement that helps the shop floor, then ultimately you're probably just not either going to delay or even worse, you won't even get the CI transformation you need within an organization. And another one, again, it's just the chemistry within a CI team. If the team doesn't like each other, you're probably not going to get too far. So being very selective on the people that you choose to be your champions to help drive a culture, especially in the infancy of a CI transformation, is very crucial. If you get the wrong people and you start off with, like I said, where people perceive CI as negative or button pushing, then it can be detrimental within an organization. So luckily we missed that. But I have seen it happen in other parts of the organization.

So let's go back to the influencer comment that you made. How do you look, how do you screen on whether or not someone's going to be an influencer or not? Like when you're, I don't know, interviewing them or, or assessing them, what are some characteristics you're looking for there?

A couple of things I look for is basically, there's a lot of smart people in the world, but I like to look at it. Okay, yeah, but do you have people skills? Yeah, you can mouth off all the Toyota production system methodology. You're informing me. Okay, yeah, you've done your research, that's great. But ultimately, can you have a conversation with a person? So whenever I interview people, so there's a couple of questions out there in there that have nothing to do with the actual scope of the work.

Like, can you give me an example?

Yeah, absolutely. Just what do you like to do for fun? Very simple one, right? It's like, what is a hobby? And one of the ones that I always, one of the guys we ended up hiring with, that I always enjoy was I said, well, I like to be a Michael Brewer, so he likes to, he likes to make homemade beer at home. I was like, all right, that's pretty interesting. And ultimately what that told me is like, okay, you actually, you like social settings. You like to have people over to have an adult beverage every now and then. I was like, okay, cool. So you can actually go up and have a general conversation and then be able to use that social aspect to help drive culture. So there's little nuances like that that I find value in.

I shouldn't even say this in case people try to get a job at Gamba Academy one day, but one of my favorite interview questions, and my, and my team hates it when I ask this, they say, I'm I'm being mean when I ask this question. And I'm really about to change the world here with this interview question because other buddies gotta going to start using it. So imagine you're sitting around a table and everybody, it's behavioral interviewing style, you know, kind of questions, you know, tell me a time, blah, blah, blah. Then it comes to, it's my turn to ask a question. And you know, and the candidates, you know, kind of comfortable and they've been used to answering Questions now for 20, 30 minutes. And I just look at them and I say, explain something. And that's it, just explain. That's all I say, explain something. And what I'm really looking for is two things. First of all, I do want to hear how, how well they do at explaining something, but I also want to see how they react to the question. Okay? And I, and I really don't want to hear them say explain what? Because then I want them to pick up on. This is a very unique question. Like the person who answered it the very best is Tony Gomez. He's our IT director. I was actually doing a phone interview with him and I said, I dropped it on Tony. I said, explain something or explain something to me. I don't know how I phrased it. And all it was there was like, I don't know, three or four second pause. He didn't say a word. Then he said, I'm gonna tell you how to tie shoes. I said, brilliant. And then he, then he commenced to tell me how to tie a pair of shoes. Right. And I could care less about how to, you know, how to tie a pair of shoes. It was more about how do you interpret the question. And then, and then obviously how well do you do. Carlos, one of our videographers said, I'm gonna show you how to, how to take and edit a picture on an iPhone. Right. And so we've had some fun to it, but. But we've also had some people kind of freeze and freak out and, you know, it kind of tells you about, you know, can they, can they deal with uncertainty? Can they deal with maybe confusion, chaos even? And so. Yeah, yeah, so throw that into the mix next time you're interviewing someone and see how it works.

Oh no, that's great. I'm definitely gonna have to steal that and put that in my, my playbook. That's awesome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, good. So what about takeaways of kind of culture and building it? Sounds like you got a pretty good culture going these days. I assume. What are Some of the takeaways that.

You'Ve learned go to Gemba and go to Gemba often are some of my takeaways. I have a recent story where we saw the value in this. I was in our Brownfield facility. I was in the shop floor making my rounds. We do a lot of maintenance in the facilities, but then we actually provide the service on the. On the well sites. And when you go. I went to Gemba and I ended up taking a couple of the mechanics just to lunch. You know, there's a lot of value in taking someone to lunch and having a conversation. And he was telling me about his time in the military and how he worked on Black Hawk helicopters and that he noticed that they had a similar issue working on Blackhawk helicopters on our hydraulic pumps was that we kept throwing away a lot of batteries, just like little 12 volt batteries that you see in a vehicle. And he goes, hey, man, they developed a charger that you can buy commercially that would trickle charge them without and remove a bunch of these OSHA and safety hazards that may be tied with it. I was like, do you think that we could apply something like this that I learned in the military to our shop floor? I was like, absolutely. Tell me more. And then we did a little research. We did a little business case. I kind of walked him through basically like a quick Kaizen event or Kaizen burst or however you want to name it. And sure enough, we did some research. And when we applied this, we ended up saying an incredible amount of money. So the value of going to Gemba and going often and getting to know your workers and giving them ultimately the voice to express ideas has been one of my biggest takeaways. And that's the one ever. We teach the CI classes. That's the biggest thing I tell the frontline leaders. People always talk about waste. They're like, okay, well, inventory is our biggest waste or motions our biggest waste. In my personal opinion, underutilized creativity is the biggest waste within most organizations. There are so many people have phenomenal ideas, but they never have the pathway or the ability to express the ideas. If you're able to channel into that, it really can drive process improvement.

Yeah, I love it. Yes. Go to Gemba. We all say it, but don't always practice it, right?

Absolutely.

All right, good. Hey, so looking back on this journey that you've had, what are you most proud of?

Most proud of. Just to see. And it's not even like the process or the financials, just to see how far we've come over the Course of last two years, like I said, starting from ground zero to what exactly do you do here? To I walk into a room and some of the buzzwords and keywords of CI are just part of our culture now. And that's just within two years. I'm proud of that. I'm proud to see that people, they take it at heart and they want to be a part of this transformation. That's the one thing. There's days I just walk in and I'll just take pictures because I'll say, oh, man, without me even saying anything, this part of the organization made an MDI board or they have a little Kaizen action sheet, little nook right here. So you see something you want to improve. And. And the part that I'm most proud of is the fact that continuous improvement is happening within our organization without me or my team necessarily having to do it for them. They're continuously improving themselves. And I think that's a great achievement to have within two years.

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. It sounds like you've done a great job. And gosh, if you think about it, you really only have just begun. Imagine what you can accomplish in another 10 years. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. So very much excited for the future.

Yeah. Beautiful. Hey, Chris. So someone's listening to this right now and they're just getting started. Aside from some of the things that you've already mentioned, Gotagemba and that sort of thing. But is there any practical tips or advice that you want to give someone who's maybe just getting going with this thing?

Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that is almost like a warning, but kind of one of those, don't get too caught up in the financials when you start a CI transformation. I know. Especially when you work for a big company, the vice presidents or the cfo, whatever, is like, okay, well, how much money is this going to save me? We get that. But ultimately, don't get caught up on the financials. Focus on your people. Toyota said it best. We build people before we build cars. And ultimately you can't monetize what it's like for a person to be part of a process that adds value to their organization.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think one of my good friends, Paul Akers, you know, he said one time, you know, fix what bugs you and, you know, you know, like, work on the process and, and the money's gonna come, right? The money will come. I mean, in Halliburton's for profit company. So I get it. I mean, so he's getting the academy, you Got to make money, right? You got to pay your salary and keep shareholders happy and all the rest of it. So we in continuous improvement need to respect that.

But.

But we also need to understand that in order to really get that, you can't obsess about the money if you start. I mean, I unfortunately had some corporate jobs in the past, and you can go on my LinkedIn profile and see who I'm talking about. And we had to, like, sometimes justify our existence, you know, and the CI group, you know, how much. How much savings did you do? And better be more than your salary, you know, and that's obviously unfortunate when those. When that's just a lack of maturity at the leadership level. Right. But yeah, you got to deliver results in the end. But focusing on the people, focus on the process, and the cost savings will come, right? When you make things easy and you make them better, when you fix what bugs, you do all those things, the results will be there. Focus on the process.

Absolutely. And another one is collaboration. So at Halliburton, our value proposition is that we collaborate and engineer solutions to maximize the asset value for our customers. And the big takeaway from that value proposition is the collaboration. Some of the other big ones we had is we actually collaborate with our customers. We, like, what do you see value in? Do we truly have the understanding of, like, what are we? What is the voice of the customer? So if you're just starting out, collaboration of your stakeholders and your customer is very, very important.

Absolutely. Beautiful. Well, Chris, thanks so much for coming onto the show. I would love to actually catch up with you. Maybe we should put it on our calendars and we'll have you on in about a year or so and just to. Just to kind of follow your journey and see how, how far you come and how 2020 treats you guys. I think that'd be fun. What do you think?

That sounds awesome, Ron. I like I said, appreciate you having on. This has been great.

Yeah. Hey, how can people best connect with you?

You can follow me on LinkedIn so we can connect there. Feel free to send me a message. I'd be more than happy to share ideas and collaborate and go back and forth of whatever your CI journey may be.

And is Chris Rodriguez or Chris Christopher Rodriguez.

Chris Rodriguez, you follow me on LinkedIn.

Okay. Yeah. And we'll get you to send us your link and we'll put it in a show notes. So that'll be GembaPodcast.com and this will be episode 302. So yeah, we'll put that in Chris, but, yeah, keep up the great work. Sounds like you guys got a really good thing going. We're here in Keller, Texas, so Odessa's not so far away. Maybe I'll swing over there one day and you can bring me to Gemba and show me what's up.

That'd be awesome, Ron.

All right. All right, well, take care. Thanks again, Chris, and keep up the great work.

All right, thank you, Ron.

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 out.