GA 346 | Navigating the Gemba with Jay Hodge

Because the first time you don't do what you've committed to, you just throwing everything out of the window because people are looking at you as the leader. Whether you're a CEO, whether you're a director, whether you're a manager of a department. They're looking to you to solidify and validate that. That's really the culture that we want.

Today. I'm excited to welcome Jay Hodge to the show. Now, Jay, as you'll hear, runs a consulting company out of Indiana, and they do a lot of work in healthcare industry, but they work with manufacturing and services and other industries as well. But Jay has a heck of a background. He spent time at General Motors, and then he was at Toyota and then Caterpillar and a few other pretty strong, lean, thinking organizations. And so he brings a lot to the table, a lot of experience. And so we get into some fun topics. We started talking about, you know, just how some folks can get confused with all the various lean lingo. The word gemba in particular, you know, something that we kind of like that word gemba, but it can confuse people. And so Jay kind of talks a little bit about, about the word gemba and then, and how to help people really understand what it's all about. And then we get into just some different stories about different improvements and, and how Kaizen and Gemba go hand in hand. And then I, I, I did want to kind of circle back and I was, I'm always curious to hear about folks careers at Toyota and, and then when they go to other companies and how they, how they're able to take what they've learned at Toyota to other places. Because it can be a, it can be a balancing act, you know, of not being who thinks they know it all versus, you know, you know, being able to really help people. And so Jay walks us through how he approached that after his days at Toyota. So, yeah, fun episode. I think you're going to like it. So show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 346. So again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 346. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Jay, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's going good, Ron. How are you today?

I'm doing well, man. Doing well. Where are you calling in from?

I'm calling from my home office in Indiana.

Indiana? Where in Indiana?

Well, basically in the middle of the woods, out in the middle of nowhere, just north of Kokomo, about 30 miles.

Got it. Got it. Yeah. Well, I grew up in Ohio, so I lived in Richmond, Indiana, as a very young boy for a little while, but grew up in Ohio. Know Indiana very, very, very well. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right, well, Jay, as you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to use?

I do. It's one that someone shared with me years ago. It's. It's a simple quote. You can't call yourself a leader if no one's following you.

Yeah, that's a good one.

It just says you can. You can have a title. You can put anything you want on your wall, on your car, I mean, on your parking space, on. On your door to your office. But you can't really say that you're a leader if no one wants to follow you or no one's following you.

That's right. That's right. Very good. All right, well, Jay, hey, tell us about your background. Tell us about how you first got introduced to all this continuous improvement stuff, and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Sure. So my career actually started in the Marine Corps in operations. So my passion is operations from the Marine Corps. You know, college, spent some time in operations at Ford, General Motors, about five years at Toyota, which is really where I developed the passion for continuous improvement. And then, you know, once you've got the Toyota name on your resume, you become somewhat of a commodity. And so from there, I went to work with Caterpillar and several other companies, ended up getting into health care because as. As, you know, if you've gone to the doctor's office of the hospital, there's. There's plenty of opportunities, let's just say.

Yeah.

In healthcare for them to understand how to utilize lean, continuous improvement, focus on a customer. And then five years ago, I started my own company, doing this on my own for companies that I wanted to work with, I thought had great potential. So that's what I do for a living.

So you guys are primarily only work with healthcare, or do you venture out into other industries as well know other industries as well?

Service industries, manufacturing, government? At some point. No, I mean, you know, this as well as I do. Continuous improvement applies to. Oh, yeah, everything that's a process, and everything is a process. So it applies to everything.

For sure, for sure. Good, good, good, good. All right. Well, Jay, we were talking ahead of time about, you know, just some. There can be confusion and, you know, there's a lot of Lingo. Right. That we use in lean and there's some Japanese words and some. All this kind of stuff. And one of the words that. Well, we're kind of. We kind of like, it's Gemba, you know, name of our company. So I know, I know you've. You've experienced times where people got confused when. When you started talking about the Gemba. So tell us a story about that.

You know, in a lot of what I do is we have what are called Gemba boards, which are basically boards where you collect and collect and discuss data and performance and formulate plans for improvements. And so people think that the Gemba is the board. And what they don't understand is that the Gemba is the process where the people who work in that. In that process live and exist every single day. So getting to people to understand that the Gemba is not the board. Gemba is where we go to, where we create value, go to the floor level, go to where we're actually touching and impacting the patients and customers. And so that's always some confusion whenever I start. Even if it's an organization that I go into that's already kind of implemented it, they always kind of fall back on the Gemba is the board. No, Gemba, that's a board is where we live, plain and simple.

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. So I know you're also passionate about. About Kaizen. So. And obviously to do Kaizen, well, you really need to go to Gemba, Right? Go to the place the work is done and hard to do Kaizen if you're not there. Right. So. So talk, maybe tell some examples of some improvements that you guys have been a part of. Maybe some stories of how Kaizen and Gemba have kind of gone hand in hand.

Sure. It's one of those things again, where Kaizen's kind of misunderstood as well. A lot of times Kaizen people will say, hey, let's have a Kaizen. Well, you can have a Kaizen event, but you're not going to have a Kaizen. Kaizen is the actual continuous improvement process itself. One of the examples that really stands out is one of the first companies I worked with after I started my company is we went and we worked with the hospital and, you know, for an OR, when you've got eight or eight or ten ORs, you know, the turnover time for an OR is critical because, you know, if you're spending 40 minutes between procedures, turning the room over, getting it clean, setting it up, that's lost capacity. It's capacity you're never going to get back. And you know, some procedures only take 20, 25 minutes. So in a one day period of time, if you're looking at an OR that has a 40 minute turnaround time between their cases, you know, you reduce that and all of a sudden you've got capacity for an additional case which becomes very attractive to your, to your surgeons who most likely don't work for the hospital. They're utilizing that hospital. It's good for the operations of the hospital. So one of the things we did, you know, through a Kaizen activity is we went in and we value stream mapped the entire process. We value stream mapped every single person that went into that room for the turnover. We documented the exact processes that they follow, the cycle times, you know, all the sub processes, how their interactions took place, the layout of the room, what equipment was in the room, what materials were in the room, how they restocked it. And we looked at how they did that and you know, through their expertise, not mine, I'm just gonna be blunt. Their expertise and their understanding of the process, we're able to understand that there's a lot of duplication of effort. There's a lot of crossover, there's a lot of things that are, that are being done in a sequential manner when they could be doing being done in a consecutive manner, same exact time. And you know, once we finished it, we went from like 42 minute turnaround time down to like 21 minutes. We basically cut it in half. And when you put that into a monetary figure, it was unbelievable the amount of potential that that extra capacity produced for an organization that had eight different ORs. Right. And you're also talking about the fact that you're paying less overtime because you're finishing your cases earlier on time, which means you're paying less over time. You're not having to bring people in, cover extra shifts, all of that stuff. And just the overall impact of the quality of life to the team members that the nurses, the staff, the anesthesiologists, the techs, everybody was phenomenal. But this is one of the things is that when people hear you talking about doing a kaizen, hey Jay, we need you to come in and do a Kaizen. I'm not going to do a Kaizen. I'll come in and help you run a Kaizen event. But you're the ones as the experts in the process, you're the ones who are going to fix it. Because that's something I talk about in my book is, is lean and Kaizen. And Gemba and all this stuff is really impressive, but it means nothing if you don't understand the processes where you're utilizing it.

Right, Exactly.

None. Nothing whatsoever.

So, hey, so tell us about. I'm curious to hear. I know. Were you at the Georgetown facility? Toyota.

No, I was actually in the Princeton. Princeton facility in Southern Indiana.

Okay.

Okay. I made the Sienna, Sienna Tundra and the Sequoia, which has changed now.

So I'm always curious to hear, you know, we've had a lot of folks over the years from Toyota that have worked at Toyota. What was it like for you to kind of be immersed in? Because I know they're like, necessarily, okay, now you're going to the lean class or the, you know, or the, you know, JIT class, or, you know, I mean, it's just kind of like, you learn by doing. Right. And it's kind of like a fish in the water. Right. It's just like, what's water? It's, you know, everybody's doing it. So talk about that experience and what that was like.

Sure. So it was kind of a different experience because when I left General Motors, the last nine months when I was at General Motors, I was actually teaching the Toyota production system to General Motors. Now we branded it General Motors system, but it was the Toyota production system. And it's interesting to be doing that in a union environment. So I definitely had to know what I was talking about to get people to understand that this isn't about reducing headcount. This is about improving processes, which makes you better at what you do. So when I went to Toyota, I got a call from Toyota and I went to work for them with them. And I was actually what's referred to as a sequence supplier specialist. And so everyone understands that Toyota uses JIT just in time. You've got what you need, where you need it, and the amount you need it. But what they don't understand is there's also something that's a next level, what I refer as next level up, which means sequence supplier deals with, like, your seats. It deals with, like, your. Your. Your frames, your wheel assemblies, your dash assemblies. And what these are. These are. These are different components in the vehicle that literally arrive at the line in the correct sequence an hour to an hour and a half before they're actually installed. So it's not like you're bringing in a bunch of pieces of carpet and you've got stacks and stacks of carpet or bolts or other things. These are actual parts that are specific to that specific unique vehicle. And so when you start talking about just in time. It's the epitome of just in time. The wheel assemblies were being produced across the street, were literally being produced two, two and a half hours produced before they were going to go on the vehicle. Which means you had to have a very, very, very, very robust process to accommodate for any issues on the assembly line, any issues at the supplier. So, you know, it was interesting because going into Toyota, it wasn't something that you taught. It was something you lived. And you saw every single person in the organization live it. When there was a problem, no one just said, hey, it's not an important problem. They said, hey, this is a problem. We need to do something about it. That's why, you know, if you go to the Toyota, the line, you can have a person who's literally screwing on a bolt or tightening a bolt. They have the power to stop the entire assembly line by pulling the andon. And that's what you call engagement. That's what you call trust in your teams. They live it. That was the difference between General Motors and Toyota. General Motors is getting there. Toyota lives it.

Yeah. I was going to ask you about Andon. Like, do you remember the first time you ever pulled it, or did I assume you pulled it Andon cord in your time?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

What was it like? What was it feeling like the first time you pulled it?

I was scared to death, like, I better have my ducks in a row. And you did. I mean, they train you that if you're gonna pull it, you know, you pull the end on and then. Then after a while.

How quickly was it until the team leader was there?

Oh, it was almost immediate because the team leaders are always in the area.

Right.

With the people that they're leading. So.

Yeah, yeah. Was it a problem?

Yeah, it was. It was, but it was something that was remediable and fixed by the team. I mean, that's the thing. We don't. We didn't. We didn't have to call the quality department and all that. We understood the process well enough. We. And we reacted. That's one of the most amazing things about Toyota is their flexibility and the speed in which they can react.

Now, what about going to other companies then? I know you mentioned Caterpillar and some other folks. You know, you might be known as the Toyota guy or whatever, but which could be a good thing and possibly a bad thing. Right. Depending on who the. The audience is. Right. How did you. How did you approach that?

That.

Have you had a lot of knowledge in your head, a lot of experience. But you also, I'm sure, had to have some humility. Right. So like, how did you go about that?

Absolutely. You tread lightly. Let's just say, say that's about the easiest way to say it is you have to tread lightly. So, you know, when I went to work for Caterpillar, it was obviously for the same reasons. They wanted to embed the Toyota production system. They wanted to em. Continuous improvement philosophy into their supply base. So you did, you had to tread lightly because people hear the word Toyota and they think automatically you're wanting to change everything that they do. And that's not the case. You have to get people to trust and understand that you're actually there to help them become better. The issue is in the fact that it goes back to every organization. Everybody listening to this can probably relate to this. Not every organization wants to get better. Not every organization wants to go through the pain of looking in what I refer to as the operational mirror and saying, you know what, this may be how we've always done it, but it's not the best way to do it. But there's some comfort that's involved in doing it the way I've always done it, and there's some discomfort involved in being honest enough to say we should change. And not every organization out there, not every leader is, is will buy into that and they won't agree with it because they're comfortable, complacent.

You know, it's so interesting. You said I was my friend Jamie Parker, she recently started her own podcast and she had me on as a guest the other day and, and one of the, you know, her audience is mostly kind of like operational operations managers, that sort of thing, frontline folks. And so she was, you know, kind of asking me general question. Like I remember exactly something about how to get started or you know, that sort of thing with Lean. And, and the thing I said is, you, first of all, you got to commit that you want to get better. And I said, and that sounds like common sense, but you'd be surprised how many people are out there who are what I saw as my calls, fat and happy. Right. I mean they're just, you know, they got a good product and they're making some money and you know, competitors are, eh, you know, so like what's the burning platform? You know, and yeah, so it's a, that's a really important point that people have to first of all agree that yes, we do want to get better and there's opportunity for improvement.

I go into organizations and you Know, usually my first conversation is with the president or CEO, and they'll tell me their story. They'll tell me where they are and where they'd like to go. And one of my very first questions is always, are you committed to being part of this activity? Because so many different leaders want an organization to improve, but they want someone else to do it. They want to delegate it. They, they want, you know, as a CEO, I want my VP of quality to lead the charge. No, no, that's not the way this works. Continuous improvement involves the CEO. It involves every single person that wears the badge for that organization. And if a CEO, a leader, isn't willing to be a part of that transformation, it will fail every single time.

Yep.

Because there's one captain on a ship and there's one captain in an organization.

Yep. So my next question, Jay. So I know you've obviously been around for a long, long time, and you've seen this lean movement of ours.

Whoa, you're calling me Old Ron.

Based on your experience? That's what I mean. You know.

Put yourself up for that.

I see your picture, man. You're about my age. Come on. Okay, so, so, but, you know, I, I, if I think back on my own career, I remember, you know, learning to see came out, you know, Mike Rother's value stream mapping book, everybody soaked it up. So everybody starts value stream mapping. And then that red book comes out, creating level flow. And then the, the blue book and the green book, you know, all the lai books that we all soaked up over the years. And, you know, so it was. There was a lot of tools being introduced to the world. Right. And then we went into a phase to where I, I like to call it tools bashing. It's. Oh, it's not about the tools. You know, it's about people. And it's true. It is about people. Right. We do got to have people, and you got to respect people and all that. It's obvious. However, you know, you can. I always then come back to the fact that, you know what, we can respect people all day long, and, you know, this and that, but if we don't know how to make a value stream map, you know, it's gonna be hard to make anything better. Right. So you gotta have that balance. So what I want to do, I know you've got a lot of experience with tools, but let's talk a little bit about how do you effectively use tools without annoying people, but also to sustain improvements?

There's a lot of ways to actually do that, but I think my favorite way to do it or most important ways to involve them in the use of the tools. I've witnessed this before where I'll go in and a consultant will sit there and they'll do a value stream map with a bunch of different players from the organization and they do the value stream map. And I'm like, wait a second. When you walk away, yeah, who else knows how to do the value stream map right now?

Right?

And the answer is nobody. But there's, there's, there's some people out there that are afraid of sharing that knowledge of how to use the tools because then they become, they're not as valuable. And I look at it the exact opposite way. If I'm doing a value stream map or process level map or doing a fishbone or a 5Y or whatever, I teach people how to do it, I want them to do it. I tell them at the very beginning, you're going to make mistakes, you're going to screw it up, you're going to measure the wrong things, you're going to go down rabbit holes, you can make the wrong assumptions, you're going to see some, some cause and effect relationships that you didn't even know existed. That's, that's called learning. That's called part of the process. But involving the people in the, in the tools themselves. And you're right, tools, tools without people, there's no value in it whatsoever. But people without them, without the tools are basically what we have right now. A lot of people sitting there thinking, man, I really wish we could fix this, but I don't know how. And so all of a sudden you combine the people and the tools and the knowledge how to use the tools and how to effectively gather the information while using the tools. And you can affect change. So it's a double edged sword. You have to use both sides of the sword or you're missing half the opportunity.

Exactly. Very good, very good. So if we want to think about a culture then, because really that's what I think most organizations practicing continuous improvement. One is they want a culture of excellence, a culture of continuous improvement, a lean culture, whatever you want to call it. What are some important things that we need to be thinking about? Some factors that we need to think about.

Most important in my book is leadership example. This is how a lot of continuous improvement initiatives have gone that I've seen over the years is we want a continuous improvement culture, we want to stop the fix, we want to do what's right all the time, every single time. Because it's the right thing to do. We want to focus on our customers, our patients. Good. Everybody raises their hand. Cheers. Rah, rah. We get a pen, put it on our chest, come in the next day, something goes wrong. Oh, my gosh. We really need to get through today. So just. Just write that down, and we'll come back and fix it. There you go. That means basically the entire discussion was. Was a bunch of hooey because we lead. We lead by example. A good leader would walk in on that second day and say, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. We had a problem. Let's stop to fix. Let's understand it. We maybe we may have to put a temporary solution in play, but we're gonna stop to understand. Otherwise, all we're going to do is we're going to get to or say we're going to come back and address it. We'll forget about it tomorrow, because tomorrow is twice as busy. We've got twice as many patients or twice as many orders, and half the people called in. We don't have time to worry about yesterday's problems today. So for me, demonstrated leadership. If the leader says we're going to stop to fix. If a leader says we're not going to accept marginal quality. If a leader says we're not going to ship late, then we do what we say. Because the first time you don't do what you've committed to, you just throwing everything out of the window because people are looking at you as the leader. Whether you're a CEO, whether you're a director, whether you're a manager of a department, they're looking to you to solidify and validate that. That's really the culture that we want. Because a culture isn't something that you roll out with the pen or roll out with the new newsletter or. Or some big banner that sits over the front of your door as a culture is something you live, period.

Got it.

Got it.

Tell us about your book. So is it called the Lean Treasure Chest? Is that right?

Yeah, it's called the Lean Treasure Chest. It's. It's. It's not a quick read. It's like 380 pages. So I sit there sometimes and wonder, man, I didn't realize I had that much in my brain to write down, but I probably made. So that's okay. Now, the Lean Treasure Chest is basically. It's a book that talks about how to use lean. It talks about. It talks about the soft side of using lean. The simple fact that when you go in to do continuous improvement or use the Lean tools that you have to be aware of your audience, because like you said a few minutes ago, if you alienate them at the beginning, you're never going to gain traction. It also points out the fact that if you do it right and you have people that are, like, pushing back against you, once they actually truly understand what you can accomplish through Lean and the different tools, they will be your biggest advocate. It also talks about. And, you know, I've had multiple discussions about this. For me, Lean is not about waste. It is absolutely not about waste. Let me explain to you what I mean by that. When we start talking about Lean, we utilize Lean to understand our processes and reduce the waste within our process, but we do it for what reason? We do it so that as we reduce the waste within a process, we can provide more value to our shareholders, our customers, our employees. We don't use Lean just to reduce waste. We use Lean to reduce waste to improve and increase the amount of value that we produce. A lot of times, all we talk about, though, is Lean is about reducing waste.

Yeah, no, that's good. That's good.

And it talks about all the tools. Yeah, everything. So. And it's. It's for the CEO, it's for the board member. It's for the person who's the director on the line who cannot figure out how to get their team engaged, and it's for the person on the front line who's. Who's turning the bulls.

Nice.

It applies to everybody. That's how I wrote it.

Very good. Very good. All right, Jay. Well, hey, man, it's been fun chatting with you. If folks want to connect, what's the best way?

Really, the best way is through the. Through my company's website. It's just WWW, not the letter J, H, O, D, G, E, A, S, S O, C dot com. I don't care. If people want to reach out to me, they can call our company at 812-789-6404. The book has a website itself. The book's on Amazon. It's on Kindle, it's on Audible. So a lot of different avenues.

Do you read it?

Do I read my own book?

Yeah. No, no, no. Not like on Audible.

No. I actually have a professional reader because my voice is not that great.

You got a radio. You got a smooth radio voice, man. I'm disappointed that you didn't read it, man. Come on.

Really? I always thought I sounded like Pee Wee Herman.

You sound great. You sound great. All right, well, I appreciate it. Jay for coming on. So we'll we'll link to everything that Jay talked about, his book and his website and all that kind of stuff. So this is episode 346. Go go to gembapodcast.com and look for episode 346. So Jay, again, thanks for coming on. It's been fun and keep up the great work. And yeah, stay warm out there in Indiana. It's about to get cold if it's not already.

It's already there, my friend. Thanks for having me on, Ron. I appreciate what you do.

Take care. Bye Bye. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over over to gembaacademy.

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