GA 515 | Software, AI, and Continuous Improvement with Nikhil Joshi

The professionals in the continuous improvement world are struggling because you can't just learn one tool and say, okay, I'll plug in the input and I'll just get the output. And now I have got my answer. You need to upskill yourself with some of the latest trends and technologies that are there.

Today. I'm excited to welcome Nikhil Joshi to the show. Now, Nikhil has a really interesting background, so he's sort of a trained industrial engineer. Was all up into continuous improvement and Lean and Six Sigma and all that kind of just basic industrial engineering work for early part of his career. And then he got into more of the software world and now he actually runs a software company. And so today the conversation was really about how software can, and some might argue must sort of cooperate with the work that we're doing. And what we focused on continuous improvement today because he knew most of the listeners are in the continuous improvement world. But also, also manufacturing, I think, is another area where they're strongly positioned. His company is. So it was a really interesting conversation. We got into some AI conversation where I have some personal, like, fear of AI. I mean, we're all about it. You're using it like everybody else is. But like, I worry, like, are we going to forget how to think as human beings? Because ChatGPT is writing all of our articles and social media posts for us now. And so we had a really interesting conversation about that and I really enjoyed his. His response to that question. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 5 15. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Nikhil, welcome to the show. How are you?

Good, Ron, thank you for having me.

Where are you calling in from?

I'm calling from Irving, Texas. That's the Dallas Fort Worth area.

Well, we should have been here.

Where?

I'm 30 minutes from you. I'm in Keller.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah. You should have drove over and we could have like just done it here in our studio. I know, that's funny. Well, I saw on your form, well, that you had a European phone number or maybe the UK or something. Or maybe that was the. The people who booked it for you or something. I don't know, but correct.

Yeah, yeah, they are from the uk. That's correct.

Okay, fantastic. Well, that. Small world. We'll have to go out and grab a coffee or something one day or something.

Absolutely. Would love to close.

Awesome. All right. Well, hey, I know you've listened to the show before, Nikhil, and we like to get Things started with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

So my favorite quote, Ron, is from the famous Japanese industrial engineer, Dr. Shigeo Shingo. He says that the most dangerous waste is the waste we do not recognize. And this quote, really personally as well as for our company, has always had a big impact because we really feel like that about technology having an impact. Whenever we go out to do continuous improvement and when we work with customers, it's amazing to see as to how we can unlock so much significant value in areas we never imagined. You know, there was waste. So that's why I like this quote a lot.

Yeah, love it. Love it. Okay, well, hey, why don't you tell us a little bit about about yourself, Nikhil, maybe about your background. Obviously you're in the software world today, so maybe talk about how you transition into that and tell us a little bit about SN ICs, your company.

Awesome. Yeah. I'm founder of SNIC Solutions, and my background is in industrial engineering. Industrial and systems engineering. So, long story short, I started this company. The company was born in India, but I'm an immigrant entrepreneur here to the US Took the odd route to entrepreneurship after my undergraduate degree in industrial engineering. And initially I started off on the shop floor doing a lot of continuous improvement activities. Time and motion studies, layout optimizations, and lean manufacturing. And at some point then we pivoted to say, well, I think the principles of lean are very nice. It's amazing, but how do we merge that with technology to add significant value? And that's kind of where we started pivoting to implementing manufacturing operations software, you know, in discrete and batch manufacturing companies. We are partners to a lot of large OEMs, whether it's Siemens or Rockwell. And I think that's, that's our niche area in implementing manufacturing operations software kind of helped us, helped open doors here in North America. So in 2015, we kind of said, hey, let's go international. But now we are global. So it made sense a couple of years ago to be based out of Dallas here as a parent company, as headquarters, and expand globally. So that's where we are. I like to call myself as an immigrant entrepreneur. That's the go to term in America right now. And that's pretty much my background.

Okay, got it. Well, we were sort of chatting a little bit before we hit recording, and we're talking about, you know, our audience is, you know, mostly continuous improvement practitioners, folks in the lean world, Six Sigma, you know, just again, just general continuous improvement practitioners. And some of them are, I Mean, let's be honest, everybody's using software, right? I mean we here, we are using software to record this and you're. Everyone's on a computer nearly daily, if not throughout the day. But talk a little bit about how you see. I mean, there's lots of software like Minitab and Sigma XL and statistical software and different things like that. So how do you see software playing a role in say the continuous improvement world and also just manufacturing in general?

That's a great question. I think at a principally everybody in continuous improvement and I've seen my fellow peers, whether they are industrial engineers, operational excellence heads, plant managers, all of them use some sort of tools. But the fundamental difference that has happened in the last many years is that you can use the tool which has a silo impact. So the output is very silo. So you use a statistical process control software. It's only giving you that. What we are living in a world right now is where all this basically different tools or different softwares and technology really have to come together. They have to talk to each other so that you can really get an outcome. And if you look at it from a customer standpoint, right? So for a continuous improvement professional working in a company, their customer are basically, you know, their internal functions and their management. So for those people right now, just the way we use technology. Personally, when I'm looking really for an outcome, if I'm using my phone, I'm really looking for outcomes. I'm really looking to improve my productivity. I'm looking for tangible outcomes. A silo tool is now not able to give that outcomes. In the past, continuous improvement professionals like me, et cetera, we used to do so much over and above using that tool to give that outcome and then that was time consuming. So you know, whether it was a lean project that I did or a Six Sigma project that I did in my past or even let's say did a plant layout simulation project or a software implementation, the timescales were basically in months, if not a year. Now the outcome that is needed is that hey, can you do this in two weeks? Can you do this in four weeks? So when speed is in question, you kind of need to integrate and weave all this technology to get those business outcome. And that's what is principally changing. And that's where I think also most of the professionals in the continuous improvement world are struggling because you can't just learn one tool and say, okay, I'll plug in the input and I'll just get the output. And now I have got my Answer. You need to upskill yourself with some of the latest trends and technologies that are there. And also just in general, the methodology of the software life cycle, right? Like software, how it is developed today is very different from how we used to consume in the past.

So what about AI? Because obviously it's here and it's all around us and new things are coming daily, it seems, and things that seemed impossible last week are, are done today. So like, where do you see AI playing a role in. In the future of software and, and really manufacturing, continuous improvement and everything in between?

I mean, in simple terms, if a continuous improvement professional is trying to improve his or her own productivity, AI is going to really help do that. And there are ample number of use cases, right? So I always give this example to my team that we are a bunch of engineers who don't really know the language of sales. So if you want to become a better salesman in terms of all the skills that you have, you probably want to use AI. That's a good use case. And a simple example is that this podcast that we are recording, when I had to prepare for this podcast, I have some thought in my mind that I want to tell you, right? But I could easily go into ChatGPT and say, hey, this is what I'm trying to tell Ron. Does it make sense? And all it does is it corrects you the context. I can tell it that, hey, you know, Ron is from Keller. Can I talk basically a little in the Texan language? Can I add that flair so that Ron understands? Those are the tweaks that AI is helping doing. Another use case that we use today is our social media posts. We don't blindly use, but we use AI to craft that. This is what we're trying to say, help me frame this better so that a wider audience can understand. And the use case that we see in manufacturing applications that are there is we implement production scheduling software, for example. So when we implement production scheduling software, the output of the software, people in the manufacturing plant want to know that, hey, did whatever you plan today, did you actually achieve it or not? And how is it basically, you know, for the next 30 days now, after a month or two, what I'm interested in knowing is that, hey, there's a way I, as a scheduler, am planning. Is there a better way? Did I miss out something? You know, could there be something that was hidden that I did not recognize? And that's where AI has a use case that you're still scheduling, but then you are using AI on top of it to say, to find basically and unlock the value that you are not able to see with your naked eye. And I think that's where we see applications. It's early days. From a manufacturing standpoint, there are some. From a continuous improvement standpoint, I think I can break it into three areas. One is it is certainly going to improve personal productivity and then you have functional productivity, which is the other area, where how do three or four people come together and try and use AI to become better at working with each other? And then the third area is that what are the real automations that you can do that in your own area of redundant work? Can you use AI to augment what is not going away? Which is very good news for continuous improvement professionals is that humans have to take decisions. And that's what we are saying that in all these things and all these use cases that I gave you the example, I'm still making the final decision that what do I want to do? And that's going to stay. So we might have organization, structures change, etc. But ultimately all the decisions that continuous improvement professionals are taking today, they'll continue to have to take. That's not going away.

I guess my fear with AI, ChatGPT in particular, and it's not just them, there's a million other variations or competitors of ChatGPT now, like, are we gonna look, forget like our, our children, for example, are they gonna be able to think the way that you and I think? Because we didn't grow up with this stuff.

Right?

Like we had to write our term paper.

Yeah, right.

And chat GPT didn't write it for us. Now it's writing it for them and they'll just, I mean, let's be honest, it's writing them for, for them now, right? And they were saying CHAT GPT make this not detectable by CHAT GPT, you know, so like that's my biggest fear is that just we're going to lose the ability to think. Like, what do you, what do you think on that?

Yeah, I mean, I also fear that every day. But I think your last podcast was about courage. And Mark Brown, I think was on the podcast who told a very nice definition of courage that that is like you still fear. You have the fear, but you still basically take the action to go forward. And I think that's the same thing here where I think it pushes you to go beyond your potential, but we will lose some ability. I'm not denying from a perspective of thinking, but what I'm seeing is that it is for me Personally, it is pushing me to really connect the outcomes and the why, hey, why am I doing this? And that thinking is basically, I wish I had got that, you know, during my engineering days, because the way we learned things was very process oriented. You want to reach from A to B. How do you have to do all those calculations in order to reach from A to B? Right? And that's what we really focused on. And then when we started working, we started focusing on saying, well, why are we doing this? Is it really needed? You know, what's the benefit of this? All that became a part of our experience and not of our study. What I see, very nice. Like, you know, even with my kids in school, the non traditional education is very much in sync with what is happening on the technology side, where it's all very project oriented, very application oriented, and it's pushing people to really think more about applications and people who then want to specialize that. Okay, you know, why, how does this really work? Can really go into the nitty gritties, but everyone, I don't think, needs to go into the nitty gritty. And that's, that's the differentiation. So overall, I don't think we will lose the ability to think. I think it will just become more channelized. Ron.

Yeah, no, that's fair, that's fair. I mean, people back in the, the days when, when the, the combine was invented, you know, and farming changed, right. I mean, I'm sure people freaked out about that, right? Or the calculator or the computer.

Right?

These things, the Internet and, you know, life evolves and we must evolve with it, I suppose. But yeah, it's still, still gives you pause sometimes, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll tell you the other one. It doesn't seem to be, I don't know where you might know better that the whole metaverse or whatever the heck that stuff is, you know, like you're looking at your glasses and you're watching the game and I'm like, are people even gonna talk to each other? You know, like, Right. Or, or will you and I do a podcast 10 years from now, you know, through our glasses or something like that? And will it even be us, you know, talking?

I mean, if it has a use case, then yes. Like, what I see right now is that there's a hue, whole new science of immersive engineering that is coming up. In fact, CES happened yesterday, which is the biggest show, and our partner Siemens had a lot to talk there on immersive engineering, but they are applying immersive engineering where the whole Metaverse is going to be pretty much focused on people coming together to design new products. Right. I think both of us going and doing, let's say a podcast in a Metaverse might be an overkill, but people want to come and, let's say, play games in the Metaverse. And the reason is that they want to basically have a more realistic feel where two friends, they are kind of in two different parts, but they want to feel that they're in the same room and they want to play with each other. And that's where I think Metaverse will come in and have applications. So as an industrial engineer, when I try and just look at the world of continuous improvement, I'm always saying that, okay, ultimately we are trying to make things better, faster, but more importantly also cheaper because the larger unsolved problems, you know, with 8 billion population becoming 10 billion population, I think AI overall is going to have very specific use cases for sure. And the same thing applies for Metaverse or any other new technology that is going to come out there. That's what I strongly feel, the direction we are going in.

All right, well, hey, I'm curious if you have any practical tips for all of our continuous improvement practitioners out there on some things that they can, they can be thinking about, you know, as we get going here in 2024, early part of the year, as it relates to, to technology and to software and different things like that. Do you have any practical pieces of advice that they could take action on?

So let's look at this, right? I think the I, I, I like to look at this question of yours from a competency and a skill point of view. So if you think competency and skills, they're different. Competency is communication, reading, writing, speaking are skills which support that competency of communication. Just in a simple example, I think all continuous improvement professionals, they have two very strong points. They understand cultural and behavioral changes very well because that's, if you see the last 20, 30 years, that's where we've spent most of our time. And the second area basically that continuous improvement professionals are very good at, are looking at tools or systems more from a principal standpoint, like, okay, you know, and that's very holistic in nature that, you know, how is this going to really directionally help the company? Is this the right thing to go? There's a little bit of philosophy there, and this is a very good, strong sense. What is missing out is that with all this technology coming in, you kind of need to make the technology inclusive as part of the journey. And that's where the biggest struggle I see is that, okay, it's not about picking up a new tool, but it's just about understanding how the software industry works or how the software life cycle works. So one practical tip I would give to everyone out there is that just read a little bit into agile software development or just lean software development. These are all inspired by actually lean manufacturing, but they are applied basically in the software industry as to how software is developed. And this is very different from how software was developed in the past, which was the waterfall method. Yeah. And we still think that this agile development methodology, the more and more continuous improvement professionals apply, they will not only relate a lot to that, but they will start understanding as to why, how to really bring in technology in any organization, because they already understand culture and processes. That's one tip. The second thing I can look at is that. From a continuous improvement standpoint, it's very easy to focus on operational efficiencies. And if you see the overall initial philosophies, they've all been very heavily focused on, hey, go on the shop floor. If you talk about manufacturing, I have experience in manufacturing, we're talking more about going on the shop floor, really making basically those simple small improvements that are out there. That's a great thing that has to continue. That is not going to go away. But if you see what has happened in parallel, is that all the technology stories, right, from Steve Jobs or all the big guys, they've kind of looked at the whole system holistically and say, well, how do we disrupt this whole thing? Right? How can this become 100x faster or 200x faster? And that's a metric which is more related to top line, if not cost of goods sold on a financial statement. So I see a lot of continuous improvement professionals and we also used to do this like many years ago, where our focus is more on operational optimization and not so much on saying how do we transition the business model itself so that we can grow top line revenues 7x10x etc. And how do we develop capabilities to grow that way? And I think that mind shift change automatically puts you on the bandwagon of saying, unless I adopt technology, that's not going to happen. And focusing on that I think can really bring out the best and change or significantly improve careers for continuous improvement professionals.

Yeah. If you had a book recommendation, one book that you would want people to read, what would it be?

A couple of them. The first one of the things that I really liked and I'm Suggesting this primarily for CI professionals because they'd relate to this. So I'm sure they would have read books like the Goal from Eli. You go right, that gives a very good domain understanding. Right. Like as to, you know, how, you know, you need to bring people together. Culture is most important. Inspired from there. I think if you're looking to adopt some of the practical tips that I gave, I think Lean Startup Is by Eric Rees is a very good book because he kind of takes the same thing, but tells that if you look at a technology business or if you look at your own business from a technology company's point of view, I think there's a lot of good learning in terms of, you know, how you can grow. The second big recommendation I'd make is that there's a. There's an organization called tsia, it's called Technology Services and Industries association. And they, they basically follow all the tech companies, I think on the stock exchange, which are born on the cloud. But they put out a lot of research and a lot of future, like what's going to happen? What's the future of tech? And recently they came up with a book called Digital Transformation. And then they scratch the transformation and said hesitation. So the book's name is Digital Hesitation.

Interesting.

It's one of my, it's been one of my favorite books in the last year because it really gives the reality of almost every organization trying to have consensus in what direction they should go. And it's very interesting to see that almost 50 or 60% of any initiatives, continuous improvement initiatives, which are at a transformative scale, are kind of basically failing. And the number one reason for that is no consensus. So the book actually kind of takes the continuous improvement professional that how do you navigate for that? And it also tells us to what's changing out there in the market. It.

Interesting. Good stuff. Hey, if, if people want to connect with you personally, Nikhil, what's the best way?

Well, I mean, I'm a technology guy, so I'm everywhere.

Yeah.

But at the rate Nikhil K. Joshi, that's pretty much my handle either on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and our website is snicsolutions.com so we're just there, just type my name and pretty much we come up online.

Yeah, got it. And we're going to link to everything in the show notes. So everyone just kind of scroll down and, and go hook up with. With Nikhil here on social media and everything in between. So, hey, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you coming on and well, since you're so close, the next time we do this, you got to come in and we'll do it in studio.

Yeah, looking. Looking forward to that. Thanks for having me, Ron.

All right. You take care.

Yeah, you too.

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