GA 552 | Identifying the Real Problems with Bill Krolicki

It's like amazing how much time gets wasted on all these little insignificant interruptions, but they just pile up. Oh, I got to double check this. You know, these measurements don't look right. Okay, well, you know, it's all that back and forth creates anxiety. Instead we go have the system checking to make sure everything's correct and then boom, they just get to go and work and make it happen.

Today I'm excited to welcome Bill Krilake to the show. Now Bill works for, well, has his own business, a consulting practice called Third Eye analytics. And he primarily is working with small to medium sized companies who are trying to do more sort of like data analysis in particular on like really think about sort of like a lean thinking organization who's trying to get better. And maybe there are some really sophisticated systems out there. We talk about them a little bit. Well, you know, where machines are dialed in and sensors all over them and the minute they slow down or stop, you know, a system's automatically alerted. But you know, those are very expensive systems and not everybody has that. So many of Bill's clients are, you know, they might be logging things on piece of paper or whatever it might be. And so he's going in and helping them find maybe a little bit more elegant way of doing it using some, some basic tools. And he walks through what some of them are, some of the various Microsoft platform tools and really helping them to identify what their problems really are and then allowing them. That's where Lean comes in then to solve the problem. But as he says, many people are good at plan and, but that check and act or check and adjust side is sometimes a little bit difficult and we're not always good at that. And so that's sort of the gist of the conversation. And towards the end of it we talk about the importance of just being able to understand if you're winning or losing and whatever you're doing, whether you're in manufacturing or you're an accountant or doesn't really matter what your job is. Like are you winning or are you losing right now? And if you don't know, then you need to think about how can I start to understand what winning and what losing looks like? So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 552 and be sure to scroll down on the, the app, whatever you're listening to and go connect with bill over on LinkedIn. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Bill, welcome to the show. How are you?

Oh, I'M great. I'm really excited to be here with you.

All right. Yeah, me too. This is going to be a fun one. So where are you calling in from?

I'm calling in from Rhode Island.

Rhode Island. Okay. Beautiful part of the country. Beautiful part. What's your weather here in mid September?

Well, it's been pretty nice. Today is a little overcast and looks rainy, but, you know, summer's over. But now we head into fall, so we get to see the leaves change and all that. So it'd be great.

Well, I'm jealous because I'm in Texas and we don't. One day we have leaves, and the next day they're on the ground, so we don't really. I grew up in Ohio, so I know the beautiful. In fact, my daughter, she's a. She's up in college up in Steubenville, Ohio, and she. She, for her first year there, she was like, oh, my gosh, look at these leaves and all the beautiful red and all that. She's never seen that, you know, she's only seen green and brown, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

Good stuff. All right, well, hey, Bill, as you know, we like to get things going out of the gate with our guests sharing a quote. So do you got one?

The quote that I always like is, be the change you want to be in the world, which I think is a Gandhi quote, at least usually attributed to him.

Right, right. Very good. Very good. I like it. All right, well, hey, tell us about yourself, Bill. Tell us about your background and how you got into this line of work and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, well, I mean, actually, I got started in Lean way back in the 90s. And it was. My grandfather was friends with one of the guys who went with Edward Deming to Japan to teach them about quality and quality control. And so, you know, I met up with him and talked to him and got started on quality, which then led. And I was working in manufacturing, led to, you know, Lean, and, you know, I worked over in China for a while, so a bunch of different manufacturers. And that's where, you know, just saw Lean do a lot of incredible things. And then. And then in the last couple years, I discovered some of these new data analytical tools that I was applying to Lean and found that they were just really incredible what you could do with them. And so then started a company, Third Eye analytics, to kind of share with more people how this stuff can help their lean efforts.

Okay, so, well, maybe let's kind of just start at the start. Like when you say data analytics, talk about, what do you mean by that? Because that could mean a lot of things.

Well, where I'm mostly doing it is a lot has to do with a lot of, there's always a lot of data in the manufacturing system. So your ERP generally capturing lots of transactional data. And then you get data from other sources, whether it's the accounting system or sometimes it's the HR system. So you're pulling that all together and then you're generating the reports to look at it. So at a simple level, it's nothing new that people haven't been doing before. Say, like your simple Pareto analysis, you're just counting the things up. But the thing, all that data is captured in a, usually a computer system and then you have the process of pulling it all out, getting it into something that's a report that's usable, that's functional, is meaningful. That's, that's, that's the challenge for a lot of people.

So give me an example. Like, so you're, you're brought into a company, they're not operating at the level they want to be operating at. Like, what are you going to be looking at?

Well, the key thing is usually looking for. Well, let me just sit, I'll just, let me just hold on. Step back for a second. In terms of, like, a lot of times what I see, what I've seen happen is a lot of lean efforts, they fail. And where they fail is, you know, you have your basic pdca. So plan, do, check, act or adjust. So a lot of people are good at the plan and the do thing. Oh, here's what the problem is. And you know, this is what we should be doing and getting, you know, getting it all lined up. But then there's that check and adjust part that tends to fall down. And then as that is weak, then you get this regression because people stop, you know, basically people stop doing it. So what I've been able to do is to, you know, what I've been doing is a lot of it taking that administrative burden that's tied into that check and adjust process and do a lot more automation on it. So it's much easier to do. So it's much easier to, you know, if somebody's doing all the work for you to, you know, generate your Pareto or whatever it is that you're looking at, it's just much easier to follow up as well as you can get this so that everybody can see it. So it's not just the one person who's grinding and putting it all together. It can be shared with everybody. And that's how, that's how it works. I mean like a specific example is going for the, the Pareto example is one of the ones I was talking.

About.

Recently was a company, they have a number of production lines and the issue was they kept on, you know, stopping from time to time and the mechanics would go and fix them and they wanted to say we want to increase our, our uptime. And so they've been recording it on paper. But the issue was that nobody really wanted to go do all the compilation work to get the Pareto to follow out, you know, what needed to be done, what was the cause. Instead they would tend to get together and what would tend to happen was the guys would either have like a brainstorming session on these are the problems or maybe it was just kind of like the most recent problem was the thing that they would point to. But it just wasn't, you know, it just, it just wasn't getting any better. So we just came up with a really simple solution which was, okay, well here we can get these simple pad, you know, like it was a Lenovo Android pad. We used power apps to do a little, a little form for them to put in there. Just like, here's the line, here was the job and here was the reason why, why it went down. And so it was really simple for the mechanics to pick up and use. They had liked it use, they liked it more than writing down on the pieces of paper. But what then this did was then it would gather all that information together, it would process it all and then it's spitting out a Pareto chart which they have up on a TV there. So they're getting like real time data on what all the problems are. And then it was really easy for them to start to see like, oh, like before they would talk about like 10 different types of things and then this was really obvious that up it's this feeding mechanism is 80% of the problems. Let's focus in on that. And so then all the mechanics come in, they all know what this is, what we're going to focus on. And once you got everybody together, laser focused on that problem, then they were able to make solutions because like the other situation that happens on this type of thing is that they go, people would speculate, oh, maybe this is the problem and this is the solution and maybe they were right. But the problem is there were probably nine other problems as well. And so they came up with just one solution and then they don't really see much results. And then they kind of be like, I don't know, this just never works. When the issue where we're tracking it constantly, we go, ah, okay, that was, you know, we're not seeing a repeat of, you know, we put in the solution. We're not seeing a repeat, but we're seeing other problems that crop up. Oh, we didn't think that was a problem. Now we know and it just gathers all the data. But the point was it was really simple because they just had to put in the stuff. They didn't have to do any calculation. Nobody had to be going through all the paperwork. It's up there on the board so they could all easily see it, no questions about what's going on. And they were, you know, no blame game, just like, oh, well clearly this is the problem. And then, then everybody gets energized to solve the problem and then boom, it just starts, you know, and then they just attack it and then, and then you start to get that positive cycle where they just, you know, they just go at it and then it becomes a game. Oh, we're going to drive that number down type of thing.

Yeah, okay, very cool. So like I've, you know, I've seen, and I'm sure you, perhaps you work with them as well, but like it sounds similar. It was just that we actually did a Gamba Academy live at a company in Indiana. We went and did a little virtual tour of them and, and they're super prolific sort of TPM practitioners and, and so the way that they're going about, like in their case. Oee.

Yep.

Like their machines are like, they're literally dialed in. Like when the machine stops, it's an automatic signal to the of thing or if it's, if it's idling or if it's running slower than it's supposed to, like in real time, it's, it's updating this system. And to your point there. Yeah. TV's everywhere. And I mean, I think to some extent sometimes it can give like too much data.

Right.

Like, well, what do we look at? But is that, are you experimenting with things like that as well where you're sort of tying into the PLC of the machine and it's sort of doing it without the operator having to tag the iPad kind of thing or.

Well, that's like, that's possible as long as you can get at the data. You know, I've been working with mostly kind of medium sized manufacturers that aren't always, always they're not, you know, they're not always on the cutting edge of, of everything. So.

Right.

You know, you got to kind of come up with a mix of.

Yeah.

A mix of solutions and a lot of time, you know, and a lot of times like this, the simple one is, is the, the easy one.

Yeah.

That's where these, you know, these tools come in and it's like they're, they can deal with. Basically the primary ones I'm using are Microsoft's Power bi, Power Automate Power apps. They can deal with all kinds of different data, whether it's just Excel or crazy databases or whatever, and pull them all together and integrate them together, PLC data, whatever you need. But you can start. The thing is the company that I was using for the example with the Pareto, they don't have high end fancy stuff, but this was a thing that really made a big difference.

Yeah, no, I got it.

They, they just grabbed onto it. You didn't need to be like, you didn't need to be at the cutting edge to do this is my point.

Did. Do you ever see any resistance to asking the, the operator to, to tag their downtime or whatever it might be like on the, on the tablet or, or they pretty, pretty open to doing that?

Most of the places that I've been at, they, where they bring this in, there's more of a resistance on, or like more of an anxiety. Just actually on a lot of times they're not used to working with computers very much or the tablets, and so that's all right. You know, so that's already where they're nervous or anxious on that. But it's just a process and you get them, you know, and that's, that's part of the thing is it, is that it's the engagement process. You work with them and then, but then what you start what they'll start to notice what everybody starts to notice. On the one hand, it feels like, oh my God, they're, you know, we've had ones where you're tracking, okay, here's how long it's supposed to take and how long is it actually taking. So it really feels like, oh, we're gonna find out who the lazy guys are. But the reality is we surface the problem, ooh, that job took a lot longer. What was going on? And you find, oh, the tool isn't any good and it's causing all kinds of problems. And before, you know, somebody yelled at the guy when he said the tool wasn't good and so he kind of just, just muddles through. But it takes a lot longer. So then it's like, oh, that's the problem. Let's fix that. Or, you know, we had a great example where, I mean, what stood out was this guy was always very good. You know, he's a highly trained machinist, very good at operating the machines. And then this one job keeps taking so much longer, and they go like, what's going on? And he's there, oh, well, we get this material in and it all sticks. So I got to keep, like, separating it all before it gets fed into the machine. And we're like, oh, well, that's an easy solve. We can go talk to the vendor, we can stop, you know, stop that. Boom. The thing, you know, is back to he's always making or beating the rate, and that's all it was. But that was. He'd just been living with that for the longest time, and it just wasn't visible. But once it was visible how much time he was spending because of this problem, it suddenly was like, oh, well, this is a problem we can solve, and it's definitely worth solving because we don't want this guy spending his time just separating stuff.

Right, right. Yeah. Well, you know, just. I remember, gosh, many, many years ago, you talk about low tech solution. I was in a factory, and it was actually in Hayward's Heath, England, in the United Kingdom. And we were this. They. They had nothing, as far as any kind. I mean, they weren't even. There was no whiteboards, right? Like, nothing. And I remember walking by and I asked this young man, I was like, hey. He was like, assembling these valves, you know, and just some manual assembly stuff. And. And I said, how many are you supposed to make, you know, before. Before lunch? And he was like, I don't know. So I said, as a supervisor, hey, how many are you supposed to make before lunch? Oh, yeah, he's supposed to make. I can't remember now. 20.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

It's like, okay. And I looked over on the ground, there's this little whiteboard. This is like a simple little whiteboard. I said, anybody using that whiteboard? He said, no. So I took it, a whiteboard, and I hung it up on a wall in this guy's little area. And I just. I just put. I put a line down the middle and I put like, lunch. And I said, Plan 20 actual. And then I said, hey, when you get to lunchtime, just write in how many you did, you know, yeah, they think you should be able to do 20. Okay. And, well, that simple Little board of just planning actual, like their productivity lifted immediately because to your point, that operator, they, they wanted to win, you know, first of all. And in fact, I got a call a week later, I was back in the States and, And the guy, the, the boss called me, goes, you won't believe it. I was like, what? He goes, yeah. And the young man, he's like, he's working after hours because he had to hit his number on the board, you know, and he was just blown away. So, yeah, I mean, to your point, I mean, we've got to measure and let people know, are you winning? Are you losing? That's my favorite question to ask people when I go into any, not just a factory, go into an office to the accountant and say, hey, are you winning? Are you losing right now? You know, and if they don't know, then we've got to help people understand that.

Right? And that's where, you know, the issue was before that they could, they could track it, but it was just tough to. Like they had been tracking things with paper, but it was then tough to see trends over time or just the administrative work to be going through and making all the calculation to see how are we on rate and that type of thing. Then instead what happened is just as you said, once it was clear that here's what it's supposed to be, then people would go, but it was great. The key thing was that it was so good at surfacing all these problems. Then the people would start to come because they knew that, oh, if something goes wrong, they're going to come ask me about it. So then they started to be more proactive about like, oh, I was working on this and, you know, and the material was, you know, we've got this problem with the material, or it's this, or here's the issue or, and. And then the problems start to get, then the problems start to get solved and then you see the productivity go up. You know, it's like amazing how much time gets wasted on all these little insignificant interruptions, but they just pile up, oh, I gotta double check this number. You know, these measurements don't look right. Okay, well, you know, it's all that back and forth creates anxiety. Instead we go have these, these. The system checking to make sure everything's correct. And then, boom, they just get to go and work and make it happen.

How do you, you know, obviously garbage in, garbage out kind of thing. How do you ensure that folks are, you know, the input that's being put in, whether it's on a Tablet or piece of paper like that. They're doing a good comprehensive job of that. Because obviously if that's not done right, then we're doomed. Right. Like, how do you. How do you go about that?

Well, that's one of the. I would say, like, that's one of the. The challenges. Like, the point is you're not doing it just to, you know, to capture a bunch of data. You're doing it to look at, you know, so that somebody can be looking at it for problems. And so. And basically, if you're. If you design it well, you should be able to see if someone's gaming the system. You should be able to see it. You can. And. And so that usually kind of stands out. But plus, as I said, it's a chunk of it is you're doing it for a purpose. We're looking for certain kind. We're looking for problems.

Right.

And so if, you know, to some degree, if there's like never any problems, that's, you know, that sometimes that's a problem in.

And no problem's a problem.

Right, exactly. So, yeah, so you put it in and you got to work with the people and then they start to see what's on and that it's not about beating them up.

Yes.

More about helping them out. And then. Then everything settles into just normal and then they're all, you know, fine. This is. This is good.

Yeah. It's been my experience, you know, the more you communicate up front, you know, even, like I remember back in, we do be doing like, smed events or whatever, and I had to videotape someone doing a changeover or something. Oh, my gosh. Some people are just like, their hands are shaking because, you know, they're being videotaped and I think they're in trouble and all the rest of it and just, gosh, you gotta put everybody's mind at ease that, hey, we're here, you know, remove the struggle, make your life better. And that sort of thing really stress the why. Yeah.

Yep. One of the things this helps with is that administrative burden of making sure. Are we. How are we doing? How are we doing? The administrative burden on that can be heavy and it's a grind. And if you take that grind away, then you can start. Then everyone gets to see that, you know, the problems pop out and people have the time and energy. You know, sometimes they're so exhausted by just doing all the calculations and shows something went wrong, then they're like, oh, well, something's wrong. I don't know what, you know, Maybe tomorrow I'll go look into it, but I don't have any energy to figure it out today. Instead, it's like all that, all the calculations have already been done for. You can see, here's the issue. And then you can go out on the Gemba and find out, you know, what's the story behind this? And then get it, and then get it solved. And what I've seen is as this, you start getting things solved. And the other thing is it locks in the improvements, because that's the other, that's the big problem is you go make an improvement and then you leave it and then it regresses back this way. It's easy to see if there's regression. It's easy to see and go talk to them about why that's happening. So you lock it in and then you just keep on surfacing more and more problems. And then people just get used to it. Then that becomes the norm. Oh, yeah, we're always just kind of trying out the new little things to make it, to make it a little bit better. And that all adds, you know, if you can lock in those savings, it just all adds up. You know, hitting a, you know, if you hit, hit a base run or a double every time you're at the plate, you're going to do a lot better than swinging as hard as you can, hoping for a striking out.

So what do you see as the biggest challenges or maybe the biggest obstacles to making something like this happen?

Number one is you always do need, just as you said, you always do need somebody who is motivated to do something with this. Someone has to feel like there's a problem and they think that this could be a solution. If you don't have that person, then you're just going to build something that's going to sit there. And even though you can have the reports generating or a dashboard flashing, if nobody pays any attention to it, it won't go anywhere. So you need that person. Whether it's, you know, and it can, it depends, you know, wherever it is in the organization, it's that person who's like, okay, I'm going to take responsibility for this and I'm going to move this forward. So you need that for this type of, for these types of tools. Generally you want to have somebody with like, I call it, like the data gene. It's that person who's, who's. Every company always has a person or a couple people who are really good with Excel and they can do all kinds of. These people are the people who are really good, can learn these new types of tools and put them to use. And so that's helpful. And then the nice part about the things that I'm using the Power bi, Power Automate, Power apps is they're not expensive for Microsoft, each license is like $10 per person. You can start small, but there's a to of resources out there. So you're able to go to courses or just YouTube or books or however you learn. You can, you can find ways to do it. But then, you know, the last thing is it helps if you have somebody you know, I think, you know, I've got a consulting firm that helps on this. It's like, okay, if you want to turbocharge and you want to go a little faster, it helps to somebody who, you know, who's been through it all and already knows the tools very well and can put them in place, you can build on it afterwards. But to get started, just like with a, you know, with a lot of lean efforts, you want to have a lean sensei come in and give you some guidance. Otherwise, if you're just doing the books or whatever, that doesn't. That, that's kind of slow. That's why your organization is successful on helping people out. It's like, it's not just the videos. You do more than that.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. So if someone, let's say they do have a team of folks who are, like you said, the Microsoft certified gurus, and they know all there is to know about these various tools, where would you point? Like, a general manager is listening right now, and they're like, I want to try and experiment with this. Like, what are some practical tips for them to sort of dip their toe in the water short of calling a consultant in. But let's just say that they want to try going on their own. What would you, what would you tell them?

Well, I would say you, you focus in. On. On one small particular problem. There's a couple things. Like, one is here's a particular problem that is, okay, here's a good candidate. If you are going and you are like going to some type of system and extracting a whole bunch of data into Excel and then you're doing a whole bunch of manipulations to get it to turn into a report, which then you have to send out to people and then they ask questions about, like, what to do? Like, well, what about this? Or well, why is that? Or like, I want to drill down and you know, now tell me, okay, great. You told me that the on time was 92%. But what's the other 8%? Okay, now I gotta go. And you know, if that's what you're running into, then that's a candidate. So you focus in on that particular one. And then you, you know, the key thing is starting with the data and then you can work on these tools. And the beginning one actually is, it's built into Excel is Power Automate. That's the easiest one to get started with. Then Power BI is the aspect of it that has much. That also incorporates a lot of the visualizations if you have to share it with a bunch of other people. So it's not just a one person. It's like, okay, we want the team to see it, or different people should be able to see different aspects of this problem. So I've done it in, you know, I've done a lot of work in operations and I've done it in accounting. And accounting, they can be just simple things like reconciliations. You're pulling in the data from one source and the, you know, pull, you know, simple like I'm pulling it in from the. Here it is from the ERP system, here it is from the bank. I gotta match them up and then boom, it does all that for you automatically is like a simple example. But it. In the manufacturing side of things where I've had usually in say, like the production planning, scheduling area, that's usually a rich area because the people who are there tend to be more of that kind of data analytical type of mindset. And they're the ones who are also usually suffering through the grind with like, I gotta reschedule this, reschedule that. And we've had great success with it. Can pull in all the bits of information that the person needs. They can evaluate it and then they can easily go in and get the reschedule going and that process gets automated.

Got it. Very good, Very good. Well, this has been fun, man. Hey, folks, wanted to connect with you personally, Bill. What's the best way?

Best way is probably find me on LinkedIn, Bill. And the last names K R O L I C K I. Not too many of us out there. And you know, or by email. It's bill k3rd ianalytics.com u I E and as you said, there's another company, Third Eye analytics, it's out in Belgium. That's not me.

Yeah, people. But that's not Bill. Right? Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, got it. Awesome. And we'll, we'll link everything up in the show notes here. So just scroll down and definitely go connect with Bill on the on LinkedIn. We probably won't put your email down there otherwise the, the bots will come through.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But, but they can get you on, on LinkedIn, so. Awesome. All right, well, thanks again for coming on, Bill.

Thanks a lot.

All right.

It's been great. Bye.

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