GA 566 | Managing With Your Eyes with Alen Ganic

So you can visually just walking by. And we were training leadership to see who's winning, who's losing from far. And if somebody's losing, we're not saying they're losing because of them. There's a problem with the process. We didn't blame the employees. We would come over and the leadership would ask, what can we do to help you? We see that you're not hitting the numbers.

Today. I am excited to welcome Alan Ganik back to the show. Now, Alan is actually one of Gemba Academy's senior coaches, really. He's our primary coach for our lean practitioners certification and he also helps with a lot of our live instructor training. And I've known Alan for many, many years and he'll tell a little bit about his story here at the beginning. But today Alan and I get all up in to visual management and man, it was a fun discussion. Alan and I sort of feed off of each other. We're both kind of crazy with our energy and we just got going about all different topics related to visual management beginning to begin, like what is it and what are some examples? And Alan has a lot of industry at a lot of different industries and now he's coaching a lot of people who are on all kinds of industries. And so he's seeing lots of different things and he's already done lots of things himself. And so we share some practical examples there. But then for me, the best part of the interview was, I don't know, maybe towards the end we really get into kind of like the change management side of things because let's say you're just going to go try to implement some visual management in a place that hasn't done it and now you're putting a board up and you're asking people to write down how many parts they made and they're like, well, why do you want me to write down any parts I made? Are you measuring me? Am I in trouble if I don't make the right amount of parts and that sort of thing. And these are very real situations that many, many people face. And so we kind of addressed that head on. And Alan, I thought, did a fantastic job addressing how to go about that. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 566 and then please scroll down on whatever app you're listening on and go connect with Alan over on LinkedIn if you already. And if you want to learn more about our Lean practitioner certification, again, Alan is the, as our, as our senior coach for that program. Just go to gembacademy.com and go to the certification section and you can read all about that. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Alan, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

Thank you. It's going well.

All right, well, it's good to see you here in the office. And we just had a little impromptu pizza party here again by Academy. So we're all bellies are all full and sleepy a little bit.

Thank you for that pizza.

Yeah, yeah, it was fun. It was fun.

So.

Well, hey, you know the drill, Alan. We like to get things started with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

I have a very simple quote from Taiichi Ono. Make problems visible.

Very appropriate for what we're about to talk about, I think. All right, so Alan, in case folks don't know who you are or they they missed out on the last episode, let's see where you you were on Last episode was 5:44. Tell us a little bit about who you are. Tell us about your background and what you're up to these days.

My name is Alan Gannick. I am here at Gamba Academy now. Senior Lean six is my coach. Been with Gamba since June last year. As far as my background, I've been practicing lean for about 25 plus years. Where I started is in manufacturing where we learned Lean production system. I was taught by some of the consultants, sensei's that were teaching Toyota production system at that time. About 25 years ago I fell in love with Lean philosophy in and have done a lot in manufacturing environment also for government. Worked there for 14 and a half years and practiced lean there as well and was teaching many people and spreading this Lean love with them. And now full time here at Gemba Academy. I'm blessed to be here.

Yeah. In fact, you were long time Gemba Academy even before you worked here, man. We copped you, got you on video. I remember. When was that? When was that? When we filmed that?

I believe that was in 2000, 2016 if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah. So you were at the city of Grand Rapids in Michigan doing some awesome work and we went over there and did a Gemba Academy live episode, I think. Steve, right? Steve Cade, our mutual friend. Yeah, Steve was over there and captured your story and everything. So yeah, it was. You were Gemba Academy even before, before you joined us officially, I have to.

Admit, not just because I work now here, but I was always big fan of Gamba Academy. Yeah. And that's why we selected 10 years ago. When I worked for City Grand Rapids, Gamba Kenmy and the content of Gambit Academy helped me a lot with my training. I was able to embed all the videos, quizzes, had good facilitator guides where I could teach others how to facilitate a training. Very helpful. And that's why I fell in love with Gamb Academy product and never thought I would be working for Gamb Academy, honestly.

Yeah. Well, we're super happy to have you. So. All right, visual management, sort of the topic of the day. And I like to just start out when we do these types of episodes. Just don't assume anything about folks listening with their. Maybe some people are brand new to Lean and they've kind of heard a little bit about this thing called visual management, but they don't really know what it is. So let's just start at the very beginning. Like, what in your opinion is visual management and why is it a key element in a, in a, in a Lean system?

Right. Simply put, visual management is managing with your own eyes. So anything that we can implement that we can manage with eyes seeing something, glance and see abnormalities, that is part of visual management. And there's so many different types of visual management that I hope to be able to talk about that in this podcast today.

Yeah. All right. Okay. Well, let's just kind of jump right into that then. Just more of on a practical side, like tell us some examples that you've seen that, that. Or maybe that you yourself created that that helped you when you worked in industry. And now even as you're coaching people, I know you're seeing examples on a. On a regular basis as well.

Yes, and obviously Visual Management during Lean Practitioner Program is one of the courses that we teach and where almost 100% all the candidates find great benefit. And that's why I picked this topic today. Visual management is a tool that I benefited greatly. And I'm going to use Citigron Rapids as an example this time in a warehouse environment. We have transformed the warehouse environment by implementing so many different visual management tools in place that helped us improve our efficiency, reduced errors, and definitely improve the cost. When you improve efficiency, you hit the bottom line. And as you just mentioned at the beginning, there is a video, I think it's in the intro as well, Intro to Lean, where you mentioned at the end how city Grand Rapids water department saved $500,000 per year, which was credited to the water ratepayers. So we have implemented in that particular case a lot of visual management. And what I mean by that is Managing inventory. So in the past, people were depending on Excel spreadsheets, access, database this and that. But what we did to get to that $500,000 savings per year, an ongoing basis, is implementing a lot of visual management. So I give the most credit besides the team that I work with is if I. If you ask me about one tool that really helped lean tool, it was visual management. So for example, our people coming into the stockroom to get parts took them long time. We did a spaghetti diagram, this and that. It took them up to an hour in the morning. Imagine somebody comes in at 7, they leave at 8 to go do the business, fix your pipes in the ground and stuff like that. Well, what we did, we looked at it this spaghetti diagram and looked at where they go and what items they pick. We interviewed them and they gave us an idea and then we organized those items in that order that they picked improved. So when we did another time study, it improved. And another thing that we did, teaching the team members there and working with the internal customers was what else can we do to improve? Well, they would come to me and say, like suggestions, Ellen, I come to this aisle and we need a valve. Well, this aisle is full of valves, you know, and I need to read these little tags that you have with a barcode. And it takes me a while to go through and find the right valve. So why don't you put it, Ellen, in the sequence? You know, quarter inch, half inch, three quarter inch, one, one and a half and so on. So we did. And the other thing they suggested to us, hey, instead of me looking what's in the box, why don't you have one sample of the vels in front of the box? And guess what? We did that. So everything we had on the shelf, we visually displayed one item. That's one thing for visual management. So these people now came in and these people do this day in, out. They don't need to look at a tag to see if it's a quarter inch or a half inch. These people know by heart by seeing that item make it a visual, they improve their efficiency of picking up their items in the morning. So we got down, it depends on the case, to five to 15 minutes. Within 15 minutes they're all. And we're talking about 50 to 100 people every morning coming to the stockroom. They were out there doing the business.

So, okay, so the critic is going to say, great. So they took a longer lunch break, right?

Yeah.

So what do you do with that extra, you know what I mean? Like how, how did that lead to a benefit, you think?

Okay, that's a great question. So they had more work than they could do it. And here's how it benefits Citigron Rapids. So Citigram Rapids or any government entity, if they can work on their workload, handle their workload, guess what they do? They pay construction workers that pay third party to do the work that they can't. Same thing. Example I can give you in forestry and wastewater treatment plant, same thing. They had more work than they could handle and they outsourced some of the work. So it's not extra break.

Great.

It's. It can get more work done.

Great, great, great. I knew it. I was just giving you a hard time, Alan. I can do that. I gave you pizza earlier so I could.

Yes, yes.

So, okay, so that's a, That's a cool example. Just in inventory management, I. One story that I have, I. I remember early, and I. I was working at a company called Flow Surf at the time, and I was in Hayward's Heath in England and United Kingdom, and I was in this. Speaking of valves, it was a valve plant.

They.

They made water valves. And this, this. This little cell was over in this one part of the plant. It was a small plant. And there was a young, young Polish guy, I remember, and he was over there assembling valves. And I remember walking up to him, I said, hey. I was like, oh, and good. And you know, my, My famous question I love asking everybody, I was like, hey, are you winning? Are you losing? He looked at me like I was crazy, like this American. What is he talking about when I said, no, like, like, are you winning?

Are you losing?

Like right now? Like, are you where you should be? I don't know. He just kind of had this. But I wasn't trying to catch him or anything. You know, it's like, oh, that's cool. And I just kind of said, have a good day, you know? So I went to the supervisor, I said, hey, is there like a specific number of valves that this young man is supposed to, to, you know, sort of produce by the end of this day? Oh, yeah, I can't remember the number. Let's say 100. I don't know. I remember exact number. So like maybe 50 by lunch?

Yeah, perfect.

That'd be perfect. Okay. So I looked around and there was this little whiteboard, like a small little whiteboard. It was just sitting on the ground, not being used. So I grabbed it and I walked over to the cell and I just drew a line on there down the Middle of the thing and I put on the left side and I said plan. And on the right side I said actual yes. And then I drew a line kind of horizontally in the middle and I said, lunch?

Yes.

You know, I think maybe we even put or whatever, you know, because in England they gotta have their tea break. We broke it up accordingly and we say like in a simple example, 50 by lunch, 50 before you go home. And I noticed that the young man, I said, hey, can you keep track of this? Does that make sense? He goes, yeah, it's fine. He was no problem. He didn't care. So next thing you know, this guy is like producing and he's hitting his numbers. The plant manager actually called me a couple weeks later and he goes, Ron, I gotta tell you, it's been incredible. This young guy, he won't leave, you know, until he get his, his number, you know, and, and it was just a, literally a whiteboard sitting on. And all we wrote was plan and actual. So I feel like sometimes people make visual management harder than it needs to be. Yes, right. Like just an hour by hour board that just if you're producing any sort of widget or product or something on some regular cadence, maybe it doesn't have to be every hour, but in this case by lunch, by end of the day. What do you think about. Have you seen this as well? Like things like hour by hour boards and things helping?

Yes, definitely. So I'm a big fan of our bar boards. And then some companies that I work with, some of the leadership said that's old school. Like you said, it is simple. It's a whiteboard. It can be a piece of paper, you know, one of those big post it notes or flip chart. But in this particular case was our bar board. When we implemented our barbour. Same kind of concept that like he's asked I was. His name was Roger. And Roger's job was to install the wooden panels to the subframe to build the floor for the trucks. Okay, okay. And I asked Roger, I said, roger, same thing. I said, are you hitting your numbers or not? He says, I don't know what you're talking about. I said, well, are you meeting the goal for today? He said, I don't know. I build this many X amount of these floors every day. So he didn't know. So when we implement, to make the long story short like he did, we implement our bar boards. And guess what happened with Roger now he knew each hour how many boards or how many floors he had to finish. He was pushing his team members. So team members would come and he would call the supervisors and say, hey, production manager, come over here. I can't hit it with this young man. He only been here for three days. I want to hit my numbers. I'm red. And what we did in that case, we put red and green so you can visually just walking by. And we were training leadership to see who's winning, who's losing from far. And if somebody's losing, we're not saying they're losing because of them. There's a problem with the process. We didn't blame the employees. We would come over in, the leadership would ask, what can we do to help you? We see that you're not hitting your numbers. So I'm a big fan of these Auerbar boards. One more example I would like to mention, since we are here talking about these winning or losing numbers. One company was almost closing the doors. One plant was closing the doors because leadership laughed. The ops director left, the production manager left. Some team leaders left. So they didn't have any leadership and they were not hitting the numbers. So I don't know what the story is, but they left. So I came in and that's the same thing as you did. I was asking, how many widgets do we need to make today? How many did we make yesterday? Did we make the numbers? Nobody on that team knew that. So I pulled up just a plywood and we put some casters on and we start putting a little piece of paper. Let's talk about safety. You know, let's talk about safety and see if we're working safe. And then when we came down to delivery, how many of these vehicles do we need to produce and what's the revenue we need to hit that day? And we're going to review it every day. And the next day when I came in and this is in the first week and asked everybody, how many vehicles do we need to produce? Ellen, we need to produce four. Okay, good. How many did we produce yesterday? Well, we saw before the meeting we only did three. Why did V3? Because we had scratches in quality, didn't reject. They wouldn't send it to the customer. Okay, let's see now after the meeting where the scratches are. Go to that area and investigate root cause analysis. At the end of the week, we had a board, nothing fancy. And everybody in that company knew about the safety, they knew about the quality, they knew about some top quality issues. And we started dressing visually and then addressing those issues. Then one of the things we did, we call them stop signs, Visual stop signs. So we knew a work center that was producing some non conformance day after day. And we see it and so we need to figure out the root cause. We know it's not the people. There's something's causing that because they're working hard and trying the best. And we put a stop sign. And I told them, hey, I'm your ops director, acting assignment. You do not move this part to the next workstation until I and my team members, we had a core team comes and inspects everything because we wanted to find the root cause and that's what they do. And I said, you have I authorize you to come and grab us from the meeting. And they say, hey Alan, red stop sign is ready for you. And we went out there and we had a checklist. We just grabbed the checklist from the back of the stop sign, see what to look for. And if everything's okay, we move it down. If not, then we look where did it happen happen with the team that we have that quality improved. To make the long story short, this plant within two months, maybe two, three months. But I know it was with three months was making the numbers they need to make people overtime went down. Why? Because we had our borrow boards, we call them MDIs. The board that I mentioned now, it's called Managing for daily improvement has six different categories. So we implemented that religiously. We were following that every morning everybody would huddle around that board and then we go and we had people presenting it from the team. We would rotate and then they all had to present everybody from that team. Doesn't matter if the management or working on the floor had at some point present. And then of course root cause analysis was done afterwards. So that's a power of visual management. Just another example.

Yeah. Best thing that ever happened to that place is the leadership left.

Well, you know it's true. Yeah. If you didn't know how to lead, then yes.

Yeah, sometimes as well. And just think about that, the morale lift in that place. You know when you leave at the end of the day and you've done it, you've won.

Yes. You go home happy, you know.

And guess what? In the morning it's a game I want to go play. Let's go. You know.

And yeah.

And yeah, I think that's another huge benefit of visual management. It's just. It's just the. Just the human behavioral psychology side of it, man. It's very powerful.

It's boosting employee morale and motivating people. So what I saw many cases but in this particular plant, I spend a lot of time on the floor, less in the office, more on the floor with the people, you know, see what's going on and to be available to them. And what I saw, they would finish their process and there's like 15, 20 minutes left. And they see, they go down the line and see, they don't talk to anyone. They just see an arbor who's struggling. They say, how can I help? Yeah. And they say, yes, I could do it. And they were just going down the line, helping each other and working like a family, not like individuals, you know, transactional employees. They were like families, I'm going to help you because tomorrow I might be struggling and you'll come and help me. Because we want to get the job done on time. These people didn't want to work weekends. This team hated weekends. Like Saturday, working Saturdays. And they said, we're going to do whatever we need, including staying with me and other people in quality, staying at night, doing the inspection before we ship to the customer. Very dedicated.

Well, okay, so someone is listening say, great, I'm going to go implement some hour by hour boards or some basic visual management. Maybe this facility has none, Nothing. So they go out there, they put a board up and then they say, hey, Jimmy, come over here. And Jimmy looks at the guy like, you're crazy. What you, what you trying to see how fast I'm working? They start hitting resistance. So now the guys are like, thanks, Alan. You know, now everybody's mad at me because I'm putting this, this visual management up and people think I'm trying to police them or control them or, you know, so what do we do then? What's the best advice for that type of a situation?

Ron, that is excellent question. I like that what you just asked. Because if you guys are listening right now and you think about implementing visual mention what ron just mentioned, 100% will happen. Because we humans in nature don't like to be managed. We don't like to be measured. You know, we think we're doing a good job. And now if you're measuring, that means you don't trust me. Those are type of questions you can get. You don't trust me. I've been working here for so long and now you're going to measure me?

You know, am I in trouble if I don't?

Am I in trouble? Exactly. So what I recommend to do and what I've done for years is before implementing this, have a meeting and select an area, not the whole plant. Don't do it at once. If you do a whole plant, most likely you will fail. Why? Because you won't be able to control and train everyone so fast. Especially if you work in a bigger work environment. So select an area work center or work cell or office environment cubicle group of people in the office environment. Let's stick with production. So grab a cell and train those folks. Tell everybody why we're doing this. People need to know why and you explain to them. We're not putting these boards up, these measurements to measure you and to punish you. You will not be written up. What we are trying to do is to give you a tool to communicate to leadership so we know how to help you to be more successful. It's the other way around. We're giving you the board to hold me as a leader accountable. So those people and when I told people in this plant and they started and said don't feel bad putting red that you didn't hit. But also I need you to use this red dry grace marker to write down in comment section why you are in red. And then for example, we'd put 20 minutes waiting for part number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then a comma 5 minutes waiting for my labels from the team leader. And then we knew now we would take that information put in Excel spreadsheet. And then when we did the gamble walk next day, for example, we would review these findings from these our borrowers to see why they didn't hit the numbers. We never ever went to an employee and we promised them we're never going to come to you and say why didn't you work faster? Are you slow? Are you lazy? No. We blamed the process, blamed the problems and said, let's address this. Why is this employee waiting? We pay this employee to do this job, not to get parts from the warehouse. Why did this employee wait 20 minutes? And we're not going to blame forklift driver for that. What's stopping the forklift driver to be able to bring here? Is there poor communication? Could it be that that forklift driver was overloaded? Wouldn't work. Whatever that reason is, let's correct it, make sure it doesn't happen tomorrow. And then during the MDI meetings, we would assign those leaders. Everybody had their responsibility. We would see yesterday. I remember one time in a different plant, same company, they could not hit the line numbers almost never because they always waited for the material. And one of the complaints I heard is warehouse people, they don't perform like they should. And they made warehouse employees forklift drivers. So Mad that they would quit and have a high turnover. And when we did a full investigation, it was a warehouse employee. The process is broken. You asking employee to go pick up from warehouse and then go to the yard and go warehouse and go back there. Or the lady on the forklift did not have enough in time, they would skip their breaks. And I said, this is not right. Let's bring things closer to point of views. Now this line is here. Why don't we. Why we have items on the other side of the building. This is ridiculous. Look how much waste we have in transportation. So guess what? When we brought everything closer and made visual management, for example, we did in that yard also Visual management where we had on this shelf needs to be two pillars, pellets. And then there were some Kanban cards. Every time they take a pound, they put in a little box. And then the scheduler takes, you know, people from buyers and stuff, they take those cards and they can replenish it. Buy what's on that Kanban. We call it Kanban card. It's a signal card. But I could take you right now, Ron, to that yard that we redesigned those and you could tell if I ask you what's missing here, what needs to be ordered, you'll be able to tell me that skid is missing. It says should be two skids of that. Ellen here should be a one skid ordered because there's three and one is missing. Ready? Visually, in less than five seconds you would be able to say that's visual management. Not going close to a reading. And from far you need to be able to see.

Love it. So are there any mistakes you see people making in addition to. Let's assume that the why and the communication is all good. Are there any sort of like practical mistakes or practical things that people maybe get wrong when they're working with Visual Management? Can you think of any?

Yes. Not using meaningful KPIs. Okay. So sometimes people go overboard with the KPIs and setting goals high too, too high of a goal and people can't achieve. For example, I worked in some of the companies where the corporate makes a metric KPI metric, but on that. And they have different plans and they make all same digits. But what corporate didn't know, some of the plants have outdated process steps, outdated tools. And they do manual work where the other ones are fully automated. And now you're celebrating success of this plant that's fully automated. And the people that do it manually, doesn't matter how fast they go, they just can't Produce. So sometimes people put these metrics that are not achievable and that kills the employee morale. And they say how come this every morning, you know, we hear in our huddle meetings that our sister plant here in town hit the numbers and we just can't. Why they're better than us. We really work hard because they didn't put the right visual management place. So you have to be. Yes. Even if it's the same widget, doesn't mean that they have same tools. I just talked to the customer, one of our customers this morning and they asked us to prepare training for their teams. Three week training in lean and they said yes, we have, we make same thing, but different. It's not the same. It's not the same that we make in Mexico, United States or in Europe. You know, some of our plants have older piece of equipment, some of them have robots and all that. So that's one of the things that came to mind.

Okay, so final question. There's someone listening and they've taken all the advice in. They're gonna really work on the why and, and all this. Like are there, are there some practical tips or advice for how to just immediately get started? So you talked about sort of identifying that one area, that model cell, as we might call it to, to maybe work in initially. So they identify that. But then what do you, like, what do you suggest that they start with? Is it just something real simple with some, maybe some 5s type principles if needed, or are there other things that you love to start with when you're first introducing visual management in an organization?

So you can organize mess, you can be very good in organizing mess. So first thing I would say start with 5s. So instead of now trying to improve and come up with idea, make sure your work center that you are now applying that to. It's organized. The tools are point of views. We have a visual management of the tools. Tools are available. Make some shadow boards if need to make that first available to the employee. Teach them 5s. Next one. One. Teach people how to see a waste in the process so they can see when they conduct the waste. And you can joke by visiting, joke sometimes by hey, what waste is that? I see you went to a trash can 20ft away, Alan. That's a waste of motion. You know, why don't I have a trash can here? Great idea. Let's talk about it. So let's fix that waste and bring something closer to you. Get them first familiarized with lean before you jump into, you know, visual management. Then let's say this work center now is fivefast. People know the basic fivefast and eight daily ways, seven or eight delivery ways. Now they know that. Now you have prepared the good foundation for those employees. Now is, let's see what's meaningful measure. I would go back to your recommendation. Winning and losing in your case, how do you know if you want to lose lost? Like I for example, I know how many coaching calls I have. If you came and asked me here, right here, notepad.

Yeah.

I can tell you if I lost or if I'm winning or losing. Am I getting what I need to do all the tasks I need to do that I measure myself every single day and can tell you from day one I started Gamba Academy where I was successful. I wasn't and why I wasn't successful, you know. So then when you have a meaningful measurement like you said, winning or losing, the other thing would be what bugs you in this work center? Let's measure that. Not just copy and paste something from Toyota. You saw, you went on Gamba walk somewhere and you saw. No. What bugs you in your work center, Alan? What bugs me really? I always have to wipe down after this guy ships to me. I don't know what. So let's measure how many times you get have to do this and then let's talk to that person and say hey, did you know this? Most cases people didn't know that this was important. All you had to do, really, that's all you have to do. Yeah, it bugs me really a lot. So measure something. So then what's going to happen if you do that? Very simple. You will get the buy in from the employees on the floor. They said you are helping me now. Yeah, I see value in this visual management because it helps and I love this tool. Now the way you describe it to me, let me do it. I tell the management why I can perform the way I need to perform and now I'm putting that on their shoulders and I feel good.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. I get fired up, man. I'm going to do visual management. Awesome. Hey Alan, if people want to connect with you personally, what's the best way?

LinkedIn is the best way.

Okay, Alan Gannik and we're going to link up his LinkedIn here in the show notes. So just scroll down whatever app you're listening on and and be sure to connect with Alan if you're not already and thank him for coming on the show. But Alan, I know you probably got more coaching calls to get to here. So yes sir, I do. So I appreciate you coming in, man. It's always a blast talking to you, man. Keep up the great work.

Thank you for having me.

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