GA 626 | Learning to See Waste with Randall Dupre

Hey, is that A3 board for everyone, or is that just for full-time employees? Because I have some ideas. And I will never forget his answer. His answer to me was, that is how you become a full-time employee, is by coming up with ideas for improvement and then implementing them.

Today I am excited to welcome Randall Dupree to the show. Now, Randall, as you'll hear, has a really, really deep, strong background in Lean, had a really strong corporate career, and he's now, he's on his own doing some, some lean training, consulting, that sort of thing. And so really, we sort of just dove into his journey and, and talk a little bit about how he got going and what he learned along the way as far as, you know, lean and working at these different, again, large companies. And then as he shares, he wrote a book, and he's actually working on some other projects as well. But so he's written a book, and so I'm always fascinated by it. By authors because I've never written my own book and I've always thought maybe I have one in me. But so we kind of get into that and talking about his book, Everyday Lean, and why he wrote it and what problem he was trying to solve with that. And then we sort of get into just some ideas and some lessons that he's learned along the way. You know, there's always this whole thing about, well, just go do lean. Well, when companies talk about doing lean, like, what does that actually mean? And why is that not always the best way to sort of approach it? And so, so we really get into that. And then towards the end, we, we touch on some, some failures that, that Randall's experienced and some things that he's learned along the way. And if we've been at it long enough, we've all had some failures. We've all had some lessons learned and some hurt more than others. But so we finish up with that. But yeah, really fun episode. And Randall's a great guy and full of knowledge. So I think you're going to enjoy this one. Show notes can be found over at GembaPodcast.com. This is episode 626. Again, GembaPodcast.com. And look for episode 626. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Randall, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's going great. Thanks for having me, Ron.

Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure. Where are you calling in from?

So I'm actually in St. Louis, Missouri, actually St. Charles County for anyone who's local and familiar with the area, but the St. Louis region.

Nice, nice, nice. All right. We were just passing through on our way. I was up in Ohio and Always kind of go by the arches. Yeah, yeah.

We're in the middle of the country, so a lot of people passing through regardless of where they're going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Well, Randall, you know how the show flows. We like to begin all of our episodes with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Yeah, so many to choose from. I'm going to go with the John Maxwell quote this time. One of my favorite quotes is, a leader is someone who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. That's one of my favorites.

That's a good one. I like it. All right. Well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself, Randall. Tell us about your background and how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so I am a person who started in manufacturing right out of high school. And when I say right out of high school, I mean, I didn't even go to college first. I was a— eventually did, but as a non-traditional student. I got into machining and I spent the first 14 years in manufacturing working in various different machine shops. And I remember, I think it was the second machine shop that I worked in. I was working for Goodrich Aerospace at the time and I was a contractor on a 90-day contract hoping to become a full-time employee. And I remember there was what was called an A3 board in the machine shops that I I worked in. And I just remember I didn't know anything about this board, Ron. No one, like, gave me an overview of it, but I just saw there was lots of ideas for improvements written on this board. I didn't know that each one of those ideas were projects that were being worked or anything like that. But I remember sitting down with my supervisor and asking him, and this is over 20 years ago, and I asked him, I said, hey, is that A3 board for everyone or is that just for full-time employees? Because I have some ideas. And I will never forget his answer. His answer to me was, that is how you become a full-time employee is by coming up with ideas for improvement and then implementing them. So, yeah, so I put my idea on the board and that actually turned into my very first Kaizen event just a couple years into manufacturing, not even a full-time employee at Goodrich. And I was already working on my my first Kaizen event and my first Kaizen project. And that ended up becoming what I later found out was a setup production event. My idea was all about reducing the setup time it took to set up some machines in my cell.

Nice, nice. So it came natural for you?

Yeah, it came natural. I mean, I just saw all these great ideas and so I started coming up with my own. And it was funny how it worked, Ron, because this first idea that I had, it turned into a pretty significant project where lots of other people got involved and added their ideas to it. And, um, you know, long story short, we were able to reduce a lot of motion because there was a lot of motion involved in the setup, going up and down stairs to get to the top of a platform, bringing tools and equipment and dies and things like that to where you needed to stand to actually set up the machine. There was a lot of travel involved in moving parts around, transportation, things like that. And literally, we just moved a lot of that internal setup to external and reduce the amount of setup time. And then folks just kept adding on to that idea. So once we even implemented the solution, you know, other machinists in the area just kept adding to it, which just made it better and better than my original idea, which kind of got me hooked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drank the Kool-Aid, right?

Yeah, yeah. I drank the Kool-Aid pretty early on. That's right.

Good, good. All right. Well, so talk a little bit about ForgePoint and why you started it and why you— I guess why you really ultimately left the corporate world?

Yeah, so I spent about 25 years working for various different organizations: Goodrich, United Technologies, GKN, Trane, Boeing. And I've got a lot of good experience working with these organizations. And from the very beginning, I've been leading transformations and kaizens and continuous improvement projects in various ways, shapes, and forms. And so, I've got a lot of experience that I want to share, and I just felt like it was time for me to kind of branch out. And start my own thing where I could have a little bit more freedom to work with the customers and clients that I want to work with, have a little bit more time for me to write. I got it in my heart that I want to write a few different books. I've got one out so far called Everyday Lean, but I got more to come. And so, I decided, you know what? I've been so focused on transformation. Let me start my own company. ForgePoint is really all about transformation, personal, professional, organizational transformation. My goal is to help not only companies improve safety, quality, and flow through the implementation of Lean and continuous improvement and Six Sigma, but also to help leaders to become better leaders so that they are actually leading their transformations and not just delegating those transformations, which led me to become a John Maxwell Certified Team Member because I wanted to learn more about leadership and helping leaders and helping organizations develop leaders better so that way they could be more effective in implementing some of the tools and concepts that, you know, you and I might be very familiar with and might have experience implementing. But we know what happens when we leave. Normally, you know, the improvements don't stick around unless you got good leaders in place who actually embrace it and hold that accountability.

Right, right, right, right. No, for sure. For sure. So I'm always curious and envious of authors. I probably have a book inside of me as well. Probably have 10. But I've just never really done it. Uh, so I, I always like to get into the heart of, of an author and just really try to understand, you know, like, what— I mean, was that just like a marketing thing, or this is something inside of you that you just really felt called to, to write a book? Like, talk about that.

Yeah, so I would say this is a book that I had started writing probably about 5 years ago, and I started and stopped so many times, Ron. Um, and it was just one of those things, I would, I would write a few pages, but I wasn't consistent enough to really turn it into or develop it into a manuscript and then eventually into a book. So, I finally just this last year really kind of just buckled down and just started putting all my thoughts on paper. And really, I got to the point where I started to become a little fearful that if I didn't do it now, I never would and that I might actually start forgetting. I've been doing this for 25 years, so I started to get concerned I might forget some of the things that I've done and I just wanted to get written down before I lost it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's good. That's good. Well, I mean, so you rattled off earlier, like, you've had a really strong career, worked at some really, really strong lean thinking organizations. What do you think when you think about, you know, these big complex organizations? What's, I don't know, What kind of mistakes are you seeing people make? I mean, one of the things is you'll often hear people say, well, just do lean. Like, what does that actually mean, right? Like, talk a little bit about that.

So, for me personally, some of the biggest mistakes that I've seen is thinking that lean or even just leadership in general could be delegated. A lot of lean practitioners get called in to come and lead an improvement project and work the team, whether it's a cross-functional team or, you know, just a departmental team. And a lot of the leadership that I've worked with in the past might endorse it and sponsor it, but they want to delegate that activity to a lean practitioner or some sort of lean person, or maybe someone who's up and coming in their department that they want to develop. But what I've seen personally is a lot of times that doesn't work as well, because if the leader is involved themselves, not only does everyone else feel more committed and they they buy in more, but then the leader themselves could give the input, and then they could really drive it on the back end when the work is not complete, but at least when the project portion of it is complete, right? Because I don't think the work is ever really complete. But I've seen a lot of times in various organizations where, depending on the culture of the organization, you know, leaders want to delegate that role. Now, I have worked for some organizations that the leaders really embrace it, and they want to be the ones leading it for various reasons. Maybe they're getting credit on some sort of practitioner path themselves, which, you know, shows up as a status marker in the organization. But a lot of times, there is no real incentive like that for the leaders to actually be down and in the weeds themselves leading it. And so, from my opinion, that could be a weakness, and that could actually cause a lot of the efforts to either not fully be implemented or not be sustained once the project is done. I've heard of organizations, none that I've worked for personally, where, you know, there's actually targets and quotas that leaders have to lead so many Kaizen events themselves, like each quarter. And I think those are great ways to get, you know, people more involved. But yeah, I would say that, you know, delegating the leadership and delegating the transformation responsibilities is what I've seen personally as being an obstacle to change and an obstacle to continuous improvement.

When you think back to your career, your corporate career, can you think of, like, and you don't have to name names or anything like that unless you want to. I don't care. Of maybe a leader or two that was really good and that drove sort of operational excellence and drove the culture. I'm curious if there is, like, what was it about them that that did it for you?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I will say a first name but not a last name. So I worked with an executive director of an airplane program for the Boeing Company. Her name was Amy, and I won't say her last name, but I will say Amy was a great leader.

Not only do I know her husband—

What's that?

Do I know her husband?

I don't know, maybe.

I'll ask you out when we stop recording if I know who it is.

That's probably a safe approach there, right? On. But I will say that, look, I facilitated personally several workshops, kaizen workshops with Amy, and at her level, I totally expected her to just delegate and assign a workshop leader to partner with me. But she didn't do that. She personally was part of every step of the process. I mean, when I sat down with her and reviewed the charter, she had great input. When we talked team members, she had great input. She personally reached out to some of the participant leaders. When it came down to the workshop, I thought she was going to come in and kick it off with a nice little, you know, rah-rah speech and then exit. No, she was there the entire time. And I was just blown away. And we had such a successful event. Not only did we hit all of our objectives, but I would say 80%, 90% of the Kaizen newspaper was completed, which was crazy for me because I'm used to, you know, maybe 10 or 20% in this environment at at best. And we got through all the action items. And I really do believe it was because Amy showed up in such a way that was so personally invested in the workshop. She wanted to see the team succeed. Now, it was a smaller program. So, you know, I would say she probably had a little bit more capacity than some of the other leaders. But other leaders might have still taken that capacity to go focus on other priorities. She took that capacity to focus on these improvement events that we were doing and really, you know, drove the team well and it caused us to have some tremendous success.

Nice, nice. Very good. Very good. Awesome. All right. Well, I'm wondering if you have any ideas of, again, you've been at it a long time. Are there any, I don't know, call it favorite lean principles that you have that people could really should be thinking about and if they just did it today, could just improve their life, something like that?

Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think the biggest thing that most people could do is just learn to see waste. I think that waste just shows up in so many places and we just either become blind to it because we see it so much, or maybe we just haven't worked in a manufacturing environment, so we don't have the right terms and language. Because in my opinion, Lean is something that applies from your everyday life to any business process and everywhere in between. I mean, whether we're baking a cake or building an F-15, there are processes involved and there is waste involved. So for me, I think that if people educate themselves and learn to see it, learn to identify it and recognize it, that's kind of the starting point. And what people are probably going to find is that they are already doing things just naturally, just organically to mitigate some of that waste and remove it without even knowing what a lot of the lean tools are or the jargon. So for me, step 1 is identifying waste and just learning to see it. And then step 2, one thing that I I think every company I've worked for could always do a better job at, and we could also apply to our home life, is 5S. I mean, to me, if I'm going to eliminate waste, my first step is probably to deploy good 5S, and that would be my starting point because I really do think that through good 5S principles, you could start to remove a lot of waste and improve safety, quality, and flow just through basic 5S. And that's something that I've seen a lot of companies, they kind of ignore because it's not the new shiny thing. They want to jump to the new shiny thing. They hear a term like kaikaku and they're like, "Oh my gosh, let's go do this big transformation." Or they hear about some training that's going on and they want to send all their leaders to go do this training. And it's sometimes the very simple things that'll get us the most bang for our buck, something as simple as 5S, which I've seen in my early days as an operator was really my introduction to Lean. That was the first things that I knew about when I heard the term Lean, I thought about 5S.

You mentioned waste a little while ago. I'm wondering, do you have like a favorite way of helping teams like sort of identify waste? There's like kind of a waste walk or like what's your favorite approach to identify and find waste?

Yeah, so I definitely, you know, I'm a big fan of value stream mapping. I think that's awesome to do inside of a conference room or a classroom type of environment to map it all out, have different teams come together.

Learning to see, as the book says, right?

Yep, and learn to see.

Exactly.

But then I also do every single workshop that I've ever been a part of, I always do like to do waste walks. I'll take the team out to the Gemba Beta before we even start mapping things out. And I usually give them, so I'm used to using the 8 wastes and using the acronym DOWNTIME. So, I would normally give them a sheet with the 8 wastes listed out and ask them, just write down what you see. And then when we go back and start mapping the process, let's talk about what we all see. And it's always so amazing, Ron, what some people see and what others don't. And then usually when someone reads off their list, other people are like, oh my gosh, I have half those, but the other half, I never even noticed those things. It's always so amazing to me.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where John Shook and the guys were way ahead of their time when they wrote, you know, Learning to See and those books that we all learned from back in the day, you know.

Yeah.

Value stream mapping is just, or material information flow diagram as Toyota people will call it, you know, I mean, it is, is probably if I had to have one tool that I could deploy, it would be that, right? 100%.

If nothing else, visualize the value stream, whatever tool you're going to use, make that value stream visual. And that's kind of like the starting point.

Are you— I'm curious on value stream mapping, are you like a Post-it note on brown paper guy or what's your favorite way of mapping value stream with the team?

Yeah, so what I normally like to do, I just roll out a big sheet of butcher paper and use a ton of Post-it notes. And then I usually do ask a a volunteer from the group to capture it electronically. And I always tell them, I'm like, I don't care if you use Visio or PowerPoint or Excel, whatever you're comfortable with, just capture it electronically. And that way we'll have a soft copy that we could review later. But very much, I like to get it up on the wall, just butcher paper, sticky notes, and markers.

Yep. Yep. Yep. I mean, I'm same way, same way. And I also like, Flowchart or whatever you use that, that's a pretty good little product where you can almost do like a dynamic value stream map if you want to get really crazy. So, yeah. All right. Maybe to sort of wrap things up, I'm wondering if you would be willing to share, is there, I don't know, any sort of, again, when you've been at it for so long, we always experience some bumps along the way and some lessons that we've learned. Has there been any sort of hard lesson or even some might even call it a failure that shaped how you lead and teach today?

Yeah. So, what I think about is a TPM workshop that I was part of when I first became a lean practitioner. So, I got asked to help this team and it was a machine shop team, which I was very familiar with machine shops having spent 14 years in one. and I asked to go into a machine shop and help out a team with basically trying to understand how much time the team was spending on doing the preventative maintenance side of TPM and look for ways that we could come up with some good schedules and, you know, put some standards in place that would hopefully reduce the amount of time the team was taking on doing these weekly activities. So I really went in, you know, with, you know, the hopeful, you know, assumption that, hey, we're going to cut out a lot of time. Everyone's going to be happy. We're going to give some people time back in their day, make this an easier, cleaner process. What I found on the front end was it was taking a crew of about 5 guys about 2 hours each week. So that's about 10 hours a week that they were spending doing this weekly preventative maintenance activity on this one piece of equipment. And we went through all the handbooks, we went through all the instructions, we looked at what our maintenance crew was doing for their regular scheduled maintenance and things like that. We found there was a lot overlap that we could cut out. We found that we were doing things, we were over-processing and doing some things that the manual didn't even require us to do weekly that we could cut to either biweekly or monthly. And at the end of the day, we were able to cut out a lot of the activities and go from having 5 guys work on this preventative maintenance activity for 2 hours to essentially having 2 guys do it for 1 hour. So that was a pretty significant improvement. And I thought, man, everyone's just going to be so happy about this. Everybody's just going to be ecstatic. This is a tremendous improvement. But it was so funny because the very people that I thought we were helping pushed back and they had so many concerns. And, you know, we had one crew, it was, there were four crews in the shop. We had one crew who was part of the workshop, but the other three crews weren't really involved. And those other three crews, oh my gosh, they had so much, they had so many concerns and so many complaints. And it was a really eye-opening experience to me. That one, even though I thought we were including the right folks, there were other folks that needed to be included that we had totally missed. And two, even though we had really simplified the process and saved a lot of time and effort, not everyone cared as much about that. There were actually people who liked taking a break from the work they were doing every week to do this preventative maintenance, and they didn't like that they were going to be, you know, getting some time back to run parts. And so, it was kind of an eye-opening experience for me early on as a lean practitioner when I actually became a full-time lean practitioner that sometimes trying to help people is actually going to take some time for them to actually want to be helped. And two, even when you think that you have everyone included that you need to include, it's always good to double-check and ask around because there might be some other folks who might have a lot of influence that you need to include that might not be obvious, like the other crews that were going to be affected by the process that we put in place. So from that point forward, anytime that I thought that I had included everyone, I went around and just talked to people and just got a feel for if there was anyone else that maybe was interested in participating that had not been invited. Or, because sometimes the answer is no, you guys go do it and let me know what you find out. But a lot of times there are folks that do want to be involved even if they're not high up on the list because they might come across as negative or they might be on a different crew or what have you. But at least getting their inputs, even if they can't participate full time, will definitely help to reduce the amount of friction whenever the implementation phase starts. So that was a lesson for me early on that I really kind of learned from and tried to, you know, do better as I went. But it was really eye-opening again, because in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, we did this great work. This team is going to be celebrated. And we still got so much pushback.

Right, right. Yeah, the whole human side of the equation is very, very tricky sometimes.

Yeah, it is tricky. Very tricky.

Yeah. Good stuff. Well, hey man, this has been a fun conversation. I don't know if you have any sort of final words of wisdom or anything that you'd like to share with the folks, and then I want you to definitely tell people how they can best connect with you.

Yeah. So, the main thing I'd like to share is, you know, whether you worked in a manufacturing environment or I know a lot of healthcare organizations have started, you know, deploying lean and doing lean, maybe you've never worked in either. Maybe you're hearing this podcast and you're you're thinking, what does this mean for me? My advice would be just take a look into it, whether you pick up my book, Everyday Lean, or you just listen to some Gemba Academy podcasts or what have you. Do both. Do both. Yeah. Or both. Just start to understand that this applies. It doesn't matter if you're baking a cake. You are probably already doing some lean things without even knowing it. And I really do think that the more you understand the concepts, the more you'll see application in just everyday life, the more time you'll get back to do other things that you're passionate about, the more waste will be removed, the more time savings you'll have, and just, you know, the more efficient you'll be overall. So look into it, get excited about it like we are, and, you know, enjoy the improvement.

Good, good, good. And what's the best way to connect with you?

So, uh, the best way is on my website, which is forgepointllc.net. I'm also on LinkedIn and, and Facebook, and my book could be found on Amazon or Barnes Noble.

Got it. And we'll have everything linked up in the show notes. Everybody go connect with Randall, go check out the book. And hey man, thanks for coming on, and maybe we'll have to catch up and tell some more stories down the road.

Absolutely, sounds good. Thanks for having me, Ron.

All right, take care. Thanks for joining us today. We know the path to continuous improvement can be challenging to walk alone. That's why Gemba Academy exists, not just to provide training, but to be your partner in problem solving. Whether you're just taking your first steps or leading a global transformation, our goal is to help you bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Beyond our library of Lean and Six Sigma resources, we're here to coach and guide you through your journey, whether that's through personalized support or joining us for live training to get that immersive hands-on experience. To learn more, go to gembaacademy.com.