GA 652 | Culture Before Technology with Hessam Vali

At the end of the day, my analogy in Lean and always saying that any business is like a water hose. You have input coming in from where you turn the tap on and you expect to get the flow all the way through the hose on the other end. And in any business, you always have all these kinks in that hose and you might have many kinks, but just one or two of them are defining how much flow you're getting from the hose. And if you go ahead and start fixing the kinks that are not really defining the velocity, And no one can see that you're making improvements because as soon as everything hits the biggest and deepest kink in the hose, and it's gonna stop right there.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Hassam Valli to the show. Now, Hassam, as you'll hear, has a very pretty diverse background, and we had a lot of fun talking about flow today. That was, I would just, the general theme of the day was probably flow. And so we get into some really good discussion on what is that, and he has a phrase phrase, fix the flow. And so we really get into what does that mean from a, from a, like a, within a manufacturing environment, like how does he go about that? And, and then we, we spent quite a bit of time also talking about Industry 4.0 and artificial intelligence. And as I've mentioned on a podcast before with other guests, you know, I have this, this, I don't know if it's a fear or whatever it is, but it's like, are we going to forget how to think, you know, as a human species? And so we spent some time talking about that. And And yeah, a lot of good discussion. I think you're going to enjoy this one. I know I did. So show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. This is episode 652. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 652. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Hassam, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's going pretty good. Thanks, Ron.

Appreciate it.

Yeah. Where are you calling in from?

I'm coming from Wichita, Kansas. So right in the middle of the country. Yeah.

All right. Just a little north of me. Yeah.

Yeah, it's about 6 hours. 6 hours drive, about hour 45 minutes fly if I fly.

Have you been in that part of the country a long time or?

Yeah, yeah. I've been here almost 17 years. I came here to do my PhD at Wichita State in industrial engineering. And I started in 2010 and 16, oh, we are getting close to 17. Yeah, so started in 2010, finished my my grad school in 20 2015, and just standing Wichita.

Stayed. Yeah, yeah. That's a beautiful part of the country. So yeah.

Oh well, we have we definitely have a lot of planes here, so that's good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome, awesome. All right. Well, hey, Hassan, I know you know how we like to begin all of our episodes, which is our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, basically I have a few different quotes, but the one that I like it, I'd use it, I share that is, Lean is about constant ticking and not occasional kicking. So this is by Alex Miller. He's in the University of Tennessee. And that's really the idea of building the habit as opposed to go ahead and just make one big thing and everybody forgets about it until the next year. So, right? Constant compound effect of doing small things, but doing it consistently.

Good stuff, man. Good stuff. Well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself, Hassan. Tell us about your background and and how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff.

Sure. So obviously, everything started with with me selecting industrial engineering as my my education. My older brother, who is a role model, he was an industrial engineer, so I just wanted to follow him.

Okay.

And, uh, I, I started that in 1998, so that's when I started my undergrad. And, um, I finished my undergrad, I started, started my first job, uh, in manufacturing and as an industrial engineer. And, you know, back then everybody was talking about lean manufacturing. There was a lot of conversation, multiple credit hours around that. I also liked statistics quite a bit. And then I, you know, started looking at what is Six Sigma, how it works, how it's tied to Lean and all those things. So, I started using those things in my day-to-day job as an industrial engineer. And I basically stayed in manufacturing since then. So, my very first job in manufacturing was from 2001. And since then, I'm in manufacturing. Different roles, always involved with quality, operations, lean, supply chain. And I kept doing it. In 2010, I moved to Wichita, and I, at the same time, I started working for an automotive company as a manufacturing manager. And then from, from there, I, um, I was really involved with, uh, building lean systems in that particular company. We had just started our transformation. And as a black belt, I was part of that transformation in that company. And I just really liked it. I really enjoyed it. And I had the opportunity to move up to the corporate and work for multiple business units, all about lean implementation. I did all that until 2017. And 2017, I was excited enough to say that I want to start my own thing. So, that's when I started my own company in 2017. I was solo back then. We grew quite a bit since then, and but main thing back then when I started was really helping a small to medium-sized manufacturer to build a good foundation for lean and continuous improvement, starting from the culture and then adopting tools and techniques and philosophies. I did that in 2021 really out of necessity. Across my client base, my previous jobs, I realized that there's some lacking in technology when it comes to lean manufacturing. So that's when I started to build some technology solutions, specifically promote lean, but on a day-to-day basis. And it all just evolved into a manufacturing execution solution, an MES, that it's all based on lean manufacturing.

Hmm.

And so is that your primary sort of thing now is the software or is it still consulting?

Basically, Teracom is the consulting and Optegridity is the technology solution. So my all day, every day, 10 to 12 hours is working in these 2 companies.

Okay.

So yeah, I have been on my own since 2017 and I've been enjoying the ride so far. Nice.

Nice. Well, fantastic. Fantastic. All right. Well, so first question I've got is, so, So, you've talked a lot, just in our previous conversations preparing for the interview here, you were talking a lot about flow and operations. And so, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what do you mean when you say, like, fix the flow? What does that really mean, and why is that so difficult?

Yeah, that's great. I'm really, I mean, my philosophy to lean is, Nothing matters unless your client can see and feel that you are making improvements, right? Or your customers start seeing that you're making improvements. The biggest, probably one of the biggest things that I realized in my time when I was working as an employee for corporate or even as a consultant, one thing that I realized was in many cases when it comes to fixing problems, we are always fixing problems, right? everybody comes to work 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock in the morning, all the way to the time that they go home. It's nothing but fixing issues, making decisions, fixing problems. But quite often when you pause and look back and you say that, I spend all this time fixing all these issues, but why nothing has improved? Why nothing is really fixing? I would say that because in many cases we are really miss the point around the theory of constraints. We just start jumping to problem and fixing problems without knowing that, all right, is that really the vital few problem that is hindering the whole system or not? Because at the end of the day, my analogy in Lean and any operation system is like a water hose. I'm always saying that any business is like a water hose. You have input coming in from where you— when you turn the tab on, And you expect to get the flow all the way through the hose on the other end. And in any business, you always have all these kinks in that hose. And you might have many kinks, right? But just one or two of them are defining how much flow you're getting from the hose. I mean, you might have way too many kinks in there. And if you go ahead and start fixing the kinks that are not really defining the velocity, No one can see that you're making improvements because as soon as everything gets the biggest and deepest kink in the hose, and it's going to stop right there, right? So by fixing the flow, I'm saying that, all right, you got to get back to the basics and you got to look at really the kinks in that hose and find out what is the deepest kink in the hose. What's the vital few that you need to focus the most and then adopt lean manufacturing philosophy and Eliminating waste, defining the flow, you know, and really start using all the tools and techniques we have in order to really remove those kinks from the hose.

What's your preferred strategy to define these so-called kinks? Like value stream mapping, or what do you like to do?

I usually have a 2-step process to get that. I always start with an RPA. The very first thing I'm doing is the Rapid Plant Assessment. Developed by Gene, Dr. Gene Goodson. He's, he was the full professor at University of Michigan. He published the Read the Plant Fast article in Business, Harvard Business Review, in year 2002. And I had the opportunity to work with him as a mentor when I was in automotive industry. And I really learned that that's a really, in short amount of time, you can get a huge amount of information about what part of that process is struggling. So, when I have that information, my next step is usually value stream mapping. So, I get into it, I always start with the product family matrix to understand what part of the family has the biggest impact on the business, and then identify that, and then go through the value stream mapping, and then start finding really what part of the process is not flowing well.

What's your preferred approach to value stream mapping? Is it just Get some folks together and some brown butcher paper on a wall or iGraphic software or whatever? What are you doing?

No, I mean, as much as I'm excited about technology and I'm doing it, but the value stream mapping, I'm always doing it on a wall. I even designed like process boxes for myself with all the necessary pieces in it, anything from the process definition to the cycle time to the number of people, process time. Asking questions, do you know your quality numbers for this part of the process? Do you have good documented work instructions for it? So basic questions. And I just design it on sticky notes. And when we have the very first value stream mapping, I always try to keep it relatively high level. I'm saying that my best practice is always go to break down each function within the organization into 3 to 5 major processes.

Mm-hmm.

So if you have like, hey, this is a sale starting from the business development, then we get to the sales, then we get to the supply chain, and we get to the planning, and we get to manufacturing and quality and so on and so forth. So I try to break down into 3 to 5 major processes and having people, and I try to have just 2 people from each function within the workshop. Usually it takes about a day. I always want to have someone as an SME who knows that process inside out and someone from the leadership in that function. So, that way, we have all the requirements that come in from top to bottom. Also, we have all the visibility to what's happening bottom up, right? So, that way, we have a really full picture of what's happening within that value stream.

Do you ever go electronic with it eventually, or do you just always keep it on the wall?

Well, I mean, I have done it a couple of times. I mean, we have clients and In Europe. So sometimes doing some work, it's just, it has to be virtually. So far, I would say that probably 90% of what we have done has been onsite with the people sitting together and doing it.

Yeah.

However, we have had cases that we've been in a room, but like 60% or 70% of people were able to just join the The physical conference room and the others are from different parts of the country, even overseas, and doing it in a hybrid model. My preference is always, even if you want to do it virtually, my preference is having people together in the same room to do it because everybody's more present, right? When you have everybody together.

Otherwise, you're looking at a webcam trying to— Yeah.

It's difficult.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, good stuff, good stuff. All right, let's switch gears a little bit and kind of go to the different side of continuous improvement, or like towards the end. Let's say we've made something better and we did some mapping, current state, future state, everything's flowing better. But unfortunately, sometimes, probably not with your customers, but sometimes, you know, it's common that Sometimes, I don't know if it's entropy or whatever it might be, trying to bring disorder to a system, but things can backslide, things can fall back apart. What's going on with that? And how do we sort of, I don't know, counter that?

Well, to answer that question, I go back to a really good book that I I recommend absolutely, which is Atomic Habits. I think that everybody has probably read that, right?

Oh yeah.

So the points, the main points behind it is you try to build a habit, right? And you keep doing it and you build the discipline, you process, you follow that process day in, day out. And then something happens that you cannot do it, right? For instance, I'm trying to just do, I try to run 2 miles every day and I try to build that habit, but I get sick or I travel or something happens that I cannot do that work. You always can— there are always 2 ways to react to that situation. Number one is you say, you know what, I didn't run yesterday, so let's forget about it today and let's forget about it tomorrow. And then all of a sudden, all the habit that you built, little by little, just go away. So I just want to again refer to that book. It said that, all right, if it happens that you cannot do something first time, if you get back to it right away the next day, you're absolutely fine. You get back to it and you do it, right? So I would say that pretty much the same thing. It's possible. I mean, I don't know. I mean, even with our clients, it's very common that— not very common, but it's happened quite here and there— that you put a new process in place. Actually, I had a meeting today with one of our clients and to exactly talk about that. We put a new process for daily, for manager standard work. So we put a management standard work, we've put the Gemba process, we put all those things in place. And the whole purpose behind it is to do the daily planning. So the next day everybody comes to work, they know exactly what they need to hit. What is the definition of win? We implemented, we had that Kaizen event probably about 2 months ago. And I was on site and just do some Gemba myself. I realized that some of the processes We built is not there, right? So right away, we basically form a team. We got together. We talked about what happened, why we didn't do it. So we've had a short, quick problem-solving session, identified what's causing the backsliding, and basically right away put some countermeasures together. So we didn't let that happen and keep going and going and going and over time. So that's one. It's it's more of a it's more of a Discipline and philosophy, but also I think that using technology can help when you build a process, when you implement the process. I think technology can enable the discipline as well because if you have the right— What do you mean by that? Well, for instance, if I know, because sometimes the backsliding happens and you don't know about it until some time, right? Because everybody goes back to the day-to-day and what process is not being followed, then you cannot do all the micromanagement to check catch it. But if you have the right way to measure the performance of that process, and hopefully you can do it automatically using some technology, then you can see and start seeing all those shifts and trends early enough that you can address it quicker. Because the bigger problem is the shift happens, the backsliding happens, and it's happening for a few months, and then you realize that, hey, why we are not following that process anymore? It's much easier if you detect that closer, you know, like the quality at the source mindset, closer to the point that is the shift starts, that is much easier to fix it and correct the course at that moment.

Yeah, maybe why when it applies, you know, things like process control charts, right? Like SPC charts and things like that. You're ready? Just common cause, very special cause, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even sometimes much, much simpler. For instance, we, um, sometimes we are using, uh, as this daily standard work, right? So we say that by the end of the day, I want you to go ahead and just fill a very simple checklist. Did you do everything that you were supposed to do today, right? Did you basically have your huddle with the team? Yes or no. Did you have— did you do your 5S and safety walk? Yes or no. Did you run your daily planning for next day? Yes or no. So if it's happening and you can— you have a way to look at those checklist data on a regular basis, and even get to the point that the information is pushed to you, like a push notification in a kind of platform like that, then you can also detect those backslidings sooner than later. Then you can go ahead and also take some. So absolutely, I would say that the control charts and stuff like that are great, but sometimes it may take some time until you start seeing the shift on the control charts. But if you can measure the behavior Early in the process, like, are you following the process? Do you fill your Gemba checklist? Do you fill your daily standard checklist? And if we can do that and build some technology to present those KPIs and metrics on a daily basis, we might be able to find the shifts in behavior faster or not following the process faster.

Well, how do you keep people not— hopefully they don't, but sometimes you'll get people that just pencil whip something, you know, oh yeah, just Did it, but they didn't really do it.

Yeah, you know, it happens. It happens. And, um, and it's a difficult situation to deal with. Um, sometimes the way that I manage that is I do my own audits, right? So, if someone is telling you that, because you have, for instance, we are putting the— in manufacturing environments, we are all used to look at the SQDC charts, right? The safety, quality, delivery charts. And we look at them on a tiered management and the daily huddles that we have. So if I look at a manager or a supervisor and look at, are the checklists always highest score? But when I look at their SQDC chart and I see, hey, it's all red and you're doing your work every day and you're red. So, that gives me a platform to deep dive a little bit into that part of the process and start asking some deeper questions and more difficult questions and to detect any of those behaviors. So, hopefully, we can fix it on the spot.

Well, and hopefully, if the company's got good supervision and line leaders and whatnot, these kind of things are easy to sort of spot, right?

Absolutely, 100%. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously, today as we sit, there's a tremendous amount of discussion around artificial intelligence, Industry 4.0, all these things. And so obviously you've got a technology background and you understand these things deeply. Where do you stand on I don't know, just technology with manufacturing. When does it add value? When is it causing a problem? You know, like, where are you at?

You know, technology by itself is not going, in most cases, is not going to fix any problem. You know, how many companies are Shifting from one ERP system to another ERP system because they think that, hey, our ERP sucks, so we got to get something better. And then they switch.

The failure rate is still high.

They'll spend 6 months to a year to shift from one ERP to the next. And in a couple of years, you look at them, you see that no KPI is getting better. Customers are still frustrated. Because if the mindset is technology is going to fix problems, I think that that's the wrong mindset.

Yeah.

What fixing problem is the culture, as it's an operating system regardless of if you are using technology or not.

Yeah.

So, but if the organization is forward-thinking thinkers, they look ahead, they are open to build a really robust operating system, and they do have that operating system, even if it's super manual, Then the technology is a huge enabler for them. They can go from like, if putting the process, all the manual processes, all those things is taking them from step 1 to 10 in so many months or years, then the technology can take them from 10 to 100 in much faster amount of time, right? But the basis, the processes, disciplines, it needs to be in place before you adopt technology.

Yeah, I was— a question that I'm asking a lot of people these days, because I'm struggling with it myself personally, is I worry, I think about, you know, I have children and, you know, and I'm thinking about sort of the future of humanity.

Uh-huh.

And I'm wondering, like, are we going to forget as a human species how to think?

Uh-huh.

Because let's face it, I mean, you have a question, what do you do? You open up ChatGPT on your phone and you type it.

Yeah.

And it gives you a beautiful answer many times, not always, but yeah, like, and imagine what it's going to be like in 5 years. It's gonna probably know your question before you even ask it because it's reading your brain or something. I don't know, like, where do you stand with, with this whole AI and just the Is it good or is it bad? Or I don't know. What do you think?

Well, to be honest with you, I'm impressed with AI and I'm using it, right?

Yeah.

But I'm— and I want to give you some examples. And the question is, we as, like, the lean practitioners, how we are going to deal with it. I'll tell you an example. So organizations, right? So I'll give you a pure example to clarify it. So we have customers or clients that they have, they're using our MES, they have maybe 1,600 digital work instructions in our platform, right?

Mm-hmm.

So every, in other words, basically the know-how of the whole products, it's in a digital platform. And now, let's say that we have a problem, right? And a quality issue comes up. And in a complex environment, in a complex product, you know that it's getting to the bottom of that root cause might be really difficult.

Mm-hmm.

It might be just interaction of many things happening together that may result in that problem. Yeah, you can define that as a problem. You can put the people together and you can have them, all right, let's go ahead and build a really good Ishikawa diagram. Let's do a good fishbone. And then let's get into the 5 Whys and just ask questions, what are we doing, and get to it. And it may take, depending on the complexity of the problem, it may take, I don't know, maybe a few hours, a few days until you have a really good understanding about the problem, right? But the technology nowadays, you can look at it and you can look and scan all those 1,600 work instructions, all the information that you have as far as all the clocking information, all the quality inspection checklist, the results of measurements that you already input to the system and can bring a summary of what could be wrong in a matter of a few minutes now. So, the question is what part of the process we still want to give it to the people to use their brain and what part of the process we want the machine to do as prep work.

Yeah.

Right? I'll give you another example. Any organization that we get involved with, we talk about the— when you get deep into the root cause analysis, fixing problems, In many cases, you see that the problem is the standard work is not clear as far as what needs to be done in order to perform task A, B, C, or D, whatever. And so you see that and you ask even bigger organization, you ask them, all right, how did you train this person to do the job? And they show you some piece of paper with some handwritten on it. People wrote something on it. Say, this is our training, or Joe made the training 6 months ago and he's not with the company anymore.

Hmm.

And you ask him, all right, why don't you have a really robust, good, pictorial, detailed work instructions that can refer to it on a regular basis? Quite often the answer is, we don't have time to do that. Our supervisor is busy. Our lead is busy. Our planning department is busy. Our manufacturing engineer is busy. So, to address that problem, and I, you know, as an engineer, as an industrial engineer, I don't know how many times I stand watching a process using my stopwatch, piece of paper, write down the steps, time it, and create, take a picture, hours and hours, right?

Mm-hmm.

Now we are, right now we have developed a technology that you put a camera and the camera is detecting every step in the process, create the step-by-step work instructions, Identify the critical to qualities, identify the tools you need, even identify the PPEs, and even time study that and give you good work instructions. In my opinion, as an industrial engineer who used to do that work back in the day, I wish I had that technology before so I can really work on the continuous improvement as opposed to just standing in the process and watching it, watching someone doing something. I'm not saying that that's wrong. I still got a lot of good knowledge about just watching the process and learn a lot about it. But probably if I can shrink that time to something significant and use the rest of it to go out and start really fixing problems, improving the situation, I'd rather that.

Yeah. Maybe you use the technology to get you, you know, 85% of the way there. And then you go stand in a circle with, you know, the data technology.

Yes.

And validate it and confirm it. Oh, I got this one a little bit wrong, but you can tweak it, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. So I think, I think that the technology should, in my opinion, it should be prepping a good prepping for better decision-making, but not making the decision.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So yeah, good stuff. Ah, well, hey man, this has been a fun conversation. Um, I'm wondering if you have any sort of like final words of wisdom or maybe some parting advice for you guys. Obviously have a lot of experience and advice for the people listening.

Yeah, sure. I probably have a couple of advices for people who are interested. Number one is changing the culture, building a good CI culture. It's not something that you can do overnight. It requires discipline, it requires consistency, and it requires patience. I'm always— when I get involved with businesses, I said that, hey, expect to see that things are going south before it starts looking better.

Mm-hmm.

Because you're disrupting a lot of things. So, don't feel that, yeah, we may be able to— we might be able to do some quick wins, make some improvements, but generally speaking, it's like you're going for surgery. The pain is going to be there until you start healing up from that pain. So, the mindset of, we got to start it and within 10 days everything is going to be like a paradise, that's wrong, right? So consistency, discipline, and patience are needed for a good transformation. And so that's one. So if anybody wants to get into a transformation, get with that mindset. And the second thing I want to talk about is, again, get back to the basics of Theory of Constraints before you start fixing problems.

Mm-hmm.

While organizations are working on, a lot of firefighting is happening on any organizations. But when you look at the ones that are not doing firefighting is because all the time they pause and they look at the entire value stream. They look at the entire end-to-end, identify the constraints and go ahead and tackle them before it becomes really a true problem.

Mm-hmm.

How many times I've been talking with people that say that we cannot have a kaizen because we are— everybody's busy because we are doing firefighting. You are doing firefighting because you're not doing kaizens, because you're not pausing, you're not looking at it, you're not fixing problems from the cause, and you're not going to be out of that circle unless you change that behavior.

So, exactly. Uh, good stuff, good stuff. Hey, if people wanted to connect with you, Hassan, what's the best way?

Well, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. My user is Hesam, H-E-S-S-A-M, as in Michael, last name V-A-L-I. And also my email address is hesam@techamsolutions.com. So I would love to talk with other folks.

Good stuff. Hey, and by the way, you mentioned James Clear. I just looked it up.

We—

I actually interviewed him back, way back in episode 261.

Wow.

Building the Habit of Excellence with James Clear. Yeah, this is a long time ago, but yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a great guy.

He is a great guy. His book is really good. Definitely suggest, I mean, yeah, for folks to just go through it. That's a good, good Way to build the right, the good habits for— 100%. Yeah, 100%.

Good stuff. All right, Hassam, appreciate you, man. Take care.

All right, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Bye.

All right, bye.

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