Understanding Lean Six Sigma Principles

And one of the things about Lean and Six Sigma that's very important was we always should be doing things that are focused on the voice of the customer. Because ultimately if nobody wants to pay for this, if there's no customer willing to pay for what we're going to do, then why are we doing this right?

Today we'll be diving into the world of the process improvement methodology. Lean Six Sigma from supply chain management, technical maintenance and complex manufacturing. I think Lean Six Sigma really sets the standard there. And my guest Ron Crabtree, he's from Meta Ops, he's the co author of four books, he's a trainer, he's worked at a couple of universities as the subject matter expert on Six Sigma green and black belt. He's mentored thousands of students and has probably more credentials than you can poke a stick at. So perhaps first things first, I would just like to welcome you to the call, Ron.

Awesome. Thanks for inviting me. David.

Maybe as a way to start, for those that aren't familiar with Lean Six Sigma, can you walk us through a little bit about what it is? And I know there's kind of like two disciplines there that have been mushed together. Some people know Lean, some people know Six Sigma. So I'd love your thoughts on. Yeah. How you see the two working together.

Yeah, I kind of got introduced to what today is labeled as Lean and Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma back in the 1980s when I was working in the automotive supply chain and materials management and operations. Back in those days the word lean as we think of it today didn't exist. Womack and Jones hadn't written that book yet. The term Six Sigma was only a scientific variable until Michael, Harry and General Electric later claimed the Six Sigma brand around using total quality management to go after things. But back in those days, you know, the General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were pushing these mandates onto the supply chain and I was working in an automotive supplier and we really weren't allowed to use the Japanese words like kaizen. You know, we're Americans so we have to use American words. So anyway, zero inventories and what have you. And I remember back in the 80s going to Taguchi design of experiments. Training at Michigan State University around design of experiments, which is advanced Six Sigma techniques for really getting at the root cause for very difficult process problems. Applied a lot in manufacturing. And then the.

See it was to be the Society for Manufacturing Engineering. They had a Kaizen Blitz series going on in Chicago. I worked for United Technologies Automotive at the time and the plant manager was a big fan of that. So he sent me off Chicago to go through some of that training. And General Motors had their Picos review system where they would actually go out to the supplier and do a lean event and then find opportunities to drive off the cost. And then at the end, of course, they'd open their hand for a purchase order reduction to do that. But so for me, you know, what we call Lean Six Sigma today is kind of birthed from a lot of good things that have been going on for a hundred years. So I've always been a little mystified by the folks that said there's a Six Sigma camp. Six Sigma is all you need. And then the folks who say, no, no, Lean is all you need. And to me, it's always a major big toolkit. And I know I'll talk later about change management and people and the resistance to change, but one of my favorite stories harks back to the 1920s. George Box and some other really smart guys were pioneering some of the things that we call Lean and Six Sigma today, Some of the techniques and the company I'm paraphrasing right the story, but it was Hawthorne Electric, and they were doing studies about how to improve productivity in the workforce. So they would go out to the shop floor, they would do time and motion studies, they'd look at every motion, they'd figure out ways to make things closer together, make it easier for people to do the work. Better tool, better methods, better work instructions, et cetera. And they started to plateau a little bit, right, in terms of the improvements. So one day they said, you know what, I wonder if the amount of light that we have in the workplace has an effect on productivity. So back in those days, they had what's called a rheostat, and it was a knob, and you would turn the knob and it would increase or decrease the lighting. So they went out to the shop floor, they did a time motion study, they turned up the lighting 10%, and they went back to the shop floor and they paid attention to what people were doing and the productivity improved. They said, oh, we're onto something. So they go back to the bathroom, they turn the rheostat up again, they go, take the time studies again. Productivity went up again, and they finally maxed it out, right? There was nowhere to go to turn up the lights. Somebody said, well, so what happens if we turn the lights down? What's going to happen, Right? So they go back and they return the lights to the original setting. They went back to the shop floor and they took another Time study and guess what happened.

Take a guess.

I'm going to imagine that they remained just as productive.

If anything, the productivity increased again. Yes. Yeah, again. So the big aha. That's like, oh my goodness, this is what's really going on here. The fact that we were paying attention.

Yes, yes.

Made the real difference. And that's frankly one of the real magic aspects of a properly applying, you know, Lean and Six Sigma ideas is paying attention to the right things but doing that in a very inclusive way with people. So if they can understand it and be part of it. So I'm sorry for the long story. No, I love it. You know, it was. And then inside of that there's more than a hundred different tools and techniques. You know, Kaizen is very, you know, bandied about as the big deal and something really important and it's an important tool in the bag. But in reality there's a hundred things in there like design of experiments, poke yoke, kanban, standard operator work and the list goes on and on. So I'll let you answer the next question.

Yeah, no, I love it. With that background on how it all got started as well with I know it's roots from Japan in the Toyota industry when it comes to Lean and Six Sigma was actually developed by Motorola. So a lot of the organizations that were using it are larger organizations in as you mentioned, manufacturing and cars. I'd love to get an idea on. Is there a particular ideal client or specific industry or size or are there specific circumstances that make this methodology ideal in your eyes?

Yeah, so there's really no magic answer to that. But generally speaking, any organization that's got more than a handful of people and has problems, right, they need to improve performance.

Customer experience, how quickly they get things done, the quality of what they're doing, the cost of what they're doing, if there's pressure to improve, they're a candidate. Even if it's only a handful of people working in the company. I'm literally worked with an auto repair shop. I worked, believe it or not, with a company that would house your cats and dogs, a pet sitting organization. And they were looking for how they could continue to improve and continue to manage their costs and be competitive and make money in a very, very tight price, tightly priced market. So just about any size organization. The thing is, do you have a motivation for change or not.

The.

Making the case for this? Also I'd be interested in your thoughts on as far as okay, process improvement and trying to get people on board.

Are there other things besides hey, this bottom line impact, because I'm also imagining like, I mean, the larger the organization, the more the change. Small changes will have big effects further downstream. Yeah. Do you have any insight on building the case for applying Lean or Six Sigma?

Yeah. The old saying is if you can't build a built. If you can't build a burning platform for change, you know, then you're probably not going to get anywhere. So somehow you have to create the burning desire for something better or different. Right. So there's danger if we don't change. You know, we could go out of business. Competition could knock us off and take over. Right. Put us out of business. There are people, our employees are being stolen away because we're not a great place to work so we can be put out of business. Our customers are very unhappy with quality of our service. The lead time it takes us to respond. What's the burning platform? And I would argue that if there is a significant reason. Raison Dr. A reason for doing this, don't even approach it because it is hard work and it does require, you know, programic, if you will, process examination and being willing to challenge all of our paradigms. So first we've got to have a case. And if that can't be clearly articulated so at least most of the stakeholders that are involved would agree, then it's going to be a real challenge.

Once they've made the decision and thought, yep, this is something that, you know, we need to do because they've got a particular problem or challenge they want to address. What's that first step like? Where do you start? Who starts this? Is this something that the leadership team says, great, we've got to do this, or. Yeah. And then also who champions it in the organization?

Yeah. Typically we need a sponsor or somebody in the organization that has the organizational stature to own the process. So typically I would look for who owns the process. In other words, in a small organization, it could be the folks that are doing order entry, you know, accepting orders from the customers, getting those into our system so that we can execute. And let's just say for the sake of discussion, we have tons of mistakes occurring during the order entry process and it manifests later. It makes fights with customers, unhappy customers, you know, employees are frustrated because they're having to do it twice. That could be a really good case. Right. For change. And then once you say, okay, this is something we need to work on, then it's trick us. Which of the hundred tools do I pick?

There's a few universal things that I always like to ground the team on.

I have this little waste workshop I created years ago and it's still available. It's on DVD desk, a little workbook. I call it the Stop the Crazy Waste Workshop. And I've had a lot of fun with this over the years with teams large and small, very small organizations, four or five people is all that work there. But they got incredible value of it is just stop and let's just get a piece of paper up on the wall, you know, flip chart. If we need to work virtually, maybe we do it in a Google sheet or whatever. And let's come up with a real problem statement. What is it that we're really not happy about that we agree needs to be addressed, and let's pretend it's all the mistakes happening in order entry just to keep it simple. So almost every business has some form of an order entry function. And then we get the right people in the room that together work that process. We want people who actually do the sales, we want people who take the orders, we want people who consume the outputs of order entry. And it should be nice if we could somehow have the customer represented at least as a voice. Right? The voice of the customer, our process. Now, one of the things about Lean and Six Sigma that's very important was we always should be doing things that are focused on the voice of the customer. Because ultimately if some nobody wants to pay for this, if there's no customer willing to pay for what we're going to do, then why are we doing this? Right? So somehow that voice of customer and then the fun little exercise I've had a lot of success with, you don't have to be sophisticated to do this. Just say, okay, let's talk about the things that make us crazy about the order entry process. And you get on a flip chart and leave a little room on your left side. You capture what people say and leave some room on the right side. And you have people talk about it. Right. Well, you know, one of the things that makes me super crazy is when I talk to the customer, they don't give me the information I need. It's incomplete. Therefore I can't do the order. Right. Right. The thing that makes me crazy is I go to look for the drawings, but I can't find the drawings where they're supposed to be. I waste a lot of time digging for the information I need to finish the ordering process. So you start to capture those things, you know, just honoring all these different voices. And then when you get done about all the things about the process that makes us kind of crazy is then we go back and say, great, let's take these one at a time. And it can ask how many times does this happen? Does it happen 10 times a day, once a month, once a year? So we begin to tabulate how frequently our stakeholders experience that problem. So let's say we have 25, 30 things we talked about and we go through and we number those. Right? Well that happens, you know, 50 times a year. This one happens 500 times a year, this happens a thousand times a year. Right. You put a value to them, then you come back and say, okay, great, thank you. Now each time that happens, what's the consequence? How much time do I waste solving for it? How much money is spent to do the corrective action? If it's a make right with a customer, that's a big deal and you put some kind of a value to it. The value could be actual money, it could be people's time, or it could be something else we see as value in the organization. But typically it's either time or it's money because time is money if our people are doing it. And after you finish that process, then you simply do a little math. How often it happens, times the quantified impact on average when we encounter that problem. And you put a of value to that could be dollars, it could be hours per year or whatever it is. Now you get to have a lot of fun with the simple 8020 rule, Pareto's Law, kind of a lexicon that's built into both lean and six sigma. Let's just add all those up and say, okay, you know, we're wasting a thousand hours a year of our time, which by the way is a big deal. That's half of a full time employee being thrown out the window. That's a big problem, gang. And they're all nodding their heads. Yes, we need to do something about that. Then you do the Pareto analysis of those 25 things, which six are really the big ones? Right. If we can solve those, we would make a big dent in solving for the problem that we have in order entry. Then once you're down to what the problem is, that's where the magic comes into play. Okay, is this a problem that raised to be value stream mapped, have a very detailed analysis. Is this a problem? We need to simply do a 5Y and work down through the true root cause of why that manifests and then focus our corrective action on eliminating the root cause. Okay, for example, wasting a lot of Time digging in the files. Okay, let's fix the filing system, right? Let's make the changes so that people can lay their hands on that immediately when they need to, and let's implement that now. There's a lot of things about what I just described that aren't necessarily obvious. Very inclusive. Your team helps you build the burning platform and actually measure the burning platform. You're actually creating potential metrics, both leading and trailing indicators that we could use to measure our performance deep down in the process. And people can begin to own those measures. And then lots of other good things happen. So from a lean perspective, that can be very powerful. Another activity, very inclusive, it's called value stream mapping. And let's just say that it's these six steps that go on over in the engineering department that we always seem to have issues. So we'll go through and we map the six steps. Who does it, how long does it take? What kind of delay time is encountered? In other words, inbox delay. You know, it gets into the inbox, but it has to wait for its turn to be worked on. So how long will it sit and wait? And then what's our first time light capability? In other words, what percentage of the time when I do that step, is it correct? And what percentage of the time is there an issue? Right. It's either incorrect, don't have enough information to finish it, you have to do a secondary process and then you go back and do the same thing. How many times a year or a week or a day does that crank? You run the numbers and say, oh, you know, the handful of steps, there's really two or three that are the root cause, that are manifesting as a poor engineering process. But we're getting down to. It's the method that we're using to go uncover in the product data management. You know, the PDM PROC data management database. We don't have a very good tool for people to go get that information right the first time. And if we fix that, that whole process gets a whole lot better and we become very, very targeted about what to improve. Again, what's common here is we're allowing ourselves to engage people in the process. The other technique that's very powerful in value stream mapping is doing what's called a value add analysis at the step level. And this is where that voice of the customer becomes very important. So we look at a step in the process and we say we ask three questions. First of all, does this step physically change anything? Are we transforming the product, the information, etcetera we're actually doing something to it to turn it into value add or not. The second question is crucial. Does our customer care about it? Meaning if we were to detail that on an invoice and show our customer on the invoice how much what they're paying is doing that work and if they were to argue with us, we have to determine whether or not that's a value add step. And then finally, did we do it right the first time? Is it 100% quality or do we have issues? Or is the step actually a double check? It's a verification, it's a sign off, it's an inspection. Well, your customer may argue, wait a minute, I want you to get it right the first time. I don't want to pay for somebody to look at this three different times before it shipped. Get it right the first time. I don't want to pay for that. When use that to do what's called a value add, non value add analysis. And we may need to separate a few things that are called necessary but non value add. An example of that is it's a FDA requirement that we capture this documentation and record these dates and have the paperwork for it. The customers buying that from us couldn't care less about the FDA requirement. They couldn't, but we're forced to do it. So it's necessary, but I can't do a whole lot about it. Once you've done the analysis, you take the team back and say, great, these three steps are really non value add. Now let's go analyze those and see what our options are to eliminate them. Can we combine those steps, eliminate the need for those steps altogether? Can we re engineer the process to actually complete those steps somewhere else upstream in the process? They're not needed here. What can we do and really open up creativity and brainstorming and coming up with solutions and oh, by the way, if it's a transactional process, this is where digital transformation begins to come into play. And one of my big advice things for folks that are worried about AI changing the world and all the other things that digital transformation involves is it always comes back to the process. Get great specificity about the problem we're solving. Don't overthink it. Right? You're not trying to automate the world. Let's be very precise and precision. So if automation is an opportunity for us, that's what we should apply. But having done all those steps I talked about first will knock down. The biggest reason digital transformation fails is people being scared of it. Afraid of it, not understanding it, and thereby directly, inadvertently or actively resisting those changes. So these things all tie to one another. So you think about people, process and technology, good business, process management, everything affects everything else. And you have to keep all three of these elements in mind. Whenever we talk about Lean Six Sigma, you know, it's always like the silver bullet. Well, it's not quite that simple.

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Yes. Yeah, I love that insight around the changes with AI because at the crux of it, even when you do need to work on automation and AI, you still have to tell the machines what to do. You need to know what the core essential tasks are. You need a clear understanding of that process and the way that your business comes together to be able to actually direct it. So I always feel like it just comes back to process. You talked about some of the resistances particularly, I mean, towards the end there you were talking about resistances, maybe to some adoption of new technology, but you even mentioned it right at the start about really the resistance to change and building this burning platform. Are there any quite common reasons you see this approach fail in organizations and where people miss the mark?

Yeah, we're really missed. The mark is, you know, I'll call it uninformed leadership that has, you know, an incorrect understanding about what's possible. And quite often, you know, you can hire a fancy consultant, right? They can, they've seen all the best practices in industry and they can quickly do the benchmarking, tell you this is what you need to fix and change, blah, blah, blah, and they dump it on you, right? But here's the problem. You know, digital transformation is victim to this. So is implementing Lean Six Sigma as, you know, 8 out of 10 initiatives historically don't get the results they could or should. It really comes back to people. And one of my favorite sayings, I can't remember who to attribute this to, but basically People would rather put up with a problem, fight you, than accept your solution or dumb idea to change. Right. So people inherently and naturally don't want to do something they don't understand.

They don't want to do something that they have fear it's going to impact them in a negative way. You know, we talk about eliminating quality ver, you know, verifications of quality in a process that scares who to death. The quality folks like, wait a minute, what am I? Chopped meat? You don't need me anymore? But that's not what that's about. Right. It's eliminating need for it and making a better process. Right. Becoming preventers of problems versus cops to catch problems, changing the cultural reference of doing it. So it really comes down to how do we include or make it more inclusive? How do we educate people to understand the nature of the change? And is that burning platform I talked about initially, did we adequately convert that into a burning platform for all of our stakeholders? You know, if it's just great for the owners because they're going to make more money, but it means nothing to the folks that do the work, that could be a problem.

Yeah, sometimes. Also, I don't know if you see it in your work where sometimes team members might not want to shine a light on the work that they're doing. In fact, they kind of like the idea of operating in a little black box where nobody really understands it because that they feel gives them job security. I don't know if you've got any examples of or suggestions on how to overcome those situations.

Yeah, those are. Those are classic situations where a value stream view of the business becomes very, very important. And that takes, you know, some pretty, you know, aware leadership to step back from it and say, well, wait a minute, you know, I've got this process that goes across the various functions and it's bogging down. And it's for the very reason you're saying. We've got these silos. We have people who are functionally organized in groups. They're looking at this from the functional perspective. It's the quality department, it's the engineering department, it's the purchasing department, it's the. You name it, right? And we all kind of do our little part in a silo, but we really don't have visibility what's going on upstream earlier in the process. We don't have visibility downstream to the customer who gets the product.

So just what's really required in a situation like that is begin to take a value stream view and come back and really work Hard on. What I call that business case or that platform or that burning platform is we have to have a reason to look at these processes cross functionally and have a value stream owner, which in a smaller company, it could be the owner of the business who has accountability for everything that happens from the end to end in that process, from the time we take the order to when we get paid for it, and then engaging people in their functions to actually map that and make it visible. So here's the burning platform, just making a suggestion. Let's say this organization sells a product and Today it takes 12 weeks from the time we get the order to the time we can ship the product, right? Because you have to go through design, you have to release drawings. We need to buy some stuff, we need to convert it, we need to assemble it, get it to the customer. And the customer comes to us and says, I need those in six weeks or I'm going to take my business elsewhere.

And oh, by the way, you have to ship it to me at 10% less price. So not only you're going to cut your lead time by 50%, you're going to reduce your price by 10%. If you don't do that by three months from now. Buy.

Let'S pretend that customer is 50% of your sales and half of your employees are going to lose their jobs. If we lose that customer, that's a great business case, right? That's a real burning platform. We bring people in the room and say, look, you're not going to like it. It could end up. There's things in your shop that would be very different. It could be you're even in a different job. It may be your function is actually going to be eliminated as a result of this, but we're going to keep this customer. And oh, by the way, if we keep that customer, we're going to go out and get more customers just like them. Because that's a competitive advantage. If we can do it in six weeks, 10% cheaper, we can go out, get some other business too. Maybe we don't have to lay anybody else. We can grow the business and improve our profitability at the same time. So we can share in that. That's the crucial thing. There's got to be a reason for people to engage within the functions and then you have to create the visibility and value. Stream mapping is a fantastic technique to do that, to allow each function to truly understand where they fit in the puzzle and then make them part of that discussion about what makes you crazy in your function. Right. In my four walls of my function of guess what? I get to have a voice. Voice of process. You start a voice of customer. Why are we doing this work in the voice of the business? What's the business needs? And then we get into the voice of process and ultimately to the voice of each employee, each stakeholder that's working in the value stream. And we get an opportunity for them to bring that voice forward and be honored. And that's really important. And then once the functions begin to understand, oh, this is the classic thing I see over and over again in this function. I'm doing this, this, this and this and I'm doing as fast as I can and I'm going to give it to the next function so they can start their part who then struggles and just has all kinds of problems. I could tell a long, I could tell a story about that in reality. And you get these people together and you talk about what's going on. They look at each other and say, wait a minute, I didn't know you didn't even need that. Wait a minute, I didn't know. I thought I was doing it right the first time. But it's really giving you trouble over here. Begins to create some dialogue, right? And then you begin to address is it a process problem, right. Or is it a relationship problem? And they have different solutions if it's a relationship problem. Right. The engineers think the guys over in purchasing are a bunch of, you know, stiff necks and not very flexible. Always, you know, protecting the vendors and being really hard to work with. Get that stuff on the table. What's going on for purchasing that forces them to do that, what's going on for you in engineering that makes you see that? And you actually talk about the relationship issues too. If you create the vehicle for a quality conversation about the customer's requirements, the end to end value stream, the voice of customer, the voice of the business. And then get into the functions and allowing them the opportunity to give their voice as well and contribute to what's going to change and be different in the future. And I've seen some amazing radical changes where things being done two thirds of the way through the process get moved all the way to the front of the process. For example, empowering the sales organization to do a lot of the pre engineering work during the sales cycle, almost as if they were engineers tapping into the same databases. And then as a byproduct of that, having that process from a time perspective collapsed by 50% to get it to production ready drawings.

Which in turn was part of the solution. By the way, it's a real story. If we don't do this in 12 weeks, we can't turn it into six weeks. With by the end of the year or three months, we're going to go out of business or we're going to have severe layoffs. This is a real true story and that in that environment amazing things are possible. But without the burning platform, clear need for change, and then articulating that down to the correct level, even down to the functional level, even down to individual level, you're going to have trouble.

Yeah, I love that approach and it kind of helps to bring the invisible visible, getting everybody going, okay, well how are we doing things? That's a big part. I'd love to get your insights on this idea of almost building a culture in the organization of process and thinking towards the system and asking, well what is, what is the process for doing that? I don't know if you have any thoughts, particularly where an organization might not have that and they're going from zero and nothing and it's not something that's talked about. Any strategies on how you might start to make that cultural change? Obviously talking about it and having workshops and trying to get some level of understanding is the base of that. But I'm wondering if you have any other suggestions.

Well, there's probably two or three pieces to the answer to that, David. There's, there's what's called standard work and you know, there, there's a hundred processes in the organization and if we take the time to try to document, make perfect standard work for everything, we're probably going to die of old age because things change. It's very difficult honor. So the trick is to do some analysis and do some agreement culturally around what do we, what do we need to be really good at? What do we have to actually be flawless at? You know, work for zero defects as an example. And let's pick those vital handful and be really good together about making those super good. Right. So we're going to do standard work and carefully document. We're going to measure and control 10% of our steps in the process that impact 80% of our financial results or 80% of our lead time or 80% of the customer satisfaction. We do that correlation and then you create a nucleus or what I like to call a community of practice. Right. Like minded people cross the functions participating in this process of oh, let's really look at the end to end value stream. Let's look at what a good customer experience is. Let's understand who needs to do what, backward through the value stream to its beginning to assure that customer gets what they require. So we create a value stream view. We create an environment where almost every employee has a direct line of sight to how they impact our customers who ultimately pay the bills, who ultimately are bosses. Because without them we don't have jobs, right? And that's a piece of the puzzle here for an organization is creating, you know, I'll call it a code of honor, right? You know, here are the basic behaviors to be part of our organization.

Here's a certain things you need to be doing to be part of us, right? And part of that might be participation, right? You actually participate in these discussions around end to end process. You actually have ownership of one of the key metrics or controls. You are actively a part of a team that's making the improvements. And if you're doing those things, then you're meeting our expectations. But if you are hiding in your silo, being reluctant to support, retreating or even fighting, then you can't be part of our team. So you actually begin to create the conditions of satisfaction to be part of a team. And those things aren't that difficult to do. But there's just a handful of things, right? Personal respect for one another, you know, that's very obvious. It has to be safe. You know, you think about the Toyota metrics, you know, just talk about that for a second. That's two dcmp, right? Safety, quality, delivery, productivity, morale, right? Those sorts of things. It always starts with safety. Because if it isn't safe, if I'm not physically safe and emotionally safe, very little else matters. Like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't have food, how far you drive to work isn't too important, right? And work down from there, right? Safety and productivity, right? If we can't be productive and be meaningfully engaged getting things done, we're not going to feel good about ourselves, right? So that's important. If it isn't done right the first time. Quality, that's the voice of the customer part, right? If our customer isn't getting what they perceive to be the quality, that's a problem. There's a reason that Toyota came up with it that way. Safety, quality, liberty, productivity, cost, morale. Morale is people. Ultimately we have to be an employer of choice. So those are all conscious decisions we make. And here's the thing about culture. Any size organization, two or more people has to make a decision about your company. Culture. Here's the deal. Culture will happen. It's going to happen. It's just going to unfold and be what it is. Our choice as leaders is do we want to define the culture and make it what we want or we're just going to allow it to happen? You have to make a choice.

Yeah. I think the more discussions I have with business owners, I mean, we all agree that a process driven business delivers better outcomes. It delivers better outcomes for the client, for the team, for the bottom line. And in business we get to choose like you get to choose who you work with. So you might as well think about this upfront and find people that resonate with the systems cult culture and make that part of your recruitment process. Especially as some leaders, business owners in particular, who see themselves as visionaries, they oftentimes don't see themselves as process people, which means that they need to make sure that they surround themselves with process people to make up for maybe where they're this crazy visionary creative coming up with all the crazy ideas. Then you know, you need to make sure you have strong process and someone needs to kind of be in that position. So you might as well recruit for it to build that culture.

I agree with that. And there's a caveat, right? There is such thing as being, being too much of a good thing. And the reality is we need people of all walks of life and all types of personalities and different ways of thinking be part of our organization. So I agree with everything you said. And we also need to honor the other aspects of human behavior that we know we have to accommodate because people do operate from different points of view. You think about the Myers Briggs type indicator.

Those different profiles, and when you do the mbti, Myers Briggs type indicator is one of the techniques that's useful. If you're saying, if I'm hiring for somebody for this sort of role, like minding and driving process change, there's certain personality attributes that lend themselves to that. Right. Then when it comes to the daily minutia, the grind of accepting and processing and doing varying engineering, very cognitive, hard thinking things, that, my friend, is a different personality type. If we're not allowing for that in our organizational design and we're not honoring that and making all personality types somehow fit into this picture and accommodating it, we're going to have trouble, you know, we're going to get to a point where we struggle in certain areas of the organization because we're too biased.

Yes. I think a big part of this oftentimes is just bringing the.

What sometimes is subconscious and people aren't necessarily Thinking about it into conscious awareness really. That's what systems thinking is all about. Like how do we just be aware of what's affecting, like all of these little parts affect the outcome of this bigger system. And some people just until you see that bigger system, it's very hard to know when you do make changes what other things they're affecting.

It is.

In the tail end. I don't know if you'd like to finish with if there's a particular case study or story. I know you've got hundreds, but perhaps of an organization that made this decision that hey, we're going to introduce process improvement methodologies into our organization and we're going to have some change here and what sort of change it did happen have happened by going through this process.

Yeah, I've got a story in mind that I think everybody listening can relate to. I think every one of us at one time or another has had to call for tech support for our computers, Right. Hopefully at work or whatever. I was working with an organization that would take on business process, outsource tech support, right. So a large retail chain outsourced to them the tech support to keep computers running at all their retail stores. Right. This is nationwide kind of thing. This would be restarting the cash register, restarting the server in the store, you know, dealing with a password reset when somebody forgot their password. This is, you know, a little while back while that's been automated. Now at the time they had 140 agents, right, individuals working at this desk that would do tech support. And the customer was very unhappy and they were literally threatening to cancel the contract. So 140 people's jobs were on the line here. So we certainly had a burning platform. And another problem they had is their turnover rate. For these agents, the folks that work the desk where it's 140% per year.

So listen again, 140%. So 140 agents, they were hiring 200 people. Not every year to try to keep these desks staffed. Yeah, there was lots of problems here, right. And so here's how, how it went and this is a very successful story. The, the person that owned the process, right, sat down with the key people that ran that group, you know, the rank two shifts, I think. Yeah, they really ran two shifts because it's North America retail chain. So it'd be, you know, eight in the morning until about 10:00 clock at night. Typically, you know, the stores are running. And we sat down and said, okay, if we don't fix this and fix it Fast we're gonna be looking for work, right? So we got a reason to do this. So we started out and I said, give me a list of all the different call types you handle. Right. There were 37 calls, 36 different types of calls. They might handle like a password reset, you know, fixing a server that went down, you know, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Let's go through and figure out which three or four of those call types make up most of the volume. As sure. As sure as shooting four call types made up 64% of all the call volume. Okay, let's just focus on those four first. Let's not try to fix all 36. Let's just stick, start with the four. And we did a very quick round of value stream mapping where we did basically a time in motion study. And we observed what happened for 10 different calls made by different, you know, by three different agents. And we did a quick time emotion study and detailed value stream maps and we began to uncover all kinds of issues. All kinds of issues. And what came out of it is, you know, this is the good practice for Six Sigma, by the way. Right. So we're looking at average handle time when it went really good and we handled it much faster. Got it right the first time, what happened? What'd they do? And then when the handle time was a lot longer, it took them two or three times longer to solve it. What happened? Right, so where the calls went really well. We said what happened? What were they doing when they handled that? That went well. Let's institutionalize that. Let's standardize good process. Let's document what happened there. For example, this agent had a clever little routine they use for a knowledge based search to come up with a solution to the problem. Well, guess what? All the other agents didn't know that. So we can, that we codified that, made it part of the process. And then we took all the ones that were failing and we did a deep dive. 5. Why analysis? Why is it we get to this point in the process and we get so many bad results? And then we began to do a pareto analysis in that side there and then do problem solving for each of the root causes at the same time. We took a hard look at the training process. When they bring in new hires, they put them on training desk for four weeks and try to teach them all 26 call types and then try to get them started. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, let's bring them in, train them for three days on how to handle password reset and let's get them started doing the work.

Two amazing things happen in the contact center industry. There are certain personality types that can cut it and be a good agent. Right. They're good at that sort of thing. They have the personality and you can't tell that until they're on the desk. Right. So the people that actually had it and you know, the personality and they were allowed to be successful very quickly. Within the first week of working they could begin to be successful handling password reset calls and they would earn the right to move on to their next wave of training and get opened up to the next desk. The turnover rate fell by 70%.

For people who had been there more than three weeks.

Right.

So the turnover rate within the first week continued to be very high. But once they got past the first week, the turnover rate after they've been on board for 10 weeks collapsed. Because we had a much better process to get people onboarded to doing value at work so they could feel good about themselves and demonstrate they have the kinds of personal attributes that make them successful. So long and short of it. You know, they basically brought down their total cost of op. The average handle time dropped by 30%.

That allowed them to actually be able to keep the contract at the old price because they had gone to the customer to ask for a price increase because it was so expensive. Customer said no, not only you're not getting a price increase. If you don't improve your performance by 50% we're going to leave you anyway. That was the burning platform. So we were able to engage those agents. People love those call desks and really understanding and begin paying a lot more attention at that micro level of how we handled each of those core call types and then reinvented how we routed the calls. Right. The newbies can handle the easy ones. The experienced folks got to handle the gnarly ones and we had a better process for escalation and all those things contributed. Just 90 days time. We realized 30% Delta average time to handle a call or the cost and a significant drop in turnover and a nice lift in customer satisfaction.

What a fantastic story and example. And.

And we say we saved 140 jobs.

That's. Yeah, I love it. I love it. And it underscores like a few things. Oftentimes the answer already exists in the organization and it's just about uncovering what already works and then making that standard procedure. And I love that idea for the whole game really is for your most experienced team members to be working on the hardest, highest value problems in the organization and then you delegate down to less skilled, typically less cost team members to cut their teeth on the newer tasks and then, you know, let the great ones rise to the top. Like, I think there's so much in there that I love. So look, Ron, I'll make sure I'm going to pop a link across to Meta Ops so people can explore a little bit more about your work. But I don't know if there's any final points you want to mention or where it's best to point people. If there's another place other than MetaOps.

There'S a bevy of sources for educational awareness around best practices like Lean Six Sigma and I've built up a year of, you know, 1200, you know, experts, we call them meta experts and they're available to pop in and help out on a hands on basis. And then we've also partnered with some pretty cool organizations that specialize in certain very tight niche types of expertise and Digital Transformation, Lean Six Sigma, Total Quality, Workforce Development, etc. Etc. So I've got a bevy of resources, literally my fingertips, that if you're looking for a solution, I can definitely point you in the right direction.

Perfect. All right, thank you so much for your time, Ron.

Awesome. Thank you for having me on your show.