Episode 1: Christopher Sass

Welcome back to the Factory Ops Exchange hosted by Guidewheel and the US center for Advanced Manufacturing. I'm Lauren Dunford, CEO and co founder of Guidewheel and executive committee member of the US center for Advanced Manufacturing. This and today's episode is one of those conversations that will stay with me. I had the chance to sit down with Chris Sass, who manages quality for a Pennsylvania based manufacturer, and he shares his unconventional path into manufacturing, how he's learned to tackle improvement one chunk at a time, and how he shifted his mindset to become the kind of leader others want to follow. Whether you're deep in factory operations already or just starting your journey, this episode is full of great takeaw.

Welcome to the Factory Ops Exchange. Lauren Dunford from Guide Wheel here. It is my absolute honor to get to be talking with Chris Sass, quality manager out of a company based in Pennsylvania. And he is just one of my absolute favorite people for figuring out how to engage the team and think creatively about tools. And he has a phenomenal story. To Chris, welcome.

Thank you, Lauren for having me today. Really appreciate the warm welcome there. And yeah, I've been working in manufacturing now for about only five years, but I felt like I've been able to make a large impact here and I'm glad to be able to talk here with you today.

Lauren, Incredible. Maybe just to start, how did you get into manufacturing? What inspired you to become who you are?

Yeah, this was definitely a big, major transition in both my personal and my work life. Before I got into manufacturing, I was working in a water scientist, so wastewater treatment, stormwater management, that sort of thing. And still a role in quality, but not really in a manufacturing role as a quality leader. And so. But it was also for my personal life as well. And so I was getting rid of my old career. I was on the tip of my own divorce. And so I was like, all right, I need to make a change in life for myself. So I packed my bags, moved to a completely different state, got a new job in a completely different industry. And that's what kind of led me where I am today and working as a person in quality for manufacturing.

Yeah. And when you first came into that role, maybe first time walking into the plant, what surprised you? How did you end up actually finding a career in manufacturing? Because not everybody discovers what an awesome industry this is.

I'm a solutions provider. And so the first week that I was on the job, I just walked around and talked to people and observed everybody else as they were performing the work. And no matter where I went or who I talked to. What I realized is that everybody was just. They had their arms up, they were waving around, they were screaming at the top of their lungs, I need help. And for me, I'm a bleeding heart. When I see people asking for help, I try to figure out what can I do to help with that. So I sat down at my desk, I'm sitting there doing this snickering to myself like an evil movie vill, and started coming up with projects and programs to help tackle all these issues that I hear people talking about that they need help. So that was kind of where I knew I was in the right path. Because everywhere manufacturing, there's always places to perform improvement. There's always stuff to do every day. The process never rests. And that's kind of how I knew that I was on the right path here.

Yeah. And it's so well said. Yeah. That mindset of continuous improvement. Not a we're all set. We don't need to do things better, but I want to figure out how to do things better, faster, you know, at higher quality, all those things. Any mentors. Did someone take you under their wing when you first joined or who are those folks that kind of shaped who you are in this field?

Yeah, maybe not in a traditional mentor role, but definitely somebody who empowered me to kind of be where I want to be at today. So 100%, you know, I attribute most of my, you know, I'm an agent of change and my. My supervisor that I had way back in the day when I worked in wastewater treatment and will be the. The only name that I mentioned here just in case she ever watches this again. But, but lawanda over, way back in the day when I worked in a wastewater treatment, if you ever see this, you know, you. You were somebody that was always welcoming to. Every time I had a wacky idea, you know, Wanda would just come up and say, you know what? Go for it. She gave me free rein to make my own mistakes. I test things out as I saw fit, resolve my own conflict management strategies way earlier in my career, you know, when I was still learning how to get along with other people and all that. And just. She was just somebody there that would just. No matter what mistakes I made, she had my back as my supervisor and just.

Let me kind of figure it out on my own.

Yeah, people like that can make such a difference. Good, Good people. Any early lessons you remember in those early days or. Yeah, anything that. That you learned the hard way?

Oh, yeah. I learned that the stock market is a much better way to make money, I should have just bought stock in Google, Apple and Facebook and then I could have cashed out 20 years later, and then I wouldn't even have to be talking, sitting here talking about manufacturing because I'd just be sitting there with my, my big stacks of cash. So that is definitely what I would be doing different. But no, but the real answer is no. I mean, everything that's happened up till now, you know, this is one of those no regrets kind of situations. Everything that I went through, good, the bad, the neutral, it all led up to AM today and the impact that I'm able to have on businesses and having this conversation right now, it's all led up to this.

Yeah. Awesome. Any tough moments you remember? Definitely. I hear the. No regrets. I would just. It all shaped any. Any of those moments that you look back and are like, wow, that, that is a moment I will never forget because it changed everything.

You know, this might be an ongoing kind of, kind of moral of the story here, but, you know, the, the, the work is simple. It's the people that become definitely the learning curve there. You know, I was born and raised with a certain mindset. And you get out in the world after, after school and you realize, oh man, other people don't have the same mindset as me. And now I'm working in this multinational business that has people from all over the world and they don't have the same customs as me. And so definitely figuring out how to be a person that other people also want to share a room with was definitely the hardest struggle of anything, I would imagine, for everybody in business.

How did you learn that? What do you remember about the path to get there?

Conflict resolution classes. I went up to a boss back in, back in the day at one of my previous jobs, you know, I got into my very first argument with somebody, you know, on the job. You know, we just didn't agree on how to do something and went over to my boss later and I was just like, hey, how. How could I handle this better? You know, and they introduced me to, you know, various leadership trainings and took my very first conflict resolution course and got to learn about compromise and the. And all those fun buzzwords and stuff. And so that, that's. That's been able to help out tremendously ever since that very first not fun day at work.

Yeah, it is so funny. One of the books that really shaped my marriage is this book called Difficult Conversations that has really great guidance for handling those challenges. Can any examples that come to mind of where you've been able to apply some of the conflict resolution learnings to have things go better than they would.

Otherwise every day, easily. Avoidance is the best conflict strategy for most things. You know, people get really heated in the moment. You just, you just gotta take a step away and then come back like five minutes later and be like, yo, man, I'm sorry about that. Like, what can we do to fix this now? Now that there's cooler heads? So definitely conflict avoidance has been the most used strategy so far.

Yep. Love it. Any kind of crises, surprises, challenges, you remember that. Especially any examples that come to mind from the plant floor where you were like, wow, I learned something from that.

Yeah. I think had this conversation a couple of jobs ago where I was kind of fresh in my being a quality leader. And so I really took to heart that best quality for the customer is what I strive for. And I realized very quickly that best possible quality is very expensive. And so I got a talk from my manager at that point in time where they talked about, you know, there needs to be a good balance between quality that exceeds customer expectations, but is still, you know, not angering your operations team because you're scrapping everything because it's not the best possible quality. So finding that sweet spot between, you know, exceeding customer expectations, maybe it might not be the best, but is still, you know, within a budget, is definitely was a good lesson for myself.

Yeah, yeah. Perfect is the enemy of the good. And yeah, yes, is there. I think one of the things that stood out to me in working with you, Chris, is you have such a great understanding of the basics and ways and systems that exist to approach challenges, but also an eagerness to push the envelope and think differently and leverage new technology and all of that. What from the tried and true, maybe legacy ops types of systems have you decided to leave behind? Or tell me a little bit about how you make those trade offs and any specific examples that come to mind?

Yeah, definitely. Another conversation around people. Right? So, I mean, nothing makes my eyes, you know, roll completely up into the back of my head more than when I hear we've been doing this for 20 years. And to me, I think that's great. It's great that you've been in business for 20 years, but at the same time, you could have been doing it better for 20 years as well. And so, you know, maybe, maybe not me personally, but this is the, the first order of business on any team that I'm a part of is that I attempt to squash this mentality of stagnation because there's always ways to do something better. And however you're doing it right now, guarantee there's somebody out there with a better idea than what you're already doing.

How do you do that? Coming in examples that come to mind of when it's worked or when it hasn't.

Very slowly, definitely small chunks over long periods of time. Almost done in a way to where they don't realize that the change is happening because it's coming in such small portions over longer periods of time. And so eventually they don't even realize that you've snuck in a new process or slowly implemented something else and they're seeing the effects. They come back and they say, oh, wow, OEE has increased by 8%. This is great. You know, they, they all pat themselves on the back and you know, I'm just sitting over here with my team or in my office, we're out on the shop floor just saying, all right, well, well, great that I made, I helped make this improvement. And no, and none's the wiser, but, but I got the impact that I was looking for.

Yeah, how maybe for whether it's that example of OEE or a different example. How. Actually, so I hear slowly. How did you chunk it? How did you decide what to do first? Were there times when you were going to move faster but decided not to walk me through anonymizing whatever details you want, of course, but like, how did that happen? Because that's, like that example is actually meaningful.

Yeah, there's, you know, there's plenty of businesses where there's a disconnect between leadership and people that are working out there on the floor. And whereas your leadership team might be saying this is what the issue is, at the end of the day, no matter how you slice it, it's going to be the people down on the shop floor that know the true of what's going on. And so starting there, talking with them about what are the issues and, and then taking what those improvements are to help out with those people and then tying it into actual KPIs or metrics that your leadership team will actually care about is the way to, to sort of be that middleman to, to, to tie it all together. And so, I mean, definitely way back again, a couple of jobs ago, and I feel like, I keep saying that a couple of jobs ago, I walked into a role where it was a titled engineering role, but there were too many engineers and none of us were actually doing real engineering work. They just needed somebody that had computer literacy to type stuff into a computer and be able to validate it. That was not a technician level. And so the job was not very exciting at all. And so after talking with the other engineers are also doing the same non exciting work as I was, we developed a solution together about, well, here's what we need to do in order to automate this process. So that way we can get these, this administrative stuff done and then we can get out on the floor and actually get more involved with the process and doing more things that a natural engineering title person should actually be doing. And so not only was it a huge success, we actually all ended up leaving the company because they didn't need us anymore because we had automated that administrative task load so much that a technician level person could do it. And we improved ourself out of a job for the best.

Fascinating. I feel like that's actually a fear a lot of folks have right now of new tools coming in and you've actually lived it with a tool that you built.

Well, luckily that great tool led to the next job, which was even better.

Okay, great.

It all worked out. It had a happy ending.

Love it. Anything. I mean you have, I think, a strong perspective of. Here are some things people should be doing to, you know, be improving every day. Any operational tactics you just love to the point where you're like, everyone should be doing these. Any things that you swear by in terms of either your personal systems as a manager and leader or things you use with the team?

Yeah, just data in general. I've been, every company I've ever been at, they collect all this data, they stick it in a server somewhere and then they don't do anything with it. And so the people that have decision making authority, they need to determine realistic goals or KPIs and then give their business a way to accurately measure them and then actually take action based on the data they get out of their processes that they're storing in their servers. And so businesses always, they get stuck somewhere along the way, whether or not that's the data collection or how to analyze it, or they, they get sort of paralyzed from, you know, scared about taking action based on the data. Because so, so many leaders these days, they trust what their eyes can see. You know, they're doing their walk out on the floor. They, they know what they see and then they make assumptions based on things that aren't the actual data. And so that's, that's definitely one operational tactic. I wish people would kind of get more used to it. It's just guys, you gotta, you gotta trust the data?

Yes. How have you implemented that? Because that struggle of we've got data but it's sitting in a server and no one's taking action on it is something I've heard time after time after time. You've got time digging in to figure out how do I get it to lead to action. Any tips for that link?

There's plenty of systems out there that the Nandrop here, guidewall included, has some capability in being able to crunch the data that it itself collects and everything. But, but, but for me and in my experiences nothing is better than just good old fashioned Excel or whatever your, your data processor is of choice. I mean there's, there's, there's Power BI and Minitab and all these things that, that you can kind of custom build and everything to, to do that. But, but, but for me nothing's better than just getting a big old raw table of data and having a sort of full access to transform the data as needed to make and understandable to a, to a decision making team so that way it can be analyzed and actioned in a way that's, that's custom tailored for them right out of Excel completely.

And being able in Excel also to pull in the metrics that folks care about, whether it's dollars or key areas of concern. Any examples that come to mind. Again, anonymizing whatever you want of data you've been able to transform into actions that move the needle and how you thought about the audience and what they needed to see working backwards. I think I've seen some of your Excels and they're quite awesome.

Yeah, yeah. And I can talk directly to God wheel here because we've actually used it to, to do some decision making for the business. Being able to know the exact amount, you know, down to this to the second for our downtime and being able to Pareto out, you know, these are the issues for, for these specific downtime issues and being able to hone in on. All right, well the, the really critical few items inside of our Pareto that take up, you know, the 80% of the chunk. Now we know what we need to go action and it's not just an assumption about. Ah yeah this production line is totally the issue when it, when it's not the data says otherwise and we have that proof utilizing data from Guidewell and now we know what we need to go action and just go, and just go get the work done instead of sitting around wondering what it is, what is it that we need to do.

Yeah, it is surprising just how frequently our assumptions from the anecdotal data we see actually aren't the reason we happen to see it. Yeah. Any tweaks that you've made where you think of it as like, high bang for the buck in general in your role of. This is a small tweak that has a big impact that people don't appreciate enough.

Yes, definitely on this one. And this is a, this is all human behavior right here. It's sort of, sort of a timeline of how I've grown over the course of my career here. And that's, you know, at first I would tell, I would go to my boss and just say, hey, boss, these are the problems I'm having. Yeah, great. From there, I evolved. I would, I would tell my boss what the problems are and then I'd offer what my possible solutions could be. Then I'd tell my boss what the problems are and have the solutions already prepared and say I'm ready to roll it out. The next part from that is I'd find problems, develop the solutions, and already have it in progress before I even approach my boss. Then don't worry, it keeps going. I find the problems. I then invite other people to be a part of, of developing the solution with me as a team, and then have it, and then still have it in progress before telling my boss. After that, I'd find solutions, invite others to be a part, have it all done with metrics on what the improvement is. And my boss at this point is so used to just me being a fully autonomous employee, they just say, cool, man, keep going. And so, you know, and then finally that, you know, sort of the, the, the culmination of all this is, is then I just go out and find things that aren't even problems and still convince people to help me improve it, because why not? And so the story continues from that.

Oh, I love that. I feel like we have a new version of like Maslow's hierarchy of.

Of. That's awesome, man. Anything that you're seeing in terms of trends in manufacturing that you're watching that you either think are great or totally overhyped.

Consider this my, my inexperience of, of long term. I suppose the current trends are the only trends I know of. Maybe I'll, I'll sit on another podcast with you. We can definitely circle back around to this one to see it so I can more. Better be able to say, yeah, this, this is how the, the industry has changed.

Yep. Makes sense. Thoughts on AI?

Ooh, you know, automation, yes, but AI maybe not so much currently from what I've seen, you know, the scant few investments that I've seen in AI personally has. It still has a person behind the wheel still validating data because the AI didn't do something correctly. And, and I have high hopes for AI. I see where it's going, how it's built into gag as a product but in its current state I've really truly yet to see it replace a human in manufacturing, at least in the businesses that I've been a part of.

Yeah, it'll be fascinating to think about 10 years from now what we might talk about or maybe not. Maybe it will have been completely a hype cycle. Anything that you want to share around learnings on the culture side, not just about a culture of improvement and not doing things the way we always have, but of innovation and testing, testing and trying new things.

Repetition. It's again a conversation on small chunks over long periods of time too. Too often when it comes to a business wants to do continuous improvement and they hire a consultant and they come in and they'll, they'll train a group of managers or executives on doing a week long improvement kaizen or something and then that's it. Nothing else happens afterwards. And that's not really sustainable that innovation and the continual improvement, you know, it really lives and dies by having someone who, who champions it and is getting the everyman involved. This could certainly be a high level manager who walks the walk and talks the talk in a top down approach. But unfortunately those types of high level managers, they're few and far between from what I've seen. But more likely than not it's done at the grassroots level bottom up where the leaders of tomorrow are pushing the envelope. They're coming into work daily on their drive into work they're thinking what am I going to improve today? And they're consistently inviting others to join them in being a part of what the solutions are.

I love that and the focus on sustain ability being built in and having it come from the team, not a consultant that drops in for a week. Love it. Well, to wrap up just off the clock section of learning a little bit about you. What do you love to do outside of work? Any folks that particularly inspire you that you want to give shout outs to. And then I'll close with a question about your dream moment if you could create it.

Sure. I'm pretty low stress and simple. I'm not going to talk about skydiving or anything crazy like that. After work I teach part time down at the local community College just for fun. When I get home after, after the second job, you know, I hang out with my dog and the rest of the time is spending a full time husband to my amazing wife. So a very simple person.

What kind of dog?

I have no idea. We, we adopted it off the streets of Ecuador and brought it here to the United States. And so it's, it's cute though. Whatever it's made out of, it's definitely cute.

Amazing. I love it. A cute dog.

Very cool.

And last question, just to close before I ask if there's anything else you want to add. If you had unlimited budget, no red tape could really, magic wand in hand, dream what's a change you might want to make in factory operations or.

Yeah, and, and I wanted to answer that. The last question was actually a two parter and I missed mentioning on it, you know, somebody to that, that would, that inspires me. I didn't answer but consider this a hot take. Maybe, but be your own inspiration, right? Be the person you could be and be the person that you should be. I know lots of people have heroes or they're on social media and they see somebody drop a tweet or whatever they're called these days and they're like, ah, yeah, that's my inspiration. Just go be your own inspiration, guys. You can be the person you want to be without someone else. But to answer your latest question here, my dream moment. Unlimited money may be counterintuitive again when it comes to talking about automation and AI, but at the end of the day, businesses are people. So if I had unlimited money, it would be all about employee businesses. You know, when your people have good health coverage, they're not getting distracted at work wondering how they're going to afford their kids doctor's appointments. When there's an excellent 401k pension savings program, you know, they're not stressing out over the future, they're focusing on the here and now while they're at work. When a company has excellent engagement programs, coworkers transform into friends and family and above all, base pay will rule. When your employee lives paycheck to paycheck, they're thinking about rent, they're not thinking about how they're going to improve your business. And so, you know, happy employees that stick around means that the business becomes a success because they want to ensure their own happiness by making sure the business stays successful. And at the end of the day, even AI is just another tool of ones and zeros that are again, they're.

Built by people so well said. And. And that is. Yeah, it's that positive flywheel of people investing and building the business together. And just. Yeah. Very well said, Chris. Thank you, Lauren.

It was a pleasure. Yeah, definitely. Thank you for having me here today.

Thanks again. Talk soon.

Foreign.

I love this conversation with Chris and especially his journey of blending data driven thinking, individual initiative with the empathy that makes someone a great leader of people. From trusting the team on the floor to quietly driving change, to being your own inspiration, there's a lot to take away here. If something resonated, I'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you found this valuable, consider sharing it or leaving a rating. It helps more ops leaders find these stories. Thanks for listening and see you next time on the Factory Ops Exchange.