Episode 4: Haley White

Foreign.

Welcome to the Factory Ops Exchange podcast hosted by the US center for Advanced Manufacturing and Guidewheel. I'm Lauren Dunford, CEO of Guidewheel and executive committee member of the US center for Advanced Manufacturing. Today I'm joined by Haley White of Madison Industries. She's a leader who's navigated leading multi plant manufacturing operations across geographies and and brings a special blend of rigor and process discipline. With deep empathy for the human aspects of leading and people closest to the work. Haley shares lessons from her journey and offers a great perspective on the future of technology and manufacturing. What's overhyped? Where are some big opportunities for impact and how we can make sure that tools we build actually work for the people who will use them. Let's dive in.

I am so excited to be here.

With you today and to be here.

Yeah, you have such a awesome set of experiences. If you wouldn't mind just to start walking me through how you got into this space of operations. When did it click?

Yeah. So I'd say I took a bit of an unusual path here. Right. I, I more broadly was just passionate about general management. I really like thinking about how to make an organization run effectively and build strong teams. So I joined a larger business coming out of business school called Madison Industries that's got, you know, a rather large collection of businesses. And I actually started out on the sales and finance side and then, you know, an opportunity arose to go from running a business that actually didn't even have its own operations. We outsourced it. We focused on just really effectively running about an a hundred person salesforce. The opportunity rose to go from that into an automotive manufacturing business. So arguably opposite jobs.

Yes.

Right. One's focused on driving a sales team, the other one's focused on driving a plant. But I thought it would be really great for my personal development and my career and so I jumped on it. So I jumped into running, running that business. It was called Flow Dry.

What was it like to walk me through whether it was your first day kind of coming in? What was what surprised you? Yeah.

Oh, I mean.

I think, I mean at the end of the day, right, a factory is just. A factory is people. Right. And you have so many people from so many different walks of life. Right. Especially pulling into an hourly, an hourly labor population. And I mean you can have all of this whiz bang technology but at the end of the day what really matters is you got to get a task done and you've got to get a very large group of people. People align behind executing It. And it's a bit different from managing a salesforce. Right. Especially a salesforce that doesn't have to tie into a very operationally complex project product right there. You can do a little bit more individual level managing, but in a plant, there's so much around how you get a team aligned to get a task done. So I don't know that that necessarily surprised. I knew that was coming. But just the journey of figuring out impactful ways to do that was a big journey and, and really exciting.

Yeah, incredible. I feel like sometimes it. People don't quite realize when they think about manufacturing that it's one of the hardest management jobs out there. You've got.

Yeah, yeah. Abs, you know. Absolutely. And you have a wide level of education levels in the plan, a wide level of perspectives. Right. Oftentimes to. In, you know, and you, you have to figure out how to make it, how to make it all. Make it all work. Right?

Yeah, yeah. Are there moments you remember where it clicked of, oh, wow, this is really interesting?

Oh.

I think my biggest clicks, like I'm a big empath and a people person. So I mean, I have a lot of, you know, intellectual click moments where we tried a new thing and I was really excited about it. But I think the things though, that really clicked and really got me in my, in my heart and in my tummy were more just some of the moments where we really felt that we got strong alignment all the way down to the floor. Everybody understood the objective. Right. And they got tied into wanting to drive the results. So an example of that would be we had a plant where historically we hadn't told everybody what the goal was and we didn't give individual workers goals. And I think, you know, vast majority of people want to do a good job. They want to work towards something. Right. They don't want to just be twiddling their thumbs. So we implemented a program called the Making the Day program where we gave workers targets and gave them a bonus for meeting or exceeding those targets. Right. Bonuses aren't just for management. If you're helping to achieve a supercharged outcome, if you can run the machine better than anybody else. Right. You should be rewarded to that contribution to labor efficiency. And so we implemented that program and I think what was really effective was going from a plant where previously if you walked around as management, people wouldn't really look you in the eye. Right. And then people started to be really engaged and our hourly employees would actually come up to me and start talking about, you know, different business deficiencies that we could implement or problems they saw on the floor because they'd started to see the big picture and they wanted to contribute to it too. Right. And I think what's really matters is that day you hit the point where it's not about everybody bringing the issue to you. Right. You're at the center of the wheel, then you're synthesizing it, but you instead get everybody else activated and solving the problem as they see it coming or before you see it coming. That's when you have a really impactful plant.

Yeah. Oh, that's such a great image also of what it feels like to walk around and.

Yeah.

Not have people want to meet your eye and the difference.

Absolutely.

You have had, I believe, quite a few amazing mentors in your life.

Yeah.

Any that come to mind that helped shape how you think about innovation, culture change, leadership?

Yeah, I mean, I think. Oh, I've had a lot of mentors within Madison who, you know, shaped how I think about running a business. You know, many of the leaders across the top of Madison, Mike Ellis, Larry Gies within Filtration Group, John Pratt, Tim McCarty. Our prior CEO, Richard Jackson, a mentor I worked for for a while, one of my early bosses, Greg Pepe. I think on ops specifically, I had two mentors who were there with me in the moment and helped me make that shift from a sales leader to factory leader. Right. And just by giving me some key tools and saying, hey, if you roll out this system, I think it'll help you get where you need it to be. Right. And those two words, gentlemen named Rob Carpiel and Robert Stewart. And what they really helped me do was sit down and just think about how to do goal setting effectively for a factory level, you know, factory workforce, and bring it all the way down to the individual employee, and then also implement some really impactful daily, daily management practices. Right. Where you just get the team in a room looking at what happened yesterday and then saying, okay, what do we need to go go do about it? Right. It seems like such basic stuff, but if you just have a very rigorous practice in place with your team of sitting down and saying, okay, what happened? What do we go do about it? What are our priorities? You can really. You can really get some great work done.

Yeah. And sometimes the most powerful stuff is actually just being. Being rigorous about the basics.

Absolutely.

Any things you remember that they taught you about the systems of kind of translating goals, things that you think would be useful to others.

I think, honestly, you just need to break it down into the building blocks. Right. What Is your goal? What do you need to do every single day to get to that goal? To get to that daily goal, what do you need to do every single hour? So one of the things we rolled out was hourly boards, Right. Where you could see where's my output versus where I need to do that hour. Right. Because if you make the hour and then you make all the hours, you make the day, you make every day, you make. Make the year. Right. And so I think just. I think oftentimes in management, there's a temptation to go and sit and go deep in your Excel and look for some big, brilliant, logical conclusion when you know the most, the greatest impact you can have is just by driving, repetition and consistency and getting people focused on those basics.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I know matters to both of us is next generations of leadership and thinking about where they can make an impact. If you were back, you know, years ago, first entering the industry.

Yeah.

Where. What would you do differently, if anything, as you think about kind of coming into operations?

I mean, I think that with each experience that we have in managing a new group of employees or managing a team, we just learn a new thing about people. We learn a new thing about what people need to.

To succeed. Right. And so it's less. Anything intellectual. And I just. Every day I wish, you know, I. There are definitely things, I think, moments where I think, gosh, I. I wish I had already had that lesson in wisdom in that earlier leadership role. And I'm sure that in 10 years or 15 years, I'll feel the exact same way about where I am today.

Yeah. Yeah. It all adds up. Lots of learning from. I heard this quote the other day. Yeah. I make tons of mistakes. I just make them fast.

And so. Exactly. Exactly.

Love it. Looking back on maybe challenges, things that you learned from that were harder. Are there challenges that come to mind in those early days at Madison or early days, kind of when you were shifting from sales to plant leadership?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that's challenging is just. Especially if you work in. I need to. You know, we tend to be very discreet about sharing too much about our businesses, so I want to give you substantive answers while being wary of that. But one, I think, just if you jump into it, a business environment that has some major, major challenges that all need to get addressed in one go. One of the things that's very important is, I think, figuring out how to pareto your problems and pick off the biggest ones first and not try to do too much at once. And then I think second, how can you build systems that quickly activate people and enable them to manage the problem themselves? Right. I think something I notice is a lot of people at the top of management tend to be people who like to create their own reality and create their own system. Right. And that makes them feel really motivated, engaged. If you move a little lower down in the company, right. You, you have some people who feel that way. You also have some people though, who actually find the act of creating their system from zero overwhelming. So sometimes one of the easiest best ways to empower somebody is to make them a worksheet, a template, a process that they can then follow to drive the outcome. Right. Then they're individually driving the outcome and. But you've given them some train tracks. Train tracks to, to ride on. And I think that's, that's very, that's very critical. And then I think the last thing that really matters is just.

Also sort of ties to empowerment is I think one thing I found when I jumped into Flow Dry was we had three plants that all had their merits, but they'd all develop some, some different systems. And I think there's a careful balance to strike between where do you let people create their own dream and then where do you create some standardized process? Because standardized process doesn't always have to be an active control. What it can also do is create some nice organizational infrastructure so that the team has more bandwidth to build on that and do other creative activities. I think if you make it so that we're not inventing it from zero, each time we confront a problem, we put some great systems, processes and infrastructure in place. Right. Then the team can be so much more creative and focus on a lot more, you know, innovation and growth projects.

Yeah, love it. So well said. If you were coming into maybe a multi plant organization today and thinking about leading across plants that do some things differently, some things similarly, what are the things you might want to standardize based on your experience and what are the things you might want to, you know, leave to the individual creativity of the sites?

I think it's a great question. Slightly complex piece of. It depends on who your team is. Right. So, you know, the, the three plants I took on at Flow Dry had very different strengths. And so some of what you standardize, right. Is to help, cater to, to help, you know, bring people up on weaknesses. And some of you just do it so that you can be talking the same language and working together. So I think the key thing I'd say is first assess your team and see where they need help. And if you can make a common process to fill a gap, jump in there. But then I think taking a step back, I then say, just where are the places where you need to be able to have a common language and oversight? Right. So an example would be new product launch. Right. If you create some standard process and state gates around new product launch so that everybody can sit down, audit how you're performing and making sure that you're getting that new product launch shipped to the customer and, you know, with perfect quality for the first delivery. Getting. Getting everybody following the same process will enable you to get to that endpoint much more, much more quickly, because everybody will be able to get to the table and work together much more quickly.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes total sense.

Yeah.

Any examples where you felt like you were able to come in and drive a dramatic transformation? You've already shared one of engaging everyone on the team and new solutions. Any other examples of going from something that was hard to being able to turn it into a transformational opportunity within operations?

I mean, I think. I think a piece of it. So one of the examples I gave was about making it about, you know, tying it to what each worker needs to do to be able to be successful. But I think the other one, I would just expand right on that idea of giving people tools that enable them to succeed in their jobs and then manage to an outcome. We had one point where I was filling in as interim plant manager.

Yeah.

For our largest facility. And so for that time, I had 26 direct reports. But I got through it. No, but the way I got through it was I gave everybody a tool that they could use to then an ownership over a specific KPI, specific outcome. Right. I mapped it out and I said, okay, if each of these things happen, we'll get there. You give everybody their thing that they're owning. Right. A tool to help them know how we're going to get there. Right. We have a ship goal. This one woman said to me, she's like, was it okay if I change this thing or that thing in the schedule? And I said, if we're. If it's not going to cause us to be late for a customer or cause a fee issue, you don't need to clear that with me. Here's your revenue number that you're managing to. Right. Go make it happen. And I just think that empowering people at a level at which they're able to be empowered can be huge.

Yeah. Wow. That is quite an example. And congratulations. You look great.

After surviving, it was A while ago. It was a while ago. I'm not doing that right now.

Oh, amazing. Any things that you do in your day to day, small tweaks, kind of little automation hacks, anything that you really feel like has helped your growth as a leader or helped you be efficient, productive, anything you want to spread, no worries. If not, just always curious.

I don't know that I have a great, a great, a great answer to this one. You're much better with hacks than I am about that.

All right, well, I know you'll have thoughts on this. What manufacturing's future is going to look like. What do you think is genuinely interesting and changing how manufacturing is done, what's overhyped, what are your thoughts on that future?

I think there's a lot of technology that has potential. What I do notice though is a lot of this technology is coming from people who've never been inside of a factory before. Right. And I think 95% of American plants roughly are classified as small or medium sized enterprises. Right. The number of plants that are large, have large employee bases, have large SG&A budgets to fund tech initiatives is actually quite small. And so where I'm going with that is a big, to me, a piece of it's about what's the great technology, but it's also what's the great technology combined with the user experience that someone with a high school education or an associate's degree can find accessible. Because it doesn't matter how many whiz bang features that you have. If your core user is not able to use it or needs access to a larger IT team than a plant can afford to use your tool, that's too much activation energy for them to get started. So with that in mind, I think, for instance, there's a lot of potential in AI just because that's the field where I think that the user experience curve is a little bit further ahead in making it possible for your typical factory employee to be able to jump in and empower themselves.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very well said. I know you're specifically thoughtful about this in areas that you've used as well.

Yeah.

Or are there particular areas you think are really ripe for better tools, better thinking that you're kind of thinking about, especially right now, to be honest, I.

Think would be it's. There's so many interesting technologies out there that are working on a piece of the problem. Yeah. And I think what will be really cool is when we reach a day where there is extremely impactful integration of all those tools. Right. So I Want to give you an example. You have a customer order comes in through the edi, Right. And is able to see if this is something that needs to be reviewed on an exception basis or just popped into the schedule. An AI agent sticks into a schedule optimizing for on time delivery and labor cost. Right. And then you have automated reporting telling you if your, if your plants are, if your machines are producing at that scale schedule or not. Right. And so basically what I'm getting at is, is a point where the basic grunt work of just figuring out what are we going to go do and making a plan is largely handled by a computer engine just applying, you know, equivalence to Excel logic. Right. And then that leaves a lot more space for, for people to sit down and focus on the root cause analysis and you know, the innovation, the growth, the problem solving issues. Because I think it's really amazing how there's a lot of problems that you can, or just tasks that you can break down into rules of logic currently get handled by humans because it is hard to set up the programming to capture all of those rules of logic impactfully.

Yeah, absolutely. It's also such a. So on board with that vision. Everything talks to each other nicely and we have people having the ability to focus their time on the more important things, not the great anymore examples you've heard of people doing interesting things in those areas or have things that you're watching.

Oh, I mean, I've always been a fan of your technology just because I think it's interesting. Right. But again, it has a UX that's accessible and it's easy to install.

You know, I'm curious to see what emerges with predictive maintenance. Great maintenance systems are a huge issue. I think what I'm curious to see there though is especially if someone's got a very customized process, are you able to create a predictive maintenance system that's able to get enough training data to adapt to a very new machine and process? Right. But you know, I think those technologies are great. You know, I think smarter scheduling systems are great. I also just think right now we live in a world that's so ERP constrained.

A lot of. And so you could have a scheduling tool within your ERP that doesn't really work that great for your scheduler, but if you made the switch to something else, it would make it harder for your, your purchasing team to look at MrP. Right. And so can we reach a point where there's a little bit more flexibility and you're able to integrate the right tools for for each, Each department, yeah.

Yeah. Oh, super interesting.

Yeah.

The important point that you raised earlier about is it's about people at the end of the day.

Yeah, absolutely.

Is about people. Do you have any ways you think about how to create cultures where innovation is something everyone can participate in, where people are experimenting with new tools in the right ways, any. Any learning?

Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, people need to have bandwidth for those tasks. Right. And so I think, you know, if you've got a plant in a space that's Place that's not as stable operationally, there's not bandwidth for those tasks. So first and foremost, you just need to get things into a steady state place so that there's, there's bandwidth for focusing on innovation. And then second, I think that you need to be able to give people very clear goals so that they know what they're shooting for. Right. And then if they know what problem we're trying to solve, they can then jump in and come up with an innovative solution to solve. Solve that problem. Right. But then to get those thinkers right, you need to have people on the team that, that have those capabilities. And so I think, especially if you're in a, in a space, space where you want to be able to drive a lot of innovation in your operation, or you think there's, there's, you know, a lot of space for it, then, you know, make sure you're, you're, you're looking for hires who will, who will enable your team to get that done.

Yeah. Love it. All right, last section before I, I let you go. This has been great. Just maybe a little bit about you. I know you tend to read a lot, so. Favorite books, favorite things to do. Yeah. What do you love doing when you're not working?

Oh, wow. I think I don't have a. I've been reading a lot of just fun fiction recently, so nothing necessarily great to recommend for the purposes of operations, but it's making me smile. I'd say no. I mean, I also just like the outdoors. Right. So I live near. I live near the lake in Chicago. So my husband and I have been getting into road biking every weekend, which has been great. Amazing. Love it.

And then last two questions. Is there someone you think is doing fantastic work, especially in leading on the plant floor and being that, that kind of leader that you think is exceptional?

I'd say I think so. In terms of leadership on the plant floor, I mean, there are so many, so many leaders at Filtration Group and at Madison Industries whom I admire. So it's almost hard to like, you know, pick a couple, two favorites who I worked with at Flow Dry. One is a gentleman named Andy Chang who ran our plant in China. And he grew that plant from zero revenue like startup plant to what it is today. Runs a tight operation, you know, incredible statistics on quality, on time, delivery, cost structure, just consistently delivers. And what I admire in him is to go through so many stages of growth with the plant and with the business. Right. He's constantly had to reinvent himself. And so he's, he's really passionate about just constantly, you know, learning and engaging in self inquiry to keep on being the leader his team needs for the new level that they're at. And then we have a wonderful plant manager over at our hungry facility right now named Zoltan, who I brought onto the team. And he just brings a wonderful blend of process orientation and empathy. Right. And I think, I think that can be very, very powerful and implant like.

Yeah, that's quite a combo.

Love it. Yeah.

Very last question.

Yeah.

If you had unlimited everything, magic wand in hand, unlimited budget, no, no rules, what's a change you would make in the world as it relates to factory operations?

I mean, I think I bring it back to that construct I had before where it, you know, you don't just have these technologies anymore that are solving a piece of the problem, but there's an effectively integrated solution. So a lot of the basics and grunt work that chew up bandwidth are just solved for. Right. A customer calls you and needs to change an order, you can immediately figure out what, you know, how shifting the schedule will impact your broader operation, your cost structure. And then that leaves a lot more time for the broader team to focus on root cause analysis, you know, addressing your top issues. Right. And then a driving, driving change because those, those tasks are the much, I think, in my opinion, are the most fun.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Haley, such good stuff. Every time I talk with you, I feel like, oh my gosh, I just need to spend more time with Hayley. So thank you. Thank you. This was great. Really appreciate you making the time.

Absolutely. Thank you for your time. Have a great day.

A huge thank you to Haley for sharing her insights and stories. Her experiences are a reminder that transformation doesn't just come from new tools or strategies. It comes from enabling people at every level with clear goals, the right systems, and the time to innovate and think about how they can improve. If this episode sparked ideas for you, share it with a colleague and follow the factory ops. Exchange for more conversations with leaders who are making a real difference in many manufacturing. Thanks for listening.