Diving Deeper into Lean and Smart Manufacturing Synergies

Welcome to the Industry 4.0 Club's fireside chat. The club's purpose is to engage the power of diverse worldwide talent to accelerate the global evolution to Industry 4.0. We accomplish this by hosting and supporting respectful, thoughtful, and interdisciplinary open conversations on creating quality content and wide-ranging Industry 4.0 topics to expand the reach of our community. My name is Mike Ungar, and I'm the CEO of the Industry 4.0 Club. I have over 40 years of leadership and management experience, most of that at Michelin in manufacturing. I'm joined today by my co-host, Mike Yost. Mike, would you mind introducing yourself, please?

Not at all, Mike. Thank you. As Mike said, my name is Mike Yost. I'm one of the co-founders of the club, Mike's co-host here on the fireside chats. Been in industry for almost 40 years myself with about 25 years on the solution provider side and the last 15 on the nonprofit side. So much of what I learned throughout those years is formed by our 2 guests here today, Konrad Leyva, who's the Vice President of Ecosystem and Workforce Development at SESAME, the National Institute on Smart Manufacturing, and Tim Stewart, the President of Visual Decisions, Inc. They are going to be leading a workshop at the MD&M South event in Charlotte, North Carolina on April 23rd, 2026. And that workshop is entitled Diving Deeper into Lean and Smart Manufacturing Synergies. Now, if I were to introduce them off the cuff, I would go on for 20 minutes here. So I'm actually going to read their, their bios. the full succinct definition of who these guys are. So Conrad, as I mentioned, is the Vice President of Ecosystem and Workforce Development at the National Institute on Smart Manufacturing, where he's accelerating smart manufacturing adoption and education programs through a national ecosystem of regional centers, technology partners, and educational institutions. He is definitely a recognized industry authority. And he engages manufacturing business leaders, educators, and practitioners across all dimensions of industry to develop and share knowledge on both the why and how to leverage information technologies in manufacturing. So welcome, Conrad. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

And along with Conrad, we have our friend Tim, who has been working with companies across industry for the past 25 years to optimize manufacturing and other business operations with the combination of Lean Six Sigma and Smart Manufacturing. Definitely relevant for today's conversation. Tim's been at the forefront of solving business challenges for companies by helping them apply new capabilities to fundamentally improve their overall business process. Methodology and approach that he and his team have developed help companies drive results such as reduction in scrap and improvement in throughput in a wide variety of a wide variety of industries. So welcome, Tim. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks. Remind me to shorten that paragraph for the next time I'm on.

Of course, we could do that. So just want to remind everybody before we jump into the conversations here with these guys, I'm sincere in my belief of the expertise that these gentlemen bring, going to be fantastic leaders of the workshop. And so definitely encourage you if you are listening with us here on LinkedIn Live, to ask questions, throw in comments. We'll try to make this a lively conversation here for the day. So with that, Mike, I will throw it over to you.

Thank you. Well, again, thanks, Mike. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Conrad. Really looking forward to the discussion. So let's just jump right into some of it to kind of peel this topic back a little bit. So, you know, we know that a lot of manufacturers, and I'll be honest with you, it was when I worked at Michelin several years ago, it was on my mind. I worried that Industry 4.0 was going to replace lean thinking. So let's just talk for a second from your experience, what's probably the mis— the biggest misconception leaders have about the relationship between lean and smart manufacturing? Maybe, Konrad, you start us off.

Okay, well, thanks, Mike, and thanks for having us here today. The biggest misconception that we've been fighting for years and finally starting to move beyond it is that lean and digital were mutually exclusive, that in the early days of lean, yeah, they were going after the low-hanging fruit and emphasizing that there were a lot of simple ways to implement Lean that didn't involve a lot of technology, but was very accessible to small manufacturers. But the truth is that, that belief then probably lingered a little too long, and it was holding back the manufacturers from implementing technology that was really needed to handle some of the more complex scenarios in manufacturing. And the truth is that industry leaders like Toyota have been combining digital and lean for many years.

Okay.

Actually, adding to that, before Tim, I'm taking the— Go ahead, Konrad. I did want to mention that, very interesting, a Gartner Research survey, a recent one, showed that over 70% of industry leaders actually were combining their lean continuous improvement programs and their smart manufacturing initiatives. So I think that's a strong indicator of what the leaders are doing, but, but it's also the small manufacturers that should be doing it too. Tim?

Conrad, you talked about, you know, the kind of traditional lean practitioners maybe not buying into Some of the digital. I'll start from the other side and talk about the technology practitioners that don't understand or don't appreciate the need to tie what they're doing into the digital or into the process side of things. You know, they treat these technology solutions like magic beans and you just put them in and everything gets better. The analogy that I'm infamous for using is a Fitbit, that wearing a Fitbit doesn't make you thin. But, you know, if you pay attention to it, look at, you know, the pretty charts and graphs that get output and so forth, and actually modify your behaviors as a result of that information, then you can make a lot of improvements. But the technology itself doesn't make you better. And so same thing on the shop floor, putting IoT systems or a lot of these other solutions in place on their own don't improve the process. You still have to do the hard work afterwards, and that's where combining the technology and the lean practices really makes everything shine. Well, great.

Now I have to send my Fitbit that I got for Christmas back because it's not just going to automatically work for me.

Thanks. You wear the ring. That, that one, that's automatic.

Yeah. Well, I would say, I think it's a great insight that you guys share, especially from an organizational perspective. There are many times where we'll see where companies have not necessarily taken the lean teams and the technology or the smart manufacturing teams and brought them together. So that research that you referenced, Konrad, I think is very relevant and it's a good thing to hear. And I think it's also a good mindset for leaders across industry, no matter what size company, to consider, right, bringing these things together. So let's talk like real-world examples. Maybe, maybe, Tim, you want to go first this time? Can you share some real-world examples where using digital technologies directly, you know, improved the lean principles, reducing wastes, improving flow, you know, standard work, that kind of stuff?

Sure. Number of them. So, You know, where people traditionally focus with machine monitoring and, you know, looking for downtime events and so forth. That really ties into several lean principles in terms of process stabilization, in terms of, you know, identifying where you have downtime, which is a form of waste, and, you know, getting that addressed and so forth. You have standard work where You can have digital work instructions that are going out there. You have video analytics that are monitoring the process for deviations from standard work. You have some of the displays that are right on the workstation itself that, you know, tell the people what the next step is and so forth. And so all of those are very tightly integrated with lean practices. You know, as you go through that. So I've had customers implement all of those. And I have seen really good results as a result of that.

Conrad, anything to add to that?

Or— Yeah, I mean, basically, the one of the things I want to stress in the benefits here is that the difference between working with 3-day-old data that's been put together through a lot of manual, or even 1-week-old data. You know, a lot of companies do it on a weekly basis because there's so many manual steps in collecting data and, and putting it into Excel and creating some reports to put up on the chart, right? Those are very inefficient processes. There's a lot of waste in clerical steps and and manpower. So by lean definition, that's wasteful. And there's ways now to put simple systems in place with, with, with a few cameras and sensors and, and our maybe some barcodes even, and, and really automate data collection and automate reporting. and take a lot of that waste and possible human error out of the equation. A lot of people are doing it. When you move from looking at the rear window and solving problems, when you look at the data and try to propose a solution, by the time you look at the old data and try to put a solution in place, maybe some patch has been done already that was not the right way. to— or the best way to do it. And now you have to deal with a patch that was put in place, plus maybe a more permanent fix. When you're working with real-time data, you make better decisions about what are the problems we should be working on today, how to tackle them, and you have more information available for better root cause analysis.

And just to— Sorry, I was going to jump on your comment about root cause analysis. You know, I can think back to when, um, we would work on problem solving. And of course, when a problem— we had a really what I thought was a pretty good problem-solving methodology, but we didn't have the digital component. So it did require us to actually, when the problem occurred, to write down everything that happened and hopefully capture correctly the data that was associated at the moment. But of course, real time at that point went, you know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour later, not real time. And we had no way of going back to look at the data. It had to be either they captured it, they made a mistake, we didn't have it. And today, with being with interoperability or being able to connect equipment, now I've got the data real time that I can go back and look at, you know, and all the conditions around it. As you mentioned, Conrad, in order to really understand better what's the root cause of this particular error in the manufacturing process. So that, that's a great example.

Or, or my companies are— some are capturing it on paper because of regulatory requirements in aerospace or in medical devices, and— but they don't have it readily available online board to do that analysis. So it goes from paper to some file cabinet, and they're not really leveraging that data like they could.

What drives me even more crazy than the NACON RAD are the whiteboards. Yeah, people walking away from their station to go write down, you know, on a whiteboard, you know, a pasteboard, how many pieces they produced that hour against how many they were supposed to produce. You know, if there was— if they missed the target, then, you know, writing down, you know, some reason why they missed it and so forth. And then they've got to walk back to their station. So that's, you know, extra movement. You've got somebody else coming in at the end of the shift and typing all that into some Excel spreadsheet. Then that Excel spreadsheet gets summarized into a different Excel spreadsheet for You know, weekly reporting and then monthly reporting goes into a different Excel spreadsheet that somebody is again manually putting all that stuff into. You don't have any easy way to look up the different reasons why, you know, you were missing targets and so forth other than going and reading through one manual comment after another. Who knows if that got transcribed correctly? Who knows if the operator captured it correctly in the first place? He's likely just putting in a symptom as opposed to root cause information. And so all of that is just wasteful. If you're capturing that information automatically, let's take that same amount of time that people are investing into doing all of that manual work, still get them ownership in the process by utilizing that information to drive improvements instead of just being note keepers.

Yeah. And you can create some simple apps these days for the shop to Hey, at least capture it once at your station, type it in, and at least all those other aggregate reports and availability of that data is shared immediately across the organization.

Yeah.

Automatic archival, all that stuff, and that usually when we do the typical value stream analysis, we don't even look at a lot of those. processes that are data-driven processes.

So just quickly want to interrupt here just to remind everybody, if you're with us on LinkedIn Live and you have questions, we have Konrad Leyva from Sesame and Tim Stewart from Visual Decisions with us here today ahead of their workshop they'll be putting on about diving deeper into lean and smart manufacturing synergies. That event will be in Charlotte at the MD&M South event, April 23rd. And if you have questions for them or comments, want to jump in, please go ahead and put them in the comments section. I just want to roll back one second to Tim's, Tim's knock on the whiteboards. And if— what do you say to the people that say, hey, there's a, there's a, there's a teaching, there's a leadership, there's a value for having the people go actually write the things on the board? It reinforces things about the process and about the work they're doing. And so, they believe from a Lean perspective. that there's value in that. And if you're not going to do that actual writing down, there's a trade-off with the value of the time saved and things that you were just talking about. What do you say to people when they talk about that?

My first response is, okay, if you're using it for training and introduction of the concepts and so forth, I can understand that. Do you really think that the second year you're doing that still has value? Do you think they're still learning things at that point by writing numbers on a whiteboard? In terms of Taiichi Ohno and his desire to create thinking employees as opposed to automatons out on the floor. Are you creating a thinking employee by having somebody go and write, you know, I did 88 versus 90 pieces? How much is that really creating that thinking employee? Whereas if you're capturing that information automatically and now having the worker say, okay, I missed by 2, you know, is that something I need to take action on? What do I do as a result of that? What are the changes that we need to make? How do we improve the process? Those are the things that you want the worker to be doing to engage those higher-level aspects of each employee and make the job more rewarding for them, not just writing numbers on a pasteboard.

So, so the value, Mike, is in that daily meeting is still valid. But you don't need to do it manually on a whiteboard. Turn those whiteboards into digital boards. Like Tim was saying, let's focus on the value of reviewing the data and what it's telling us and what pivot we might need to make in our ways of working today or tomorrow to work around things and spend more quality time on What do we do better than writing things down? We still need to write them down one time, but digitally.

While there may be benefits for the process of writing down, there are higher-level benefits for saving the time and focusing on higher-level problem-solving and thinking and things like that.

Excellent.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

I think your benefits of writing it down, Diminish over time.

Right.

Okay. Excellent. Appreciate that.

So, so let's, let's jump into talking about some of the common mistakes that you see when people try to implement digital lean, and, and how can they avoid these mistakes rather than turning, let's say, a technology into another form of waste, you know? So how can they make sure that they get the value from their from, from going down this road? Tim, you want to start us off?

Sure. I think the biggest mistake that's made, again, is to treat them as separate, separate things. You know, hey, you know, we're a lean company, but we're gonna, you know, implement this technology over here to do predictive maintenance or something, and then treating it as a technology project. Whereas, if you think about it as part of your digital lean initiative, then you can say, okay, we have this new capability in place, we have this new data available, how can we adapt our processes to better utilize that information? How do we change the way that we do our shift startup meetings? How do we change the way that quality does their root cause investigation of, you know, things that are happening on those machines and so forth? Being able to tie the new capabilities, the new data that you have available into those existing lean processes is a task that I think is very underperformed as part of these implementations.

I think one of the mistakes or oversights is that People, many companies are in, find themselves in this, I'm putting out fire mode all the time, and they pursue either a Lean initiative or a continuous improvement initiative as a, let's solve this specific problem we're having today, and don't take the time once in a while, it's like, we need to balance that kind of problem solving with more strategic thinking and really take the time to at least once a year sit back and say, where do we want to be 3 years from now? And look at a technology investment as part of a strategic roadmap, their business plan, really, where do I want the business to be in 3 years? And how can technology or lean initiatives help me get there and dedicate some part of my investment beyond putting out fires to, to really doing strategic investments in the business.

I wonder, guys, as we talk about the ease of technology adoption now, and, you know, how pervasive technology is in our daily lives now, You even mentioned earlier, Conrad, about like simple automation or simple cameras, and there's a whole lot of ways that you could pretty easily drop some things in and get rolling. I wonder what a risk that is for us as an industry, this temptation to sort of dabble or try versus that strategic look that you're poking at, because even lean, like, I think we would all agree that lean is one of the most mature disciplines in industry, if not in manufacturing, yet still, like, people that truly understand and understand and follow lean, numbers I've heard are, you know, less than 10% of manufacturers actually fully adopt lean. So they're sort of dabbling in lean, and we have the ideas of the concepts, and sort of we prescribe to it, and now we have these technology solutions, and we don't Really, there's not a whole lot of depth to understand, so it's pretty simple. Maybe just some reaction to whether those things are— I guess it makes it easy for us not to really fully commit to the strategic path and the right approach, as Conrad just talked about.

Well, one thing with looking at this more strategically is also to remember that people need to be at the center of all of our big strategic initiatives that— so I think one way is to make sure the company has the right mindset, the right— is putting in place the right culture, which should be strategic. That's one of the dimensions of the culture we need, but also like a digital-first culture, a lean culture. All of these are cultures And I think making sure that that part of the change management process is in place is also very important to the success of, of these kind of initiatives.

I, I think that one of the worst pieces of advice that's given out, and it's probably the most frequent pieces of advice given out, is to just start small.

Mm-hmm.

What ends up happening is, you know, you have different groups in the company that are all told to just start small. They're all thinking, okay, I'm gonna go do, you know, test monitoring stuff on this machine. Meanwhile, these guys over here are looking at a full-blown system to do some machine monitoring. These guys are just gonna put in a sensor, and you have everybody doing things every day, different way in your company.

Yeah.

And, you know, hey, we just started small. And, you know, the other thing is if you start small and you say, okay, I'm just gonna do this on this one machine, nobody's gonna change the way that they do their job based on there's now data available on that one machine. And what we talked about earlier is you don't get the value from just having the technology installed. You have to change the way that you, behave on the shop floor and so forth. And so if you're not changing behaviors because you've only implemented it on this thing, all you've done is a technology, you know, pilot. You've not really seen if it makes a difference for your business. And so for a variety of reasons, I think that you need to start with that larger picture in mind, figure out what it is that you're really trying to accomplish, work backwards from there into what are the things that will support that, And then strategically, you can start, you know, on bite-sized chunks within that overall strategy to make a difference.

And that's a very typical thing that an engineer or somebody with some limited buying power might say, I'm just going to get this little thing here and prove to management how this works. But it can backfire because management can see, oh, look, we did these 2 or 3 little projects this year, and we didn't move the needle on the business.

Right.

Instead, if you turn it around and look at strategic, well, where my goal is to move the needle for management, and then say, okay, how do we support that? We've really brought management into, into the whole equation and decision-making earlier in the process.

That's really, those are good perspectives, and thanks for sharing them. You'll be doing this workshop in Charlotte at MD&N South in April. What do you hope folks take away from the workshop if they're, when they attend? Conrad, how about you starting us off there?

Well, I'm hoping that those that are coming in with a Lean perspective leave with a better understanding of how important it is to bring digital into, into their landscape and leave with more tools and more options of things they could do. And like Tim said, those that are coming from the digital side understand that when you implement technology with a mission of improving the business in these dimensions, that It's a much more effective way to implement technology, that we're not just putting a data platform in place for the sake of data platform. Maybe it's because we want to improve how we measure our performance and therefore focus on the right problems. So there's a whole chain of behaviors we're trying to change in the organization. So I'm hoping people come and leave with those thoughts, the workshop.

For my part, at the risk of being a little bit too kumbaya, you know, it's, we're better together. You know, if you've got the people that are lean, the people that are technology-focused, by bringing those different sides together, we really can make 1+ 1= 3 here.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, we've been talking for the last, almost last 30 minutes now with Conrad Leyva and Tim Stewart. And so guys, as we get ready to wrap up the time, our time together, maybe Mike, you start us off with a final thought and then we'll go to Conrad and then to Tim for the—

Yeah, I appreciate that.

Yep. Yeah.

And Again, I think these are 2 of the finest experts you're going to meet on the subject, or maybe not to be that provocative, but 2 very well-respected, capable domain experts to learn from. And so I hope everybody will take the time and join them at their workshop and follow them online. And I think, you know, probably right at the top, you know, Conrad talked about the fact that, you know, digital and lean are not mutually exclusive. And so I think if you can walk away today and understand that as your takeaway, you'll be in good shape.

Ahmed, your final thoughts?

So look, come out to the workshop. Not only do you have us contributing our thoughts, but we also engage your peers. So a lot of benefits of the workshop is the whole peer interaction and ideas that get shared among peers, and we really enjoy that part. We just did one in California recently, and it was a great exchange with a great group, and even people across industries end up picking up something from what the other one is doing. That's very important. But if you are going to miss the workshop, I also want you to go to cesme.org, C-E-S-M-E.org. mii.org, and look for what is smart manufacturing, and look for the paper, First Principles of Smart Manufacturing, because— and download it and use it as a checklist for the conference. So when you go and talk to a vendor, say, how do you do this? How do you provide scalability and security? It's a great checklist of things that should be part of your strategic buying on solutions and when you're out there at the conference.

All right, thanks, Conrad.

Tim? We talked about having strategy there at the end. Conrad, and actually all 4 of us, have been part of the process along with Conrad to help bring that strategic approach to manufacturers, particularly small and midsize manufacturers, where we can help identify what are those process, cultural, and technology changes that will help support those business goals. So if you have questions on how to do that, feel free to reach out to any of us.

Thank you, guys. Thanks. So really wanna thank you, Conrad, Tim, for This discussion and the preview of our workshop, your workshop that you're going to be doing at MD&M South on April 23rd at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. We hope you can decide to join them and the Industry 4.0 Club there. If you haven't registered, here is the link to the, to the website to register. Go there, look for the workshops and sign up. I think you'll really appreciate the opportunity to learn from both Conrad.

can.

The Industry 4.0 Club would certainly like to encourage you to take action, you know, read a book, attend this workshop that we've been talking about today, or encourage your company to start a smart manufacturing strategy and roadmap. We'd like to know what you're doing. Drop us a note on our website at www.industry40club.com or at our LinkedIn page and let us know what you're doing to advance the deployment of Industry 4.0. We also host conversations like this weekly, so if you'd like to be a guest with us on a future broadcast, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out to us on our website or LinkedIn page. And with that, Konrad, thank you. Tim, thank you. Mike, thank you. Really appreciate you guys taking time out of your schedules to, to be with us today.

Thanks for having us. Got it.

Thanks, everybody.