Peer-to-Peer Support: The SCMEP OpExchange

Welcome. My name is Mike Ungar, and I'm one of the co-founders of the Industry 4.0 Club. The club's purpose is to advance the deployment of Industry 4.0 for manufacturers across the country and really around the world. My background includes 35 years with Michelin North America in continuous improvement, operations, finance, and HR. Today I'm a focal point business coach and executive coach helping business leaders achieve their full potential. I'm joined today by my co-host Mike Yost. Mike, would you introduce yourself please a little bit? Sure.

Thank you. Hi there, I am Mike Yost. I'm one of the co-founders of the Industry 4.0 Club. I've been in industry for about 35 years, work on the nonprofit side helping manufacturers find the resources that they need to understand Industry 4.0 and similar technologies. So strong supporter of SESAME and the club and anxious to hear what Mike has to say with his efforts.

Thanks, Mike. So we have the privilege of having conversations today from the SESAME broadcast booth in the Smart Manufacturing Zone at SESAME's— I'm sorry, at SME's South Tech Conference. We're joined today by Mike Demos. Mike, welcome.

Hi.

A little bit about Mike's background. Demos Company Connections. And runs the Op Exchange program for the South Carolina Manufacturing Extension Program, SCMEP. Mike's background is he has significant manufacturing experience as the general manager for Morgan Advanced Materials and a senior operations manager for Dish Network. He's also worked for Baxter Healthcare, IMAX Corporation, Schlumberger, Sea Level Systems, and NCR Corporation. Mike has a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Clemson University and is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. So we're really glad that we could talk about OpExchange today, Mike.

Glad to be here.

So talk about OpExchange. How long have you been involved with the organization and how have you seen it evolve?

So I've been a member of the OpExchange for a little over 16 years. It's been in existence almost 22 years. It started off as the Lean Alliance. The Lean Alliance started in 2002 for a group of companies here in the upstate of South Carolina. And the, the whole purpose of that was for collaboration and for benchmarking. So again, I've been a member of it 16 years, started when I was with Dish Network, seen a lot of changes over this time, right?

So you were a manufacturer that joined that?

Yes, Dish Manufacturing was a remanufacturing facility, remanufactured set-top boxes. Right, so we had about 1,300 people at that time, so big operation, had a lot of lean learnings to do, right? And that's one of the things we got out of the, the OpXchange.

So that's with other manufacturers that started as Lean and now has evolved to the OpXchange, and still it's a manufacturer-centric organization?

It is manufacturing-centric, but distribution companies as well, and other companies can join. Right? But the whole thing about it is that it is people, process, and technologies.

Can you talk a minute about the relationship between OpExchange and South Carolina Manufacturing Extension Program, SCMEP?

Sure. So the OpExchange is an SCMEP program. It's always been that way from— they founded it in 2002. So they sponsor it. They support it. The— they also provide workshops for it as well. So they help, they coordinate, they hire Ming to run it for them, right? But it's, again, they're big supporters of this throughout the state.

And then they're part of the national MEP network.

Yes, they are. Yeah.

Do you do work with other MEPs or is it strictly with—

Not— this is South Carolina, right? So this is geared towards, again, the whole purpose of the OP Exchange is to help make South Carolina more competitive, right? Better for the companies, better for the people in the ecosystem of South Carolina.

So you have in the OpExchange, I understand you have well over 170 companies or somewhere in that range. Is that right?

More than that. So they've got 187, just, just, just got 187 just, just yesterday. And it's growing.

We've, we've grown 80%, 80% in the last Why are so many folks joining the op exchange?

It's, again, the value's been there all along. The value's been there from the very beginning, right? So it's, again, it's that fraternal group, that's the sharing, the collaborating. It's a peer group. I've known some of these guys for all these years, but they're joining because they're seeing the value, right? There's such immense value in this. Attending one of these events, going in and seeing these things and taking it back with you to your plant.

So they can actually go to other people's plants?

So we have, you know, up to 36 events a year, right? And so of those, probably about 20 of them are plant visits, right? So, you know, we have 2 to 3 events per month. And but yeah, it's going into these plants and this is part of the OpExchange. It is when you join, it is about sharing, collaborating. When you join, you're willing that, you know, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna learn from others, but I'm also gonna give back.

And do you end up, what are the, is it a membership group?

It is.

Okay, so from a membership perspective, do you typically have a role or a typical type of person within a company? So do you have business owners, do you have technology people, do you have plant floor? Like, what type of people, roles do you have represented?

So this is what's beautiful about the OpExchange, because it's, um, a person doesn't join the OpExchange, a site joins the OpExchange. And I have sites, you know, small, medium, large size. And whether your site's 10 people, whether your site's 7,000 people— I think that's our highest, 7,000 people— every single person is a member, and they can participate in the OpExchange. They can attend these events. And that's what's great about this. We have these plant visits. When I was a plant manager, I would send not just engineers, not my CI manager, I'd send my operators. I'd send my operators. And you would talk— first of all, just an operator feels really good that, wow, he trusts me enough to go on this plant visit.

Wow.

But they bring back great things. They bring back some great ideas. You know, I saw this thing and we're going to implement that. You know, Can we implement that? Great idea, yes. So yeah, it's everyone— general managers, plant managers, CI managers, operators.

And so you guys provide the structure by which these folks can come together, share openly, have decorum and rules to follow as far as, you know, not sharing trade secrets and stuff like that.

So, and that's one of the things, and this is where we do coordinate— I coordinate that up front. With the company that we're hosting, that's hosting, and, you know, what can you share, what do you not want to share. Some of them are more secretive, some of them, some of them I video the whole thing, right? I record the whole thing and I put it out there, and we have this online portal. That's one of the big improvements we've made over this evolution is we make this, if you don't attend the event, you still can benefit from it. It's out there on the portal. There's a good event recap executive summary of everything that's happened. And then when these companies share, they share forms, templates, you know, A3 templates, you know, this is our leadership program. And somebody, can I get a copy of that? Okay, yes. And so I put that out there on the portal. So even if you— so you just joined the AOPA Exchange today, we've got about 3 years worth of those plant visits out there.

Wow.

And go back on that portal and go look at all the lean events. Go back and look at the events on robots or AI, and you still can benefit from those plant visits even though you just joined.

So something— so you have plant visits and you do some things virtually as well, workshops as well, or how does that work?

Oh yeah, yeah. So like next year, next year we have— I still coordinate the plant visits. Right. So I'm still lining up the plant visits. I got some really good ones. Rolls-Royce is going to be hosting in May. I got Honda is going to be showing what they're doing with their, with their, their vehicles, their 4-wheel vehicles. Some really great, great events lined up.

Yeah.

But I also got some workshops and I've lined them up all for next year. So I've got 12 workshops throughout the state. Again, it'll be in Greenville, Sumter, and in Columbia. So across the state, so everybody can benefit across the state. Leadership classes, I have lean manufacturing fundamentals, and we actually have a course with SESAME, right, on smart manufacturing, how to go about starting smart manufacturing.

That should be great. That'll be a fantastic— it's like a great lineup for next year.

Yeah.

Can you kind of get into now, so obviously the visits are very helpful, but they don't mean much if people don't go back and do something with them. Do you have some examples without maybe talking about companies about how folks have really benefited from these events?

So the benefits, there's one thing about lean is all these incremental benefits, right? Incremental benefits. There's so many of those, right? Every plant visit somebody goes back with takes back some things. I know that I Well, I can talk about my companies, right? So I know I sent— I couldn't attend an event, right? And I sent one of my operators and she went to Shaw Industries and she went and she saw some neat machine guarding that was there. She came back, shared that with our safety expert, and we implemented that machine guarding. It was a great way that helped improve the safety of our machinery. And that was at Morgan Advanced Materials when I did that. So the, um, there's that. There's, uh, one of our— one of my, uh, my brothers in this fraternal group is, uh, uh, Scott Brown at Velux in Greenwood. And he, he went to— it was an event at Sleep Number. Sleep Number was doing an event and they were showing what they're doing, a value stream map and how they improve their productivity 75% in 2 years. It was phenomenal. But in the plant tours, when you go on these plant tours, You see the things that are presented. You also see the, you know, oh, look at that, I like that, you know. And he saw something they were doing with their racking, and I forget what it was, but it was something in the rack. And he told me, Mike, I took that back, I talked with them, and they gave me— I implemented it. I'm saving thousands of dollars a year just on that little idea.

Wow.

So there's all these little small incremental things that you bring back. And then there's, there's these plant visits. But the bigger, the bigger thing about the Op Exchange is this this brotherhood, this fraternal group. And I'll give you an example. When I was at Dish Network, we had— we were really— we got really good at visual manufacturing and flow and the culture and building that culture and how people and operators and how they can use the visual cues. So we're really good at that. BorgWarner up in Seneca, completely different industry, automotive industry. They were really good at TPM, total productive maintenance. We sent our engineers and our supervisors up there. They spent time with them and did deeper benchmarking how they're doing their TPM, how they're getting information out of their machinery. They reciprocated and sent their people back to our plant and spent— their supervisors, engineers spent time with our team and how we implemented our lean belt program, how we implemented our our flow system. We both got better in the areas, and we did this without consultants. We did this, we did, we did this just by benchmarking on what we've individually done.

Yeah, so people get to know each other, and therefore they're able to then get that relationship going and make those kinds of exchanges in a way that doesn't cost them more than just being a member of the exchange.

Right. And they trust each other, right? They have a level of trust.

Yeah, and there's trust in this, right? There is trust. But again, within this, there's also some of the companies will make you sign the NDAs when you go in there, right? But there is a—

Well, that's normal. That's normal.

That's great.

So the exchange started as the Lean Council, evolved— Lean Alliance, evolved to the OpExchange. So what other changes have you seen in the The evolution of your group here? Are they talking about technology more? We're here at a technology show, right?

So it's definitely— so it's when we started evolving towards that anyway. So as we were doing these plant visits during the years, it started being where it wasn't just lean manufacturing. You know, we'd get leadership. Leadership is a big part of it, right? You know, somebody's got a 5% attrition rate. How are you doing that? Share that with the group. But we started getting into technology and the technology, and again, we saw this evolve over the years, right?

Yeah.

And so now we're jumping into this, okay, Industry 4.0, and look at all these neat things that are going on. So yeah, we do have, it's interesting. So a lot of our events, you know, we did Stanley Black& Decker and they showed us what they were doing with AI and their knowledge-based capture with AI. And what they're doing with their robots and limiting forklifts using the robots. But in that, lean is there. Lean does not leave. This is fundamental. And this is where somebody just doesn't go jump into Industry 4.0. You have those lean fundamentals first, right?

Yeah, we talk quite a bit about that. Aligning the technologies with the operations, having a foundation for Continuous improvement, lean, etc., is foundational to being able to—

That's one of the things that we had. We had 2 plant visits, Stanley Black& Decker up in Fort Mill, and their first one, their plant manager, one of the things he just said, he just put it out there, we never, we don't jump into these things. They have great automation, beautiful automation, the way they've automated and reduced labor contact, reduced non-value-added activity. But yet lean was part of it. He said, we don't do anything— he had not jumped into predictive analytics yet. He hadn't jumped into that portion of Industry 4.0. He says, no, we've got the connectivity, we've got our dashboards, we've got communicating with our equipment. That's our next step. Wow.

Yeah, well, we talk about that all the time. We don't consider— I think it's a big mistake for anybody out there to think that they're on the Industry 4.0 journey when you buy a piece of technology, right? The awareness, the education, the networking, like we're trying to get people to understand that you're all on this journey, right? And, you know, you'll have your practices in place first, and then you can digitize your operations and do the rest of the stuff.

That's fantastic. Well, you know, we've been talking for a while about how things have gone in your history a little bit and some of the results. You know, I think this, Correct me if I'm wrong, but the op exchange is something pretty unique here in the state of South Carolina in terms of compared to what other states might be doing. If other parts of the country want to start something like an op exchange, what advice would you give them? Because I mean, 187 companies, it's pretty, pretty neat milestone.

Yeah, the, um, the thing that I, I recommend if you're starting this, right, is to, um, you get companies that First of all, again, our mission in South Carolina is to make— for the OpExchange is to make South Carolina better, right? Make it better for the people of South Carolina, the ecosystem. So if you're starting this in another state, involve companies that are not just in it just for themselves. They're in it for the better, you know, for the better for their employees, for their state, for their community, right?

Right.

So involve companies that are not just in it just for themselves. Involve companies that have a good reputation, right? Good reputation for leadership. Again, to me, leadership is probably one of the biggest things. I've got a company in the OpExchange, 100 employees, right? But yet, and they're not high on the Industry 4.0, but they're one of the companies I'm saying they're going to go places. Because they got that— I interviewed their CEO and he just, he loves his people. You know, I think that I talked to one of their employees, says, love 'em, feed 'em, pay 'em, right? That was the— he says, that's what our leadership does. This is one of those operators on the floor during the plant tour.

Right.

Yeah, that company, they can go anywhere because the people— one of the companies with a 5% attrition rate, by the way, right? So they can go anywhere. And lean and Industry 4.0, They've got that team, they've got the leadership, they've got the employees that care about the company.

So what I hear you saying is find a group, a small group of companies, get started with a small group of companies that have the right chemistry, the right interest in exchanging with each other, and start there. Is that what you're suggesting?

That is. And then when you're doing this, again, one of the things that I just, the common theme I see of the companies, and I go on lots of these plant tours, the ones that are doing really well, they've got that leadership. They've got— and one of the things that marks that is that attrition rate, right? And it's just, you look at those ones and that it's— there's a common theme, right? They got leaders that care about it. So I recommend helping encourage that humility. I had one company back when I first started leading this, I had one company Was I'm not going to say the name of it, but a big company. And they I was trying to get them to join the op exchange because I thought there'd be such great things they could share. And he says, "You know, we're we're so and so. What what are you going to teach us? Right?" And high attrition rate, right? They got so much to learn. Now I've got some bigger companies that are joining. This company I was talking about. I'll talk. I'll say their name. They're so great. Stoll Industries. in Abbeville. Stoll Industries is this beautiful company. But we had— this is Abbeville, in the middle of a cow pasture, in the middle of nowhere. We filled that event. I had a waiting list. I had companies coming from— big companies coming there and learning, what's your secret? How are you doing this? And it was really— it was neat.

Fantastic.

I had a question about Like the age of the people that show up? You said everybody at a site is invited. Are you seeing a shift towards a younger demographic as you get into more of the conversations about technology and things like that?

Yeah, it's all ages, right? And so we had an event recently and it was actually, it was a workshop and it was on the 5 generations that are at work. And we had a Gen Z, there, and he had to actually present. It was in a workshop. He had to present on what characterized Gen Zs, but it was really interesting. It's so great though because he's been— he's just fresh out of college, right? He's got so much to learn. He's got so much to offer, but he's got so much to learn too. And so one of the benefits I see that he's coming in, he's, you know, technology, but yet he's seeing the people part You've got to interact with people, and the core of this, you've got to lead people. So yeah, I see a really good mix of all those 5 generations.

Fantastic. Well, you know, we're— as we kind of get towards the end of our discussion today, can you share a little bit about the vision you have for the OpEx change over the next 3 to 5 years? Where do you see it going?

It's shifting as we speak. So we've got a strat plan, right? We got an advisory board for the OpExchange and we put together this strat plan and we targeted 250 companies. Again, we want all the counties in South Carolina represented, some members in all the counties. I think we've got 38 of the 46 counties now, so we've really spread.

Wow.

But we targeted 250 companies by the end of 2026. I think we'll be there end of next year. Right? Yeah. So it's so— and that vision, again, I think more of this— what's great about this is seeing the companies take this and actually improve their operations, right? So vision is making South Carolina better, more competitive, right? Just through that, that sharing.

That's great. And will you be adding activity? You know, so you mentioned already a lot of activities. Will you increase the number of activities as well as you grow?

We've talked about it. We're going to have to, right? I've got a— so we had a few years ago, it was like pulling teeth getting people to attend. You know, I got this event over in Sumter. You know, please attend, please attend. And, you know, attendance wasn't high. Every one of our events now, they're full. Every one of them, they're full. So I think we're going to get to where we're going to need to have more events.

I was going to say, I'm a fan of the notion of putting in all the hard work to become an overnight success. And I think that you guys, what you guys are doing is showing you've been doing this for a long time. And as other people see it and catch on, they're gonna be like, well, where did this come from? And, you know, and replicate it or join it and have much more of a push than—

Well, you said 17 years ago, Lean Alliance, a handful of companies, right?

Maybe 22 years ago.

How many? Yeah, 20 years. Maybe what? 20 companies started, something like that.

It was around that 20 range, right?

And now 187, and holy cow, a goal for 250. That's amazing. Um, well, it's been great to talk with you. Do you have any last thoughts as we, we kind of wrap up today you want to share with the audience?

I just— again, this is a— this is such a great tool for your companies, and it's also a leadership tool, right? So this is where developing your employees— so one of the things that I did When I was a general manager, I would— because you want, you want to put teeth into this, right? You want it, you want people to come back with something. Put it in their objectives, um, have them give teach-backs. One of the things I, even for my operators, they would come back, give a teach-back to the plant, what you learned, right? What are, what are something you took away from this plant? Now, one of the things when you learn things, sometimes you go to these plants, you see things you don't like.

Yeah.

I'm not going to do that, right? So it's— there's always lessons learned, you know, so put some teeth into it. So it's not just— one of our directors said, I don't want it to be just a field trip, right? I want them to come back with something. And, you know, so—

So if there are companies in South Carolina that want to find you, join this, how do they find you? And if there are other people out there that just want to emulate, learn from you, connect with They can contact me at mike@opexchange.com.

That's my email. The SMEP webpage, you can find that program under there. There's regional vice presidents for the SMEP that are spread throughout the state. You can contact any one of them. They are at every one of these events. They are, again, that's the support they give. They know the value in this. They support it. So contact any one of them as well.

Well, it's fantastic. It's just another example of what the SCMEP is doing for the state and what you're doing for the factories and the manufacturers. Mike, any last comments from you?

No, I mean, I think obviously we are about community. We believe that in order to help companies grow, help communities benefit from Industry 4.0, they're going to have to do it by sharing. They're going to have to do it by working together. And so this is a great example. So appreciate what you're doing and hope we can support it however possible, Horne.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

So really big thank you, Mike and Mike, for this great conversation. If you like these kind of conversations, please look for additional Industry 4.0 broadcasts on Women in Manufacturing, the Future of Manufacturing Fireside Chat, and People, Process, and Culture. These events that we have will be advertised through our LinkedIn page and on our website. And also please join us at our next live event at IME West in Anaheim, California in February 2024. I want to thank you guys again and, and have a great day.

All right, thank you guys.