Latest / The Manufacturing Blueprint / 14. Good People, Broken Systems: Why Root Cause Beats Blame in Your Shop

Transcript

14. Good People, Broken Systems: Why Root Cause Beats Blame in Your Shop · The Manufacturing Blueprint

• MakingChips: Hey, I had a really good idea. How about if like in our shops and our manufacturing places we build like a little trial stand and a jury box and like whenever somebody messes up, they have to go to trial and like give the reasons why like that might be kind of fun. You need to tell me the reasons why you you're not guilty. If you're gonna do that, I always think you sh also should have a section with like old product, maybe that you don't need any more like scrap stuff and like baseball bats we and maybe an old machine and you can just go in there when you're frustrated and just beat the life out of it. Smash it up. Now that I've got out all that anger now let's just now let's discuss what the root cause was. Now I'm not angry anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not gonna blame you but just let me take out my anger first. Yeah, you need to do that sometimes. Welcome to the Manufacturing Blueprint. This is the show where manufacturing leaders, shop owners, and operators come to sharpen their thinking, strengthen their teams, and improve the way work gets done. From leadership and culture to systems, strategy, and execution, we break down the blueprint used to build high-performing manufacturing organizations. No fluff, just straight talk and real conversations, real lessons and real results. Here's your host. Jason Davis. Hey guys, welcome back to the Manufacturing Blueprint. Today we are talking about something every manufacturing leader has dealt with. Good people struggling inside of broken systems. When a job's late, setup takes too long, quality issue gets missed, or communication breaks down, it's easy to point to the person closer to the problem, but many times that person is just where the issue showed up, and that may not be where the issue started. So as we get into this episode, one of the things I want to talk about is how often do we have the wrong assumption, right? When something goes wrong in the shop, leaders often assume that someone didn't care, someone didn't listen, someone didn't try hard enough. Sometimes that's true, but oftentimes good people can be stuck working inside a broken system. So good people can only perform as consistently as the system around them supports. That's right. A a bad system will beat a good person every time. So when the team struggles, finding the root cause will help shift the focus away from blaming individuals and then we can concentrate on fixing the broken processes. We got to avoid our natural tendencies to blame a person's character because it's usually the operational or the the environment, the situational factors usually that cause the issue and not the Not the person. Yeah. I think I've I've been guilty in the past of thinking like, okay, so we we missed a deadline or we had a quality issue and somebody was being lazy or somebody was being careless, and that that's probably been accurate at times. But, you know, just because that setup got delayed doesn't mean that somebody was performing slowly. You know, I think it's really important that we are careful not to confuse our symptoms. With our root causes. And and I think you you kind of touched on that. That was a really a good point. Like we've got to, you know, have to dig down, figure out exactly what i is going on in the back, because it's easy to start pointing fingers, it's easy to start laying blame on people, but that's not always the case. So have you ever, you know, been in a situation where it looked like a person failed? but once you dug into the problem, you really found out maybe the system had a little bit of a a lapse in it. I know I I know I have. Think I think I've seen that everywhere. In fact, sometimes it's me, right? I'm the I'm the problem. I'm the person who's not performing, but the it's the systems, right? And I've seen it at all levels. There's there's this famous guy, Edward Edward Deming, I think. Deming anyway. Yeah, Edward Deming's mm. You heard him? He was saying that it's like ninety something percent of of variations and problems come from production system problems rather than the workers. So you're saying less than ten percent is actually people related issues. But as you said, our first tendency is always to blame the person. that's right. That's right. And why is that? It's because we become accustomed to success, right? We think these things should work. But quite often they're heavily reliant on manual people processes and people to manage. I've seen it from Production level operators. You're talking about people who just an example I can think of is a new guy, right? He started in the business, he goes in, he takes over a process. We haven't had issues with that process. Right. Until this guy takes it over and then all of a sudden it's inconsistent, unreliable, defects, right? Scrap rates through the roof. This guy's just not getting it. He's not learning. The problem is it took him it took the previous guy years. Right. The previous guy was there for twenty years and then he retired. Right. And what went wrong was this guy didn't have all the little secrets and the knowledge. And that's just something that you just can't pick up overnight. And it we it's easy to become heavily reliant on the people and those people's skills. Sure. but I've also seen it at manager level. I've seen managers, directors, senior leadership come in. And because businesses can be so complex, it can take them a long time learning. all the the craft that goes on in the background, right? All that hidden magic, all the things that I know to check, right? I need to I know I need to check this out because it's unreliable. I know that this can give me problems. All that tribal knowledge and how do you get a new manager just to come in and be able to pick that stuff up? It's easy to blame the manager when the metrics are bad, right? But the question is, why are we so heavily reliant on people to hit those metrics every day? Yeah. you know, in fact it's it's crazy that this was the topic we were talking about because I had a situation literally happen yesterday. We had a a customer that was calling to expedite a job. We had, you know, done our due diligence up front. We had the product programmed kind of rushed. We had ordered special tools for the inspection, but with this expedite the customer was needing, our our tools hadn't got here yet. So we're still waiting on on that to arrive. And 10 minutes before the shift ends, quality says, all right, part's good to go. So now I'm I make the decision, okay, well, we need to run this on second shift. So we hurriedly show the operator how to do the load. And it wasn't a very difficult load. First shift guys trying to get out of there, second shift guys just coming in. We show them how to load it. Everything's going well. I think. I show up the next morning. We've got they were able to run fourteen parts over over the second shift. And guess what? Every one of was wrong. So what did I immediately do? I'm like, I am like, whoa, stop. And I'm like, I can't wait for this guy to come back on the second ship. Like, we're gonna have some talks today. But once we dug into it, so you know, I it was probably good I had a few minutes to like settle myself down 'cause although I don't get too excited, but once we were able to identify what was going wrong, there were kind of like a a series of things. And it ended up being we didn't properly specify the torque that needed to be used when putting this this block of material into the fixture. And so if it was over tightened, it would kind of stress the aluminum a little bit. So once it machined It would and you take it out, it would relieve itself, maybe only like one or two thousandths. It would kind of close itself back in. And that was enough to put it out of tolerance. Because we had one feature that was a really tight tolerance, but the tool that we needed to inspect it with, it wasn't here yet. Now we could inspect it on the CMM, but we didn't have the program finished for the second shift to run that program. So it was all these errors, you know, and but because the customer was screaming. Hey, we need these parts. Like we've had some problems. We need these parts right now. You know, we're trying to help them. We weren't prepared. I gave them the go-ahead. And there we have, you know, 12 parts. Now we're behind a whole nother shift. You know, very difficult. But but it really wasn't necessarily that operator's fault. It was, you know, we didn't specify all the things that needed to be done, all the criteria that needed to be done. We were trying to help somebody out, customer, and we failed at it, right? And so that's just another lesson learned, but I I think, you know, it's easy to want to blame that individual, but it wasn't really really his fault in the end. But it comes from that, right? The business pressure, the drivers in the business, the urgency, the change of shift, the timing, all of those things. You don't you never see the defect coming. But whenever you look back at it, you can recognize all the things that we should have done differently. But right, that's that's hindsight. And you know, we never have the luxury of hindsight. Right, yeah, no. And and I think, you know, before we can fix the problem, we have to know what kind of problem we're dealing with, right? And so in this situation, is it a people issue? Is it a process issue? Was it a leadership issue, right? I mean, should I have stopped the whole process and been like, no, we're waiting, you know, like we've got to again, you're making decisions based on what's best for the organization, what's best for your customer, or taking risk or, you know, sometimes it's risk mitigation instead. So sometimes we do say, Okay, no, we gotta stop. But you know, it's it's that and so it's it's really having to figure out what kind of problem we're dealing with. And I think that's where we gotta determine, you know, are we dealing with a people problem or are we dealing with a system problem? Because not every mistake's the same. And as a leader, we have to work to separate what those different problems are, right? I think for me, people problems usually fall into more about willingness and attitude from individuals. versus like system problems are gonna be, you know, usually revolved around your your clarity, your tooling, your tools, your training, priorities, communication processes. Did you notice how much how many more problems there are around around the system that than than there are around the people, right? Yeah, and the number of opportunities. If you think of how many places your systems and your processes can break or can fail. It's far more than just a person. You've got to distinguish straight away, is it really a person's problem or is it not? So you could ask yourself the question: would a reasonably confident person make the same mistake if I replaced them with somebody else, right? So if I replaced that person who made the mistake, if another person came in who was reasonably confident, could that same thing have happened? Yeah. And the answer is normally yes, right? It's very rare, seldom will you say no. No it was that person. Most people can fall into the same trap. And even in that one, if you don't specify a torque, well, how will the next person you in you bring in know that you need to apply a torque unless your process says that? You can't just expect people to know, right? You can't expect people that have been there for years to have a maybe sometimes I see it right. People have it like a cheat sheet and they have all these little things and a little crumpled up piece of paper and they have it in their back pocket. Right. And that's either got measurements, tools, you know, notes about how to do things, special things that they have to program. And they keep it in their back pocket and you see them like, Why is that page so crumbled? I've had this. This is keeping me right here for the last five years. Since I've worked on this program, this I this tells me everything I need. And I'm like, Give me that. It's gold dust. We need to photocopy it, right? Archive this because this is everything that this guy's it's all this hidden knowledge. So yeah. Ask yourself the question, would any other reasonably competent person who was put into this process could it still feel? And then look for behavioral patterns. So if you put a top performing employee into that process, right? And it starts making errors, does that mean your top performing employee has got the problem? Or is it your processes? Always assume that it's a system. problem first. Prove that the system is flawless before you address or change your individual. If you blame the person first, you risk leaving your process problem unaddressed and that trap then will catch out your next employee, which is only going to lead to you blaming them and creating bad morale employee disengagement. Hey guys, if you're making chifts, your tooling should never be the thing slowing you down. Kenometal has spent decades helping manufacturers cut faster, run longer, and get more out of every setup. From turning and milling to hole making, threading, and beyond, they've built tooling designed for the real world demands of the shop floor. And it's not just about buying another insert or another end mill. It's about finding the right tooling for the job, making sure you're improving your tool life, reducing your downtime, and making every spindle hour count. Whether you're just trying to solve a stubborn application or improve productivity, or just get more consistent results, Kenneth has the tooling and the expertise to help you personally. Learn more about what Kennemetal can do for your shop at Kennemetal.com. Hey, I had a really good idea. How about if like in our shops and our manufacturing places we build like a little trial stand in a jury box and like whenever somebody messes up, they have to go to trial and like give the reasons why like that might be kind of fun. You need to tell me the reasons why you you're not guilty. If you're gonna do that, I always think you sh also should have a section with like old product maybe that you don't need any more like scrap stuff and like baseball bats where and maybe an old machine and you can just go in there when you're frustrated and just beat the life out of it. Now that I've got out all that anger now let's just now let's discuss what the root cost was. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not gonna blame you, but just let me take out my anger first. Yeah, you need to do that sometimes. But I think you're right. Like the things you c really have to ask yourself is Did the person or did that individual know what was expected? Because I and and these these are things like as I sit here and I think about these are things that I feel like we have to do. And we have to ask these questions, but did they know what what was expected? And then were our instructions clear? Was what we were asking them to do realistic? Right. Did we give them the right tools? Did we give them the right programs? Did we give them the right inspection path? Was was all that ready? Were they trained properly? And really did we communicate all of these things clearly? And many times, I mean, what what I have found is that that's where the downfall is. And you know, my frustrations come because we didn't do this or we didn't do that. But then when I really stop and look at it, it's like, okay, the first question is, did we communicate exactly what we needed? Well, I mean, I thought I did, you know, but a real great example, just this past week. I got caught by the autocorrect in a text message. So one of the guys on the floor texted me a question. He gave me basically option one or option two. And I really didn't care. And I replied back to him, I'm fine with way. now, what I had thought I typed was, I'm fine either way, but autocorrect told him that I'm fine with way. So he's out there, like he doesn't want to come ask me again. 'Cause I've already responded and he's like, I don't know what to do. And he asks his neighbor and then they ask another person. And when I finally go out there and I was like, Hey, which way did you go? And he's like, I was waiting on you. And I'm like, What do you mean? Like I was like, You choose. I don't care. Like, make a decision. And he was like, Well, you said you you said I'm fine with way. And I'm like, No, I didn't. We're having like this argument back and forth. And I was like, hang on. And I look back at the text and it said, I'm fine with way. And I'm like, So, you know, that comes back on me because I thought I typed it, communicated it clearly, but I did not. That was on me. So I was like, nope, that's my mistake. So he was like, Well, I thought that's what you meant, but I wasn't sure. And I was like, But then I was like, Well, why don't you just ask me? Like, 'cause that's the next step is like, Hey, this text doesn't make sense. Like, so it's also the balance between A, I have to make sure I'm communicating clearly, which is difficult at times. And then B, if they're not understanding it, ask. Ask me back. What did you mean? I don't understand, but a lot of times people don't want to ask those questions. So so that's that's really it makes sure our priorities are really communicated and not relying on on miscommunication. So do you ever take time to stop and think and ask yourself the question? How many times do I provide direction every day just to keep the business running? Mm-hmm. Sometimes I think if we counted that it would actually scare us a little bit. And then we wonder sometimes why we can't take time off work or why we whenever we take time off work, we come back, nothing has happened or nothing has changed, or things maybe haven't moved forward as fast as we would want. Yet if you think about that example of your text message, right? Or people phoning you asking your opinion or making decisions, right? Making a decision on a part or how to do a part. And we make decisions rather than setting in place like a principle or a guidance that the team then will follow in the next instance. Because what I find is you could ask for your decision and then something similar will come up again in two or three weeks and they will ask your decision again. And what we do is we become a very, very heavily managed business rather than being able to coach and develop those leaders who already have established standards which provide direction. Yeah. Right. Does that make sense? Well yeah, no, absolutely. And I and I think that's where like your best people become the system. And that's what we've got to make sure that we really build against. Hey Gabe. Hey Mike. Hey, so as you know, you've you've helped me and and Hill quite a bit the last couple of years. You know, there's something I was kinda wanting to I was hoping you would share with the listeners. I'll kind of set the framework. You know, for the first several years I was trying to grow and diversify Hill. You know, it just I I I felt like I was just kind of always bumping against the wall, like kind of reaching out to the same people and so forth. And then, you know, kind of starting to learn through you and conversations I started I got a lot smarter about who I was trying to reach and and how I was trying to reach them and that type of stuff and and and we've really seen a big change since we've you know, changed our model. So it was kinda you know, you've got some kind of go to market strategies and and steps that that that you guide people through and I was wondering if you'd share those with the listeners a little bit. Yeah, it's it's it's fairly common where people come to a factor and they wanna hire us and They haven't done some of the I would say preliminary things that they should have done before coming to us. So there's kind of a hierarchy of like what what steps you should take take when you start thinking about going to market. And it really boils down to like complexity and cost. Like you obviously you want to start with the least complex, least costly thing and then kind of go down the down the pyramid, so to speak. And most shops are very familiar with the first one is just, you know, word of mouth, your current customers, referrals, networking, like You should absolutely max all that out. And it's pretty common when people ha you know, they're selling into plant A of of big OEM, but they're not selling into plant B of big OEM. They should go after plant B because like that's just low hanging fruit. So that was the first part of our strategy was was to go after other locations of our best clients. Totally. Totally. The first one being the reactive stuff, the referrals, the word of mouth, your network. Second one is just farm your existing customers, as we just talked about. Third one is referrals. So, you know, we've all had the the buyer at plant company A that quits and goes to company B and you know, we keep customer A and we pick up customer B. That's awesome scenario. But you can actually replicate that by being intentional with your customers, you know, going over their LinkedIn and find out where they worked before, asking, you know anybody at that company that, you know, might send us work? And and just asking, you know, asking your your decision makers at your customers like who else do you know that we could that we could help? so just being intentional about that. I think a lot of shops just are don't they just don't think to ask or you know, they may may be afraid to, but just ask. Like nothing happens unless you unless you go for it. Yeah. So four is LinkedIn. So, you know, most most shops have a a LinkedIn presence. So just proactively looking for good companies, good decision makers, second degree connections that you could ask for a referral to like I see Mike knows this guy at this shop. Maybe Mike would introduce me to that guy. So LinkedIn is I would say it's you know a lot of labor, but not a lot of like cash out of pocket. Fifth would be email. So email is one of the more cost effective go to market strategies if you're trying to go outbound. so build a list, start reaching out to them over email, find the decision maker, get him into your pipeline, follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. Email would be the next step. After that would be phone. lot of people don't want to call, Mike. Yeah. Or or a lot of people don't like getting the call. Yeah. Well that you know, I think that's head trash of why they want don't want to call 'cause you know if you hate getting a sales call, then you don't want to be the guy given a sales call. Right. but every single P and L has a revenue component. And you gotta do what you gotta do to get that revenue. That's right. And then the the last the last two Ads. So paid ads do work. but it's very hit or miss. So it's very hit or miss if if doing a a paid ad like a Google ad strategy, an paid AI ad strategy, social media ads, LinkedIn ads, it's very hit or miss on if that's gonna work for your shop or not. And it's very expensive. Even if it does work, it's it's pretty expensive. and it's you know somewhat technical to set up and maintain. and then trade shows. Well, go to shows, so they're they seem more attainable. But they are they are expensive, they are time consuming. You can't control who's gonna walk into that booth. Right. and so trade shows do work. Like we do a lot of trade shows. Don't get me wrong. Like it's just that should be one of the last things. You do not one of the first things. Yeah. Well, and and I mean, I'll attack on maybe an eighth on the trade shows is you know, even as an interim, just attend the trade show. But don't just walk around and look at stuff, right? Like talk to people and Yeah. You know, that's a that's a step to see if you can get traction at a trade show before you invest in it the next year. Yeah. Yeah. What I mean is exhibiting at trade shows. No, I know you do. I was just saying, like I mean, I've I've always had more luck at trade shows not in my booth. Totally. I mean, if you're if you've got networking skills, y like going to trade shows is is really good. I mean it's you know, still kind of expensive and very manual. so you gotta have the time and the skill for it, but yeah. Totally. How can you guys help with that? If if any of that sounds overwhelming and and I know you're always happy to talk to people through things, but yeah. What's what's a good way to kind of see what you do and how you can assist the process? Yeah, I mean, I guess if I could simplify it, step one, just have we maxed out what we've already got and you know, is can we or can we get down the road further with that? if you've already maxed it out, then yeah, go to factor mfg dot com and we'd love to have a a conversation. and we can tell you about what we do. we can give you some pointers on, you know, factors not the right fit, where you might where you might look or what you might do. Perfect. Well, thanks for sharing those tidbits with the listeners and we will talk to you soon. Thanks, buddy. So, you know, as we we've kind of talked about how, you know, it's it's usually not a people problem, it's usually a system problem. And we've talked about how how do we find where that broken system shows up, right? And it's usually where it's usually in predictable places, right? It's in that schedule, it's in the setup, it's in that communication and those quality handoffs and whatever. But you're right that every shop has key people that know how to get things done. And that experience is so valuable, but when the system depends on just a few people, that company becomes really fragile. It's kind of back to your example that you had earlier. You were talking about an individual who had notes and who had been on the job for 20 years and knew exactly what to do. And, you know, I think about like one of the things that we've tried to do as an organization is try to h make sure that we have a new items meeting. So every time we have a new job, and this is part of our AS certification requirements as well. That's kind of where it originally started. But we've worked and we've developed it over time. But we'll have a every time we have a new item that comes to us, we'll have a a meeting between engineering, quality, purchasing and production. And they've each got checklists that they have to go through for this product, right? And they're at we we ask some very and and sometimes it's tedious, but you just have to do it. But we're asking questions like, okay simple things like is this raw material available? Right? How long is it gonna take? do you have any issues from a programming standpoint? Are you good on your fixtures? How we're gonna hold it? Are there any special quality tools or any special collets or holders or anything custom? Right. So we go through all these. So we're trying to prevent the you know, having issues later on down the road. So just like we do that, then also once we're finished with a job we'll actually take the time and we'll look at what we what we ran last week. Did we have problems? Did we have setup issues and make sure that we talk through those and record anything that we want to have changed, right? So that way the next time we set it up is very simple. Or I say that it's very simple, but you mentioned earlier that you had an individual and they know all the quirks. Well even if they record and they write down like, okay This is my process. This is what's going on. There's still gonna be some quirky things that they don't write down. There's gonna be some things that they just know how to do by feel like, you know, they know how tight to make it. They know, you know, that, okay, well, if I start with it facing left and then go to the right, it's way easier. And maybe they don't even put, you know, they're they're only putting a few things down in the process. That individual that has the experience, they just make your system better. So that's where your best people become the system. That's right. Those people that have all those knack points, all that tribal knowledge. Mm-hmm. They're not doing it just to try and bypass anything. They're not doing it to keep other people out. Sometimes people see knowledge as power, right? And they don't want to train others because they might feel that they can be replaced or whatever. But That's not very common. Normally they're just trying to survive their processes, right? At some point they've had to figure out how to do it and they don't want to forget. So they make themselves little quick reference notes and whatever. But the critical thing is how do you harness those people and extract all that data out that you need? Because those people are your best trainers, right? They're the people that should be training others. And how do you get those people making those? standard operating procedures and training the next people to share all that information and how do you take that little gold nuggets that he keeps in his pocket of notes and how do you extract that to become even just like 'cause quite often that's just like fundamental training things that you can learn in day one, day two, or your first week, right? About how what torque should be applied or how that should feel or orientations or best practices. Maybe you have a best practice book. that people can read or can reference, you know, and it and it captures some of that data so that you don't you don't lose it whenever you change or lose an employee. You know, maybe we need to create an AI chat bot that's called Bob so we can like just say, go ask Bob and you can go ask Bob anything and then he'll give you the answers. He'll he'll give you the answers for everything. But but I think that's where, you know, your best people often become the bottleneck, right? That's where everything starts to slow down because Maybe your supervisors, they get buried under, you know, having to make every decisions or all these decisions have to run through them. That's what happens is a lot of times with owners, they feel trapped because they're the only ones that see the full picture. So I think at every single level, there are things that we need to do. Like maybe if you're an owner or you're a leader, ultimate leader of the organization, you know, it's important that you have meetings with the teams to discuss, you know, what are your long term visions? What are What are you doing right now on the outside? Because, you know, we we deal with a lot of airspace, defense, we deal with a lot of like e really cool stuff, right? Things that people can really get behind and be proud of that they're making. But for if if we don't do a good job communicating, the guys on the floor, I mean, they're just seeing like a block of aluminum or steel and a drawing and they don't know what it is, where it goes, and they don't get that sense of pride. You know, one of the things we do is every quarter. We have a review where we we we look at any new projects that we've done, any new customers we've obtained, what customers we may be going after, where some of those products go. And some of the stuff is really, really cool that I can't even talk about. I can talk about it to the guys. I'm not gonna talk about it on air, but I can talk about it with the guys, the team here, and and it's like, you know, it makes a difference when they know that this is going to really help somebody innovative. And it's gonna make the world a better place. So I th I think some of those things are really important though as you're as you're dealing with an owner. And then even as you step down, I mean, if you've got a manager or supervisor, you know, it's important that they're being very clear, communicating and they're they're making sure that their teams are getting the information that they need. And then also, again, like you said, retaining that tribal knowledge, having a system, developing a system that allows you to retain it, put it into some type of training document. And that way, you know, that onboarding process becomes easier and then work to have a system that makes it to where, you know, people want to work there because if you want to you know, one of the most expensive things is to having to, you know, rehire, retrain, re you know, redo the wheel so to speak, if you say. So it's important to threing on good people, keep good people and to keep things moving. Deher processes, right? Your process should not rely upon anyone. And whether that's the guy on the machine or whether it's your supervisor or manager making the decisions, you need to f figure out how you stop them at being the hero and become so unreliant. So generally for us, what that is is cross-training, right? If you know that you've got good people on processes and you know that you could have processes there, well, how many people are trained to do all your processes, right? And how frequently do you rotate your people through different processes? Because that's also maintaining their standards in various different roles. But at the same time it allows you to look for any operational weaknesses as people change in or out. So ban your expert, ban your hero from doing that job until a trainee is able to do it as good as them. They're not allowed to touch it. Right. Gotcha. Yeah. And and then and then document it. You gotta document the magic. Document everything they're doing. Get your hero to write down what their secret sauce is, right? What's their what's their ingredients to their secret sauce? How do they make the best barbecue sauce? Right. What do they do? And maybe even like record them. If you've got a really complex task and maybe you're you're tight for time and how you're going to train it or cascade it. You talked earlier about your first and second shift and a quick handover. Mm-hmm. I've seen it before where we would record a process a process and then we can say to the person, Right, play this, stop it, copy it until you know what you're doing. And Actually nowadays we've got software that we can upload a video to, right? And the software is now breaking it down and and it'll create an SOP just from a video. Right. That's really great. And because AI or whatever is now analysing it, they will see the knack points, right? They will see where that person holds it and the orientation, how they're holding it. And it will pick out more knack points than we can see and and we can create SOPs far easier and faster than we could before just by simply videoing those tasks. So Yeah, and they and they say picture's worth a thousand words. So video must be worth a hundred thousand words. I don't know. Well, well it is. It could be priceless. Don't let your competitors steal it. That's for sure. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So if good people are stuck in broken systems, what does the leadership need to do? Like The answer is not just to put more pressure on it, but I think the extra answer is really like better structure. So for for you, Paul, I mean, what are what are some of the things that you see as far as that's concerned? So it it's things like that. How do you how do you take that? I remember watching a guy once. I was doing a Gemba and I walked down to a process and I stood and I watched it. And I was puzzled. I said, What are you doing? And what he was doing was he had a little packet of cigarette papers. And he was taking the paper out and he was using it as a shim. And he was putting the c cigarette paper in there and he was putting the cigarette paper in there and in there. And I said, Why are you doing that? He says, It's such a fine tolerance to get that exactly where it needs to be. And that was the tolerance he was working with. And I was like, guys, we should we shouldn't need a cigarette paper. But but fair play to him, right? He invented a way to do it just by the tool. And it was working. Right, yeah. And it was working. But whenever there was someone else in there and they didn't use the cigarette paper, they couldn't get it, right? The machine that didn't run, it didn't function right. It just wasn't oscillating correctly, right? Moving part. So what we had to do, I had to get someone to go in there. I said, guys, get something other than a cigarette paper, right? Get them a shim that's calibrated. And they says, Can we get some of that? Yeah, you can, right? Just get a shim that's that size, calibrated, right? Reference only whatever it is, but have it there. Have it available, document what he's doing, how he's doing. And simple things. And sometimes we miss those things. But guys are very creative because people want to do a really good job. So they do these things and you never appreciate it until they're not there. But you as a people leader also need to drive it. If you don't do a gamba, if you're not on the floor, if you're not aware of these little secret tricks that the guys are doing, will they be forward thinking enough to To look into the future and say, well, what problems is that going to give someone else if I'm not here? Generally they're not they're not thinking that way. So we have the responsibility as leaders to go and do that. But not not just for the guy on the shop floor. It's about you, Jason, when you're running your business, right? Whenever he's asking you for do you want option A or option B? Well, rather than just making the decision on or that one decision, how do we create a philosophy or a principle that we say, well, in this position in future, here's how we want to handle this. And then how will that team know, not just him, but the other team members that also come across that same scenario? Because as people leaders, we're just totally inundated. I'm swamped every day with questions, emails, looking answers, responses, advice. And what we need to do is not become just a great leader because If we're a leader with loads of followers, which is fine, right? Everyone needs to be a great leader. But if you're a leader who creates other leaders, then that's better because you're educating other people who can create those other answers. And you need to create the framework to allow those people, right? Say, this is how we approach this. Now I want you to go and solve those other issues that we're having within these constraints or within this guidelines, right? And you're Enabling your team to stand and make more educated decisions on their own and become more self sufficient. Which takes a greater burden away from you as a people leader. In the long term, yeah. No, you're right. It's really difficult to create new leaders. Like that is something that is a very special skill. And I would say not a lot of people have that skill. That's not one of my strongest points for sure. Paul, I know that's something that you do really well at. You know, you're very good at coaching, you're very good at at at bringing people along. And that's something that's a skill that I've had to really work hard to develop and have failed at miserably over the years. Because, you know, a part of me says, hey, look, we all we know what we need to do. I don't want to be a micromanager. I've got my own things to do, like go figure it out. But sometimes it's just really important that you as a leader, you have to do things to help your team succeed. You have to do things to really help empower your teams. And sometimes that's you know, getting them together, asking them intelligent questions and forcing them because, you know, some people don't want to become leaders or some people are kind of used to this whole system, like the working system is like there's a boss and they tell me what to do and I go do it. Right. But I think, you know, there's there's that balance where we've got to help people learn to think for themselves, help people to learn to do for themselves. And and I don't mean that in a negative way because Most of the time people can do that clearly, but it's very easy to to fall in like a traditional like, okay, the boss tells, you know, you're the boss, I'm the employee, or vice versa, whatever. And it's like, well, you just have to tell them everything. But that's really not how it is. I mean, and that's not how it should be in my opinion, at all. Sometimes we're too busy for to do one to ones, right? We well we wanna coach people, we talk about it, but sometimes we're just like we're too busy. We're too busy doing stuff. Problem is that's just a vicious snowball and it's a cycle. Mm-hmm. If you invest enough in educating and coaching your people, it should give you more time back. It you you can't afford not to invest in your people and helping them develop and helping them become better people leaders because that's how you can multiply yourself rather than being having everyone reliant on you. Yeah. Yeah. I I think that's that's really important. If you're looking to increase your spindle up time without adding any headcount, check out the Hennig Workflow Automation System. I've seen it, I love it. It's a compact, automated pallet delivery solution that lets you work ahead of your machine so your shop never stops. You can load up to 40 pallets with material, fixtures, programs, and just let the workflow cook. A Henning Workflow is designed for high mix machining, works with a wide range of machines. And even with a 125 pound payload on top of a 300 millimeter pallet, yet still takes up less space than most competitors' pallet automation system. That means more production, fewer manual changeovers, really just a practical path to high profit lights out machining. Learn more about the Hennig Workflow by visiting Hennigworldwide.com slash workflow. thinking about like as leaders, what we what what should we fix first? We've kind of got maybe a couple things. And there's there's two t two directions I want to maybe chat about, which we've kind of already chatted about the first one is that, okay, we want to fix the leader situation below us, right? We want to help bring other people into those roles. We want to empower them to be decision makers. And we want to then I guess essentially you're kind of like starting to clone yourself a little bit, right? And so having them ask the right questions and be able to get to the right solutions without having to come ask someone above them, right? And that's ultimately what we what we want to do. But then also, you know, thinking about there's going to be now there's going to be things in your business like we we can't fix everything at once. So I think we just start looking at the different areas in your organization that are giving you the most confusion, causing the most delays. where are you seeing are you seeing repeat rework somewhere? So for us, you know, if I had to kind of rank how that looks for us, I would say, you know, look like looking at the just broadly, the looking at the production floor first, right? That's probably where the biggest majority of our problems are gonna be, just because I mean there's the most work going on there. We can drill down into that. Then there's areas of our quality that needs to be looked at, right? How are we handling the throughput of our quality department, our first articles, first offs, final inspections? Then maybe you're gonna look at your engineering or your purchasing, maybe your shipping departments. So you kinda go through each of those and and really start by fixing the repeat problems. Talk to your people, find out what is frustrating your people. Like what are the things that, hey, every single day this is a problem. Like I have to do this over and over. What are you having to do over and over? And then and then be able to attack those things individually. So kind of creating a process for actually attacking and improving the process. Yep. Think you summarized that real good. I would say the we're talking about your processes, you can't improve your process again if your process doesn't exist. So try and think where if you're looking for where it has the biggest impact, well, what's your highest runner parts? What's your machine that's running the most, or where's the biggest risk to your business? Where's got the greatest value of parts, or where are you making money at the most, or where's your most time sensitive? And you you need to make sure you're tackling it in the right place. But you gotta invest your time, you gotta invest on creating your standard operating procedure, stop relying on the tribal knowledge. I think with that too, you know, one of the things we haven't necessarily touched on is we've gotta define the ownership, right? There's a there's a point where we need to define ownership because we've got clear priorities, right, for the individuals. We've got, you know, improving our our standardization, we've got work notes or setup documentation, those things, but Making sure that we're defining the ownership of different things in our shop and getting metrics tied to them. You know, we've kind of touched on that in some of our other shows where you've got to work to be able to measure certain things so that way you can monitor it easier. Right. Because if you don't have a way to measure it, then there's no good way to monitor it. And so that that just kind of leaves you, you know, your monitoring can't be thirty seconds. It's now thirty minutes to go. figure it out. And then you're not getting those indicators, those early indicators. You know, you're kind of you're you're lagging indicators is what you're seeing. You're finding problems after the fact, not before they're starting to build and happen. And interesting to know how you record that, right? And we're looking for our our turn backs or our process failure. So sometimes you there's patterns there that you don't see unless you're recording them somewhere. So where's these issues that keep biting you over and over again, where you're losing time consistently but you haven't ever tackled before. And sometimes we just don't record our issues. And if we actually recorded, if we actually took time, here's a book, every time we have an issue, a machine stops, anytime we're losing time, go to that book, write down what the issue was, what caused it. And whenever you reflect and and look back at that, you may realize that there's patterns of things that you should be addressing. Maybe that wasn't on your radar before. Yeah. And you can do that from a maintenance standpoint too. Right. Because like obviously like for us, like CNC equipment, you know, there are are some breakdowns. There are some things like this happens or that happens, this error code, that error code. If we're logging that information, then we can look back and see three years ago we had the same problem. What did we do to fix it? So that fix can come a lot quicker. It doesn't take us eight hours, we can do it in an hour. And I think that's where like I'm I am not AI savvy like a lot of people. There are there are people that are way more AI savvy. And I was kind of being a little facetious earlier when I w when I said I'm gonna we're gonna create a AI chatbot named Bob. But you know, there's something to that if you've got the ability. And I know Jamie Marzelli on the Raw Material podcast, he's talked about this where, you know, he's creating a chat bot that is going to I mean he's he's putting all this information into their own local brain, if you will. And that is, you know, if we continue to feed this information, it's a little scary. I'm not gonna lie to you, but if we're feeding our problems into it and then we're feeding our solutions into it when we run into future problems, it may have our solutions that we've already established, but it's easy to forget. I mean, you know, you just different people, different personnel, different shifts, but somebody else has probably already experienced this problem and they've already got a solution to it. So we don't have to go back and redo it. We can just look at our own information, sift through it, yeah, helps us do that quickly, and then get to a solution faster than we would otherwise. Yeah. That's a really, really good way of of recording those lessons learned, right? And then being able to apply them again whenever the same situation arises. Whether that's the same team that it arises with or different personnel, at least you've got a a golden book of answers that you can go to and say, Here's the issues. Have we had it before? What did we do? Yeah. What do we need do differently? Or and then how do we prevent it from happening again? Sometimes we're just not good enough at doing that full corrective action, right? And in training out that to prevent it from happening again rather than yeah. Rather than fixing it again, it's how do we prevent it for the next time? One of the challenging parts is making sure that you're getting your information recorded. That's a challenge in all business because it's easy enough. to like you're working for three hours to find a fix to this problem. So all right, I found the solution. So what's like the the traditional way is okay, I've got the machine fixed, I've got this process fixed, go run it. And you don't stop immediately and go record what happened. Like that is so difficult. It's very hard to do, but it's a very critical step. And I think if you're not as a leader, if you're not requiring that from your team then you're not able to capture that data. Like it's it's as much as important that the leader is enforcing that. I mean, you know, you it has to be enforced because if you don't continue to require your team to put in that information, then then it's just going to be lost. I mean, 'cause it's just easier not to do it. Yeah. And a lot of times people don't see the importance of having that until a certain point in time. And you're you're making me think just about Handoffs in general, right? And whether that's anything, it's just could be whether it's information, things moving between departments in your shop. If you don't have a good clean handover and a handover process, then you're gonna get gaps, which is where processes are gonna break down, whether it's information, right? Where does engineering bring information to, where does quality find their information, where do operations hand over the parts to quality, where does Logistics, warehouses interact. If you don't have clear handover points at all those points of communication, then you're also going to get breakdown in your processes, which is going to lead you to lost time, whether it's defects by gaps in communication, all of that. But the goal is to I'm I'm thinking about where you said earlier about your gaps between your shifts. And I can't stop thinking about that because I see that as well between day shift and night shift. How do we get a clean pass between shifts? Is it that you do a five minute handover, a crossover between people? Or is it simply just by five S, right? You're taking five minutes to make sure everything's back the way it was so that the next shift knows where everything is before they start. So that there's no unusual abnormalities in the environment around so that people can pick it up in a fluid manner. We have to try and eliminate any assumptions like I thought the morning shift finished that or I thought night shift had completed that. Right. Those gaps in communication are big problems. Yeah. And that's where having better system doesn't remove the accountability, like right. They actually make that accountability clearer. They make it fairer. They make it more effective. Because, you know, if you're putting those things in place now, you know that your team is ready for that next step. You know that that shift handoff is. has been communicated clearly. Now there's actually an accountability. I mean, you know, it's it's not that you're trying to be a hard nose about things, but if you have done the right things from a leadership standpoint, then there needs to be accountability, right? Because that's where we can start to figure out, okay, is it laziness? Is it lack of effort? Is it, you know, lack of abilities? But now as you have put those processes into f into place, we c we can actually have some of that accountability. And that's Yeah. So those systems make that accountability possible. I think, you know, sometimes people probably worry that talking about systems it it can kind of be excuses for people, but you know, a strong system actually creates better accountability because those expectations are very clear and and you really can't have true accountability without having a clear standard. The standard becomes the boss, not the leader. Right. Yeah. It's not for the leader to come to say you're not working hard enough or you're not working fast enough or I think you're lazy, right? You can't say that as a leader. But if you have a system and the system says that the target should be ten per hour and the dashboard shows you only made seven per hour, then the system says you're lazy, you're not working fast enough, you're not hitting your target, right? Yeah. It be it doesn't become opinionated. It becomes factual based on the standard, right? It's about knowing that your environment should be set up. It should look like this, right? Here's a good environment. Photograph it. Stick up the photograph. Here's what I expect it to look like. So whenever you come down, if the environment doesn't look like the photograph, you say, well, why doesn't the environment look like the photograph? Right? It's it's non negotiable. Why do we do our five S and lay out all our tools and shadow boards and all of that? Because that's the standard that it should look like. And it's easy to manage this standard because it takes the opinions away from it. Right. Sometimes it can be hard for that leader to hold the employees accountable because it takes effort, it takes work, but you know, the system is what defines what good looks like. The process makes those expectations visible, right? That documentation, it w it can help reduce confusion, but ultimately, you know, they have that leader has to be the one to like enforce those standards, enforce those expectations, enforce that documentation. And if you're not doing those things and you you you're ultimately hurting your organization. Yeah. Yeah. I think what you need to do is is change that opening question. I I said there about w if the target's ten and you only hit seven. Well the question should never be, well, why did you mess up? Why didn't you hit your target? It's it's looking back at the process and saying, Well, why did the process not enable us to get ten? Why why did the process? Yeah. And w Yeah. And then using your processes, you should be able to see clearly, well, did the material arrive on time or did it arrive late? Did the machine malfunction or did it run when it was supposed to? Or did we miss a training step and did we make an error? And all of that should be very factual based on your process defined steps. And it's not opinion because you should be able to see it based on your standards. Yeah. It sh it should be a fair approach for your employee. It should feel fair. It shouldn't feel like you're ever picking on the you shouldn't ever feel like you're picking on the employee because the the target is how do you make it a no blame zone? We should never go in blaming the employee, right? The goal should be to shift management response from who did it till what part of the process allowed this situation to happen. Yeah. And then if you do that, workers will then start telling you the steps that are broken. Rather than necessarily maybe staying quiet about it because they don't want to be blamed. Yeah. Your accountability should never feel random either, right? And because, you know, if you're if you're having that communication, you're you're clearly communicating those standards, it's not gonna be random, it's not gonna be biased, you know, you're not gonna play favorites to one or the other. Those are other things that could really hurt the morale aspect in your organization. If if one individual f or two individuals feel like, well, these other other people get preferential treatment, right? Those things, you know, that's that's gonna be a terrible point for your morale. But if everybody is held to the same standard, everybody is held to the same responsibilities, then that is a very fair organization. And that actually I think builds even more trust because they know they can depend on that leader to have their back when they need it and they can have that leader to to hold them accountable when it's needed. And and honestly, I think most times people People appreciate somebody that's gonna hold them accountable. Like I mean, as individuals, I mean, if we have somebody that we know that truly cares about us and is holding us accountable in a positive way, then we're gonna work harder for that person. Like we're willing to go the extra mile. We're able to put in extra effort because we don't wanna disappoint them because we know that they care about us and that they're trying to help us be better individuals. So there's there's a lot of personality complex. that you know, and and how personalities have to work together, but but that's all part of that that larger structure. So I think maybe think about how you even structure your your problem solving. Sometimes if we go in and you find a defect or something's gone wrong or broken, think about your strategy and how you investigate it, right? The first time you have that deviation, what do you do? Do you retrain? Okay, well what happens the second time you have the same deviation? Do you retrain again? Or do you do A process audit, right? What do you find out of the process audit? Maybe you find nothing, maybe you find things and you fix it. So then the third time you have deviation, then what do you do? Do you retrain again? Do you do another audit? Do you do a performance review? Do you do something right? But it's it's good though if you have a standard and just document it. Okay, this is the first time we've seen this issue. So what we'll do is we're gonna retrain because we think that's the best solution. Or We don't think it was a training issue. Let's review it. Or this is the third time it's happened. Do you know what? I need to get an engineer down here to do a process confirmation or to review the audit with me because there's something going wrong that I can understand. And it's good if you can also document and put a structure behind your problem solving technique so that the employees will be able to predict and know what's happening and understand why. Mm-hmm. Well, and and with that, Asking questions that are reflective upon leadership is important, right? You know, we've we've talked about this, but did we as leaders make the expectation clear and giving honest answers, right? Because if every one of our problems happen and we always end up coming to a root cause that's on based on like a single employee or that emplo that lower employee, so to speak, they're not gonna have trust in the system, right? Because I'm gonna I'm gonna be open to say that there are times where my I'm not giving clear expectations, I'm not providing the right tools, I'm not communicating what the priorities are. I didn't do the right training. And so as leaders, we have to also be super self reflective and own it. If we're wrong, we're wrong. And don't be afraid to say that you are wrong. Because I think people respect that too, right? Because if if you're constantly blaming others, then that's going to reflect negatively upon you and nobody's gonna stand there with you. But if you n if they know that, hey, If they mess up, they're gonna own it. If you mess up, you're gonna own it. If and if Bob messes up, Bob's gonna own it. Then then now everybody's owning their own mistakes. You're not getting fired for it, but we're gonna make ourselves better for it. And I think that's how we can make that entire process more successful, more repeatable, and more give us more ability to train the right ways instead of, you know, blaming That blame culture, that blame game. You can't you can't succeed with that long term. You're just not going to be able to We have to resist the urge of being a cop, right? It's not about catching people out doing something wrong. We need to focus on becoming coaches and helping the team win against our challenges. Yeah. But but can we have a jury? Can we put people on trial? Is that so you're saying we can't put people on trial? No. A jury, a jury box. And if you're found guilty, what happens? Do you get docked out a week's wage? I don't know. I like that. Maybe we'll find we'll find like a good charity that it goes to and you lose a week's wages to the charity. I don't know. I can think of a good charity it should go to. I've seen it before where on a production line, I'm thinking more of assembly maybe than your machine shop, but I've seen right a a worker, someone on assembly, they install part A instead of part B. And immediately management comes down. Well, who caused this? What happened? Okay, they identify the person who'd done it, right? There's a reprimand. Why? Because they weren't paying attention, they installed the wrong part, you get a disciplinary note, and then everyone's told you gotta double check your work before you're finished, right? Before you complete that work, before you say you're done, before it moves on to the next station, double check it. That's not really the answer. Because you know what? Two weeks later the exact same mistake happens with a different person. So When the leader finally stops blaming the person, you have to allow, well, what happens to this? Why why does this happen? What allows it to happen? But it's systemic of the environment, right? Is it yeah the two parts that they got mixed up with? Do they come in identical packaging? Right. The two parts may look the same. They could be a handed left, right hand. They could be it could be difficult to tell the difference. They could come in the same packaging and impossible to tell to the naked eye. It could be maybe it's just fatigue. Maybe the guy's been working overtime. Maybe we're running ten, twelve hour days and they've already in maybe they've already assembled four hundred and they got one wrong and it's just fatigue. Maybe it's pressure. You're at month end, you're rushing to hit your quota, you get it wrong. There's loads and loads of reasons. But we need to be thinking about systemic fixes and whether that's error proof or something else, like color coding. Color coding, right? Red goes to red. Well, I shouldn't use red. Red's bad. Blue to blue. Yellow to blue. No, you never use red on the floor. Yeah. So something like that. Pokeyoking, right? How do you make it mistake proofing? How do you make it easier for someone to do their job rather than taking the easy way out in blaming the person? Or nowadays we're talking about Barcode scanning or AI watching the floor. Yeah. Nowadays we have a building quality, right? Where AI is supposed to inspect these things and tell us if it meets the criteria or if it doesn't. So think of all those opportunities just before we start going blaming the people on the floor. Yeah. Well, I really like how you frame that question. And it's really it's not who caused this, but the question you need to ask is what allowed this to happen? That's exactly right. I mean, I ran into that situation not long ago. We had a really old program. Like this is a product we used to make tens of thousands of parts years ago. We still make a few, but not very often. But there were some special tools inside that program. We had a couple of options. Like, you know, this one program, you could make three different parts out of it. So the operator had to make some decisions, which was fine when we were doing them. all the time, every day. It was very simple. But now, you know, five years down the road, you've got somebody who had never really run those is now running them. And now they're having to make decisions inside of the program of which way to go. Super confusing. And we end up killing parts. Not a huge deal because we kind of found it early, but then it happened again. And so then we started digging in and we were like, okay, why are we allowing there to be decisions made inside of this program? Well, Again, it's training because back in the old days it was really simple. Like, okay, I'm making this part, so I choose one, six, and fourteen. I'm making this part, I'm choosing two, eight and twenty one, whatever it is. And so we we knew, but we didn't have it documented properly. So we were able to stop, make changes, split everything up. So now if you're running this one, you know you choose this one and then there's no options or no no decisions that have to be made. And so that's I think an an important thing. So And and I would say this week, you know, my challenge is look at something that's a a problem in your shop. Look for something that's a recurring issue in your shop and ask, are we dealing with a people problem or do we have good people stuck inside of a broken system? That's it for this shift on the manufacturing blueprint. Your work is just getting started. Before you blame the person, inspect the system. Whether you're Expectations were clear or not, whether the tools were ready, whether the training was in place, whether the process gave that person a fair chance to succeed. Make sure you look at those things because strong systems don't replace accountability. They make accountability possible. So if this episode helped you think differently about your shop, your team, or the way you lead, make sure you follow the podcast, share it with someone else in manufacturing. That helps us bring this content and more conversations and more real world solutions to the people who are building things every day. We're giving you the blueprint. Now go build.