Doing well. How are you?

Sure, so Alphanova Consulting, as you mentioned? Right. We’re a consulting firm and we help manufacturers improve their performance, their bottom line, basically. And we do it through operational improvements. We also focus on developing their people and a few other things. But basically, that’s the focus of the business. We’ve been in business for about six years.

And to answer your question about how it all started, how I got into manufacturing. You know, originally I my path was very different. I wanted to be a lawyer when I was coming out of high school, I was attracted to the I guess, the demands of the career, you know, inquisitive and investigative.

And so when I learned that you had to get on a new license or a new bar exam for every state you moved to, I said, okay, I’m not doing that. And so I decided the next best thing or closest to being a problem solver was industrial engineering. And that’s where I started. That’s where my college career or most of my college time started.

Fast forward and I’m originally from the Dominican Republic, and I moved to Puerto Rico. And when I finished a master’s degree out there, I wanted to get into manufacturing because being an engineer and loving math and all those things, I wanted to get into that. So I moved to Texas, which is my home base 16 years ago now.

And that’s when I transitioned into manufacturing. And the reason being, again, I enjoy seeing how things get built and just have a passion for that, for collaborating with people, with solving problems and seeing how, we turn materials and things into a product that we all consume and use.

Absolutely, I remember talking to other folks and getting the question, why do you care where it comes from? All I care is that it works . To me was intriguing and I wanted to get more details and understand how it all comes together. So that’s part of my motivation and my passion for it.

I did, yes.

Actually, before I answer that question, I wanted to mention something. I have a gift for your listeners, and it’s a link to a self-assessment where they can take it and get feedback as to their performance gives them a benchmark. So if we can have that available to them, that would be, you know, useful to your listeners.

Okay. Yeah, very cool. So to answer your question about my passion, so I mean, I feel a lot of passion for the manufacturing sector. I feel it’s I mean, in a world that’s going more towards information and service, especially here in the U.S., it feels like manufacturing is becoming less and less significant. And I feel that manufacturing should also should almost be protected because it’s almost part of the infrastructure, the independence and part of a country being self-sufficient.

If you look at, you know, Europe and France, I think Germany is one of the countries that’s being talked about that’s best handled some of the economic downturns. And a lot of it comes from being self-sufficient because they’re strong in manufacturing. And I feel that’s an intricate part of a good economy of a country. And again, as I mentioned, seeing how things get done and improving have a hand in improving what’s there.
That’s my passion. I guess when I collaborate with folks and we’re able to have an impact, a positive impact, that is it’s very rewarding and fulfilling when you’re able to find folks that you can collaborate in and having a positive impact.

That’s exactly right. It’s to me, it’s part of a of a strong economy. And when you have that back and then safe from imports, you know, especially now. Right. We have all these supply chain issues. Countries that don’t have that infrastructure are unfortunately suffering the consequences of that.

That’s part of it. I wouldn’t say it’s the whole thing. So if I can, I’ll run past the six that you read on the article. To me, the first one’s got to be leadership support. And I’m talking about the senior leader. You have to have complete buy in. I see a lot of people out there that see, you know, the Toyota production system, as some people call it, or lean as head of a project that has a beginning and an end.

And unfortunately, that misconception leads to a lot of failure. And what it should be is more of the adoption of a management system into your business and where you are basically implementing it. And then it becomes just the how you do business. The second one, it’s having a steering committee. And that’s where this leader that I just mentioned brings in their direct reports.

So picture of the executive team of a manufacturing business, and they’re all coming together to drive a common vision. So what that means is they all have to be bought in, committed. And a lot of times when I talk to clients before we engage, I say, look, you really have to understand that for this to be successful, you’ll need a level of commitment that even if you find an obstacle as big as a person that you respect and you’ve worked with for the last 20 years, we have to be able to overcome that either by bringing them along with us.

Or maybe making a decision as to maybe there’s a change that needs to be made, whether it’s the responsibility or even exiting the company in those those cases have happened as well. The third one is having a strategy deployment process. And I’m walking through all six of them, since you asked. The strategy, the appointment process is basically were that that team, that steering committee sets the direction so that everybody working in that business has the same direction.

They’re pulling in the same direction. The priorities are aligned and there’s no contradicting targets or goals, if you will. And that every person from the strategic leaders all the way down to the operators that are working on the shop floor, know what the target is and what’s their part and implement in actually realizing those improvements.

The next one, the fourth one would be Lean Daily Management. And this is where an old Deming cycle that was called PDCA, basically establish a plan, go execute it with being mindful of what the obstacles are, check what those are, and develop countermeasures and then go act. That’s probably one of the areas that I see lacking in a lot of these manufacturing businesses, having the discipline to do that.

The next one is having lean leaders. We call, out in the industry, you’ll hear that term lean leaders, which is basically having leaders that really apply the principles that mentor their folks and make them participate into the improvement process. And then lastly, I would say trained and engaged employees. If your employees are engaged, you’re wasting their talent because people will give you the solutions to their problems.

They live through them every day. And so they’ve thought about it 100 times. How do we solve this? It’s not going to be every case, but in a lot of cases they will have. And the other part of it is that if we implement something, it could be the perfect solution or effective. If employees are not part of the solution, just by nature of change being done to them, there’s a very high likelihood they will reject it, which will make it unsustainable. So those are the six. I don’t know if you wanted me to walk you through all of them, but basically It’s the rundown of all six of these elements.

It’s not very easy. There is actually a very well known publication out there that completed a survey years ago, and their estimation was that 70% of manufacturers are engaged, and I said 70%. So almost three quarters of them are engaged in some kind of improvement initiative, but only 24% of those actually see significant improvement in their execution in their business, basically.

And so, I mean, I would tell you the magnitude of difficulty almost all of them are doing it, and only a quarter of the ones that try actually get the results that they’re looking for, that’s how difficult it is.

I think I do believe so because here’s my observation. I feel that it you know, putting processes in place takes skill. Right. It takes understanding and knowledge. But actually, the part that’s always missing or more and more often missing is the behavior side. Changing behavior that is so tough for human beings, for us to change what we, you know, are accustomed to.

And so I feel that’s the part that makes it so difficult, so tough to take an entire organization and change their mindset, how they approach things, how open they are to making change and adapting to it. That’s what makes it so difficult. The other part, anybody can learn the technical aspect of things. It’s the mindsets and the behavior change.

No question. You know, one question that I get from people as I’m working with them is, you know, when does it end, is there a time where we make it and we’re lean and efficient. And I say, look, here’s how you have to think about it. There are two driving forces for two opposite driving forces. You have forces driving you to actually have a less efficient operation.

And these things are, you know, new processes, new equipment, new people, new requirements, new regulation expansion as well. So these things are always they’re pushing you to be at risk or be or becoming less efficient. And so you have to counter that constantly with improvements and recognizing that we need to change and evolve to be able to overcome those challenges and keep our edge and our competitive position in the marketplace.

Well, I mean, there’s several tips I can give. So one is some people don’t understand there’s a gap in performance. So they have to understand what are we trying to accomplish? What’s the vision? If it’s a specific metric saying we’re trying to improve quality or on time delivery or cost, there’s so many. If you make it clear to people that there’s a gap.

They’ll be more inclined to say, okay, we’re not meeting our goal, right? It’s not good enough. So we have to do something about it. Second one is, you know, what’s in it for me that’s very common out there. Like, what do we get out of doing this? How does that impact my work environment in a positive way? If I engage and try to make things better.

Another one is go solve a problem. You have people out there that sometimes they have legacy management that they’ve lost credibility with the people in the business. And it takes so little sometimes go solve a problem so they start trusting you again. So you earn that trust in that credibility. And then the lastly, I will saying get them involved.

If people are able to say, I mean, I’ve seen this, they say, are you telling me that I can solve this problem? We’re saying, yes, we want your input. We want you to be part of the solution. That goes so far into getting people to buy in that it’s typically a really good approach.

That’s exactly.

I share a term that came up in conversation with our client years ago. They said, make sure you avoid coagulation. And they complained it was a playing words with which was collaboration through manipulation. So don’t do coagulation. It’s not like you have to make them think that it’s their idea. It’s how can we get that knowledge? Tap into that day to day interaction that they have with the process and equipment and so on, to turn that into energy to make improvements?
Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. So I remember this company, we were working with them and they were trying to reduce their lead times. They were basically reducing their lead time because the competition was basically getting to a place where it was not an obvious decision for the client. And so they needed to drastically reduce their lead times. So we went and very aggressively pursued.

We found so much opportunity. They were they have very poor practices in terms of their processes, not defined they had some practices that we call things like bad chain. They didn’t have work standards. So the quality of product was really not defined. So they ended up with a lot of returns and a lot of defects, internal defects, if you will.

And just to sum it up, we were able to help them reduce the lead time from 14 days to three days. Which was significant. But the back story was that, you know, sometimes those things don’t happen at the first go around or very quickly you have to push. You have to be persistent. People are going to are going to push back.

I remember one of the leaders that were in there said, I’m going to quote, I think he said Vince Lombardi. And he said, I will lose twice, but not with the same team. In other words, he said, we need to really get on to this. And sometimes people have to believe to buy in. And some people have to, you know, for lack of a better word, they have to be pushed or nudged along the way.

And once they see it, they’re saying, wow, we’re really having an impact here. And then we go. And so that team really got fired up and we made a significant amount of improvements. I mean, out of, I believe, 17 plants they had at the time, the plant, we were engaged. They rose up to, I believe it was number two in terms of productivity and quality, which was significant.

It was it was significant.

That’s exactly right. I was going to say that, you know, sometimes people I mean, this somebody actually one time made that comment. Is this something you come over a weekend and smack us over that and more lean? I said that’s definitely not how it works. And I mean I tell people that ask for a timeline.

You know at a very at a minimum, you’re probably looking at 18 months. As these things start take hold and you execute them, when you start getting into strategy, that takes several years, several cycles of you really going through this process and being successful at it. And then add to that the things I mentioned a little bit ago, which were, you know, new products are going to expansion.

You’re always battling those things. It’s a never ending journey to improve the business.

You know, actually, I haven’t I’ve found the opposite because now the need is there more magnified, right? So people are saying demand is there, we can’t fulfill it. So it becomes a more tangible problem. As opposed to saying we want to improve just for the sake of improving or because we want to maintain our edge, as you said.

Or where can we improve or there’s that fatigue factor. Now it’s a need. And so there’s a saying that says the mother of invention of innovation is, is need right, when we have a need, we take action. So it’s actually been the opposite where people are saying we have to reduce our lead times, we have to reduce defects and we have to shorten our lead time.
So we can deliver because clients or the demand is too skyrocketing with everything that’s happened in the last 24 months.

Well, I mean, I guess the only thing I can say is that we work with manufacturers and we typically what we do is we help them reduce their costs by it could be as much as 25%, sometimes more, restore their quality to 99% and their on time delivery to 99%. And to accomplish those things, so many issues happen between equipment and people and so on.
So, you know, if anyone wants to learn more, we have plenty of resources on our website. They can visit us at alphanovaconsulting.com and if of course they want to have a conversation to learn more about us, they can reach out. We have our information out on the website and we’d be glad to help, regardless of if they end up, you know, hiring on our services or not.

Very good, Matt. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it as well.