Revolutionise Your Service Delivery : Data-Driven Transformation with Jason MacLean

Revolutionise your service delivery, data driven transformation. Join us as Jason MacLean from Freepoint Technology shares unique insights on measuring and improving manufacturing performance. Now I know what you’re saying. You’re in professional services. You’re a management consultant. There is so much we can learn from what manufacturing does.

They’ve got real time data that enhances productivity. That’s something we can all learn from. You’re going to be able to reduce downtimes and foster continuous improvement in your business. We’ll talk everything from AI to change management. It’s an episode you don’t want to miss. Let’s get into Biz Bites.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And my guest today is someone we met online, but we actually got to meet in person, which is a rarity considering he’s way on the other side of the world. Jason is. All about measuring performance, improving excellence as a result of that in a very interesting way.

I’m gonna let him introduce himself. Jason. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Yeah, Jason MacLean. I’m director of enterprise accounts and sales here at three point technologies in London, Ontario, Canada. Pleased to meet you and see you again. Yes, that’s the great little story that we had where we actually had an opportunity.

We engage with each other and unbeknownst to me. You were traveling to to Sydney and we actually got a chance to meet in person, share, share a drink or two, and and discuss a whole lot of different things that we’re going to touch on some of those as we go through it go through the episode today.

Just tell me, I guess that’s the first thing is the business itself is not just located there. You obviously were in Sydney amongst other places in Australia for Yeah. What we do is primarily in the manufacturing sectors. We have software and hardware that we bring into the manufacturing environment where we can attach sensors and different types of software solutions to measure performance.

A lot of my customer base is in Australia and New Zealand, so I try to make it down at least once a year. To, visit all the customers. I don’t always get to see all of them, but I try. Yeah, so we connect all these sensors and limit switches and software to a manufacturer’s environment and we can pick up downtime, count measure performance and benchmarking.

We have scheduling solutions for production scheduling where, you can optimize your output. Standardised work instructions, the list goes on, but that’s primarily what we do. We come in and give that manufacturer the visibility from the shop floor perspective that they may not have had.

Before I think what’s interesting about this space is that particularly I know a lot of my audience are in the professional services or consulting type spaces, but ultimately, there’s a lot of similarities here because it’s still people driven, even though there’s a fair amount of equipment and automation that might be involved in the process, there’s still people that are driving the quality of the workmanship that’s happening along the way, let alone the end quality of the product itself.

Yeah, I felt like our solution gives you that visibility from, say, production supervisor or management standpoint to see that action and that activity on the shop floor. If anything, it’ll boost productivity and quality because the team members on the shop floor. typically want to do a good job and they want to be rewarded for that.

This gives us a visibility of that activity, right? Yeah, I find it boosts that morale, it boosts the quality output of whatever product that manufacturer is making, and and that OEE, if you want to call it that, right? I think it’s interesting too, because most people would assume that once you put Whatever equipment you need in place, that efficiency just happens.

That’s not necessarily the case, right? No, typically, what I see with my customers anyway is, if you deploy our solution on the shop floor and you show the visibility give that visibility, whether that’s on big screen TVs hanging up on the shop floor or maybe it’s operator monitors that they can view their own activity.

You typically see about a 15 percent increase in productivity across the entire shop. And that’s not with, that’s without doing anything. That’s just showing what, because people are going to see that. They’re going to see their own metrics and their own KPIs and try to improve. That’s just human nature, right?

Whether it’s competitive from shift to shift, or it’s just them challenging themselves. But yeah, when you start really diving into, say, the reports and all the metrics that we do capture, and then form plans, whether it’s continuous improvement projects, to make processes or environments better that’s when you see The real ROI, right?

Yeah, I think that’s, it’s interesting as well. I just want to touch on the initial reaction that you have from people because they’re effectively being monitored. And so the one part is to go as you described it as being competitive and going, Oh, I’ve got, and that willingness to want to improve, but is there the other side where people are going?

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So come talk to us, podcast done for you. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to biz bites, but is there the other side where people are going? Hang on, Big Brother’s watching me a little bit too closely. Oh yeah, you get that. It’s all in the approach. I try to be as hands on with the deployment as I can.

There are some customers that they want to do all that onboarding and set up themselves. And deployment is in their control. And that’s fine, but you do have that, that mentality that Big Brother’s watching every move that I make now, or You also have that, depending on how you deploy solutions is You know, you’re giving the team member a voice and the ability to tell their side of the story.

So if there was quality defects, if there was downtime, I’m giving you a solution where you can enter in that information now. Or it’s captured in real time and you aren’t going to have That big brother coming down from the head office to, to question you, the story is already told, right? It’s all in the approach, I believe.

If you just deploy a solution on the shop floor and don’t get that team member feedback and interaction, then I think that big brother mentality is what’s going to stick, right? Yeah, that’s, it is an important thing, isn’t it? I think for any business and automation is becoming more and more a part of, of businesses all the time now, and it is about how you manage that human interaction that is going to become more and more critical in that process of not only deploying it, but overseeing it.

Yeah, and the more lean customer, like I know a lot of companies are trying to run as lean as possible, especially post covid. I think having a solution in place like ours it eliminates that need to have You know, supervisors walking the shop floor as much as they used to pick up, say, Excel sheets, or team members writing down things on paper, and it has to get entered in later on.

It’s a huge time savings to have a solution like ours on the shop floor with companies running as lean as they do. Or at least as lean as they try to run, right? Yeah. I think that’s an interesting point too, isn’t it? That, that how lean are they trying to run? Because that’s one of the things that people are seeing is okay.

Invest in the technology, eliminate the people. Therefore, greater greater profit, but it’s not necessarily that way, is it? And some of it is also changing the changing. There might be some jobs that are lost, but there are new jobs that are being created as a result as well, aren’t there? Yes, that’s right.

Like I’ll use my perspective and my experience with our solution specifically. Like I was with Toyota Motor Manufacturing for 21 years and then I went to a Tier 2 automotive supplier as a maintenance manager and I actually brought this solution that I’m promoting to, every day into a environment where there was nothing.

And I found there was a little bit of that big brother mentality at first. I changed my approach and I was giving the team members the ability to, say, call for help in a process. They no longer had to leave the process to find somebody, like maintenance or a supervisor. They could tell their side of the story.

I as a maintenance manager was able to showcase through all the reports that I was generating with our solutions that I was understaffed. So I was inefficient because I didn’t have enough maintenance team members. That gave me some of the metrics that I needed to go to the front office and say, Hey, we need to hire somebody.

And this is the reason why. Whatever those reasons were at the time. So I got two new maintenance team members out of that. One electrician, one millwright. You can, it depends on how you want to use and analyze the data, right? You can. Promoted that you need more people, or you could use it as a time savings and eliminate some of those old outdated, antiquated tasks.

Yeah, I think it is an important perspective that people understand that it is perspective, right? That it is about how you want to drive into it, because a lot of it is fear based. That we’re bringing in the machines are going to take over, we don’t have any work, what are we going to do? And it’s actually not really that’s not a fair perspective on how things work.

Going. And as you say, there are opportunities then where if you improve efficiencies in one area, it may create new positions in order to support that drive, not only for greater efficiencies, but for increased productivity. Absolutely. 100%. 100%. And there’s a lot of fluff out there, like whether it’s marketing or I see a lot of posts on LinkedIn where they’re talking about Industry 5.

0 now, and I don’t even know what that is, right? The, Industry 4. 0, I know it gets tossed out there a lot I don’t think the majority of manufacturers out there are at Industry 2 or 3. 0, A lot of fluff. There’s a lot of over exaggeration with regard to AIs taking over everything and Yeah, AI has some pretty cool stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s just cool stuff.

It’s cool tech. It’s not a solution. It’s not a permanent solution. You need to have those team members, managers, supervisors, leads on the shop floor driving these changes, right? Yeah, absolutely. You still need that human element in there. And so talk to me about that. The human element itself, once you come in there and how much of what you’re doing is improving the balance between what the machines are doing, what the human element is doing, how does that, how do you find that blend?

Because some of it is, some of it I imagine is improving what the machines can do as well as what the human element can do. From a Consultative base, like I’ve been in manufacturing, say, all my career. Some of these pain points that some of the manufacturing leaders are trying to solve, I’ve been through.

I can put myself in their shoes. And we can deploy our solutions tailored to those pain points. Which is great. But, yeah, driving change on the shop floor. You need to have a, what’s your cause, what’s your purpose, what’s your reason for doing this? Is it just to check a box, or are you trying to improve a process for X, Y, Z reasons?

Benchmarking is a big one. Do you know your throughput, your OEE, where you’re supposed to be at versus where you are in real time. You’d be surprised how many manufacturing sites don’t know their OEE don’t know their throughput, what it’s expected to be. They know what it costs for, say, downtime.

But they don’t know their throughput. They don’t know their OEE. And if they do, it’s written in a binder somewhere and nobody knows where it is. Running into that a fair bit. Having those questions in mind or those tasks in mind. Okay, we’re going to benchmark. We’re going to try to improve this process by identifying bottlenecks, identifying, is there excessive steps in a process that don’t need to be there?

Or maybe you need to rebalance your entire line, right? Is the job that you’re doing underburdened, and the job that the person beside you is doing is overburdened, and that’s why you overcycle on that process all the time creating a bottleneck. If you don’t have tools to visualize all that, then you’ll never know.

So we try to give that ability and that visual, visual shop floor perspective where you can see all the bottlenecks right away in real time. I think most people can relate to that. I think particularly any business owners that are listening right now, is no matter what size your business is, I think you, everyone would be nodding their heads and going, I realize I’m probably a bottleneck at some point in my business.

But it’s actually understanding how. How vast that bottleneck might be and how, how easy it may be to unblock it and to go around that. And I think that’s that is such an important aspect for any business to fully understand. Yeah, and it could be something simple as you’ve been monitoring your process for a month or two.

And you’re looking at before and after data. And, hey, at the end of the day, you make a plan to save. Whether it’s a couple seconds, in some cases, or a few minutes of whatever task that team member is doing or that machine is doing. It could be as simple as an equipment, move or change.

It could be in some cases we’ve had some locations that re engineered the entire process just because it’s non profitable, but they always thought it was a big money maker. Once you start visualizing it and showing it, reporting out on these benchmarks, you’re able to make some critical changes and some, I’m not going to say smarter decisions, but some quicker decisions on specific processes, right?

I think one of the interesting things about processes for any business is there’s history, and often, The reason you started doing something was a valid reason, and it might be because of, where things were placed or the opportunities, and then everything has been built around that, and you haven’t gone back and questioned why that, or whether that decision that was made in the first place is now still relevant and could be changed, and I bet that’s something that you see all the time in business.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s that this is the way we’ve always done it kind of attitude where You know, in some cases it fits, but in a lot of cases it doesn’t anymore. The whole point of continuous improvement is it’s continuous, right? Yeah, it’s a great idea, let’s implement it, and then let’s build on that, right?

It’s, once is never enough. Let’s continue, it’s continuous improvements. Let’s continue to build on whatever that good idea was and optimize that process. And then go back to it every year, right? Go back to the changes that we’ve made. Reevaluate, before and afters and put a plan together to make it even better or more efficient.

I find, yeah, a lot of customers out there, including past businesses that I’ve been in. It’s that this is the way we’ve always done it. We’re comfortable this way. So that’s the way we’re going to stick with. It’s not always the best case. No, and it’s funny because when we met, you told me a story that stuck with me.

About you walking into a particular manufacturing place and just questioning the placement of equipment. And they were looking to replicate that placement of equipment in a new facility without questioning why it was there in the first place. I don’t know if you remember that example, but I do.

Yeah. Talk everyone through it. Yeah, it was a industrial bakery and I was just getting a tour of the facility, not a customer of mine, but potential. And we walked through, and they were showing me different processes, and I just happened to glance at the end of the line where all the material comes off, and it was, being picked up by a forklift and driven about five minutes down to the warehouse where it gets wrapped up in shrink wrap, the skid does, and then brought all the way back to that process to get parked in a freezer beside that process.

So it’s just a simple, why don’t you move that Wrapping device right to the end of the line and eliminate all that travel time. And I guess, being that was the way they’d always done it, they were just nose blind to it. They didn’t see it right away as a waste, but it was about, I don’t know, what did they say?

I say, that idea, they did implement it. They did move the equipment saved them about, 20 minutes every hour of just travel time back and forth to the forklift. Just lost time, right? A double handling of material and that was a bottleneck because the product would stack up and stack up while the forklift operator was traveling around with this material.

And that was just something that I noticed being a fresh set of eyes on site, right? Now using solutions that will visualize all of your data and all of your machines and processes would have easily identified that the end of that line is a bottleneck, but they already knew that. They just didn’t know that there was such an easy fix, right?

I think that’s the key, isn’t it? So there are solutions. Sometimes you get so close to something in your business that you can’t, you might be able to see, as you said, the bottleneck, but having to see the solution, sometimes the obvious is really there and you just can’t see it because you’re so close to it.

And it was free for them, aside from hooking up some hydro, right? It was a free, they already had the equipment they just had to get their electrician to hook up a new outlet to plug that equipment in, and there, they saved 20 minutes per hour, just in travel time. It was a huge savings for them, and it eliminated that bottleneck so much that they did replicate that in that second facility, and on that second line that they were installing.

A little pat on the back to me, I feel good about it, it’s always nice to have a different perspective I don’t think any ideas are bad ideas, but I do think that this is the way that we’ve always done it, and this is how it’s going to stay, isn’t It isn’t always the best course of action.

It is a big thing to do to look at something and say, and businesses that have been around for a number of years, sometimes decades and to walk in and say what if we were starting today? How would we do it? What would we do that’s different and completely go with a blank canvas? And that is a difficult thing to do for a lot of businesses.

But this is the whole idea, isn’t it, really, that you, when you start measuring efficiencies and things, you can start to see that, hang on, maybe there is another way to do this. It could be a group effort. Nobody I’d be lying to you if I said change management in any course is easy. And never, it’s never easy, right?

It’s bad. You can’t do it by yourself, especially in a manufacturing environment. You can’t have one person trying to drive change across the entire organization. But having tools in place specific to people in the roles and it starts from the top down, not the bottom up driving some of this change and continuous improvement is definitely key for success.

And make it a group effort, not an individual effort. You’ll find that it’ll be a lot easier to follow some of these things through versus, uh, one person trying to lead the whole herd, right? Yeah, and I think you make it a really important point because Often businesses come in and they will bring some tech or something into the business and they’ll, champion that piece of tech.

But what they’ve forgotten about is the change management process because it impacts people around them. So you do need a specific change management team depending on the size of your business to help people come to grips with what is being done and what the implications are for it.

And What the positive outcomes could be. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s be honest. Once you start measuring things that you haven’t measured in the past it might look really bad. You know what I mean? It might be worse than you thought it was. And I’ve seen that out there too, where somebody started measuring something and they’re like, What’s going on here?

This is twice as bad as I thought I was doing. But it’s true, and it’s real. So let’s put a plan together and get you to the next step where you can go to your betters or your counterparts and go, here’s where we are. We didn’t know where we were. Here’s where we are, and it’s bad. But now we have a plan forward to get to that next step, all right?

And the next time that you have to present out your findings or some of those changes that you’ve made, maybe you were here and now you’re up here, right? Yeah, it’s That’s what I see out there anyway, for sure. Let me come back to that in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you about, when you’re starting to drive efficiencies in people, there is a danger as well that you, while machines are designed to operate at near optimum capacity consistently humans are not.

As much as we would like to. Walk into the office at nine o’clock on a, on any given day and say we’re going a hundred percent until five o’clock. It’s just, that’s just not the reality. People don’t perform at their optimum peak level every day. So how do you manage that?

Because there has to be some, there are always outside circumstances. There are always reasons why someone may not be able to perform at a particular, at the highest level on a day to day basis. So how do you, Manage that shift in a business on a day to day basis. From a manufacturing perspective, I say you have to build in some of that and do a process cycle time and there’s tag time.

You got to give a team member the ability to stop what they’re doing. Get a drink of water or stretch or what have you in between whatever tasks they’re doing. But you can never, yeah, you’re right, you can’t expect 100 percent out of everybody all the time. I don’t find that a lot of manufacturers out there are setting targets at 100%.

Like I know from my Toyota days, it was 95%, throughput throughout the shop. And a lot of those days we do that, nothing was ever perfect, like there was lunchtime builds, there was break builds, there was making up for downtime, there was making up for, if a team member went home sick and somebody else had to cover them and things like that.

I think it’s just having plans in place that, with the expectation that, Nobody’s ever going to operate at 100%. Now a team member operating at 50%. That’s a different discussion, like whether that’s recertifications, retraining, or maybe they just don’t want to be there anymore. I don’t know, but you’ll find that out there as well. I was going to say you must it must uncover a fair bit of What happens in every business, right? Where there are people that are not performing at their optimal level. And when you’ve got the data to understand that is happening consistently, you’ve got really a couple of choices, don’t you?

Understand why it’s happening and whether that can change in the current environment or realize that it’s the wrong person in the wrong job. With the data that you get and that you collect, if you’re analyzing it and scrutinizing it and doing it properly Yeah, you’ll be able to identify that there’s either an abnormality in the process or inconsistencies between maybe two or three people that do that same job.

And then it might be a retraining exercise that you have to do. It might be Like an overburden is, you could be, you go down to the process and see what that issue is, and maybe, I’m shorter in stature, so maybe I have trouble reaching something that somebody six foot doesn’t. So it takes me longer.

So yeah, it’s all what you do with that data. As I say, most team members aren’t trying to do a bad job, most want to do a real good job. And, You get a little pat on the back at the end of the day, week, month, whatever it might be, but everybody’s there to do their job and go home safe and sound.

It’s not always a team member’s fault. It could be the process and how it’s set up as well. But with that data that you get and that you capture and analyze and scrutinize, Go to the process and see. Watch. The team members, they do that job day in, day out. They’re going to know it better than any supervisor or engineer or manager.

They’re going to tell you or show you exactly what the problem is, right? Yeah, take that data that you’re capturing, go to the shop floor and see what the problem is for yourself. And I gather you’ve collected a lot of very interesting data. I don’t know whether that data is necessarily pulled across all all the places that you deal with, or you just look at that individually.

But tell me about some of the interesting finds that you’ve had, because there are efficiencies that can be quite easy to overcome if you’re aware of them. If you’re aware of what they are, that can happen in any business, right? I’ll give you one example that just comes to mind is I had one of my customers call me up one day and he’s I’ve had this solution hooked up to my CNC machines for two years.

And he says, it doesn’t make sense to me. It shows that I’m a hundred percent uptime every day and I can’t get it. my product out to my customers, on time, like any day of the week, and he’s I don’t understand what’s going on. So I said, all right, we’ll go to the shop floor and, ensure that the machines are actually on and running.

He says your solution is telling us that it is, right? I’m like, okay, great. Why don’t I come down to your site and take a look and see what I see versus see what he’s yep, come on site. So I made a day trip of it. Went on site to that customer’s location. They had 21 CNC machines on the shop floor and what the operators had been doing, not all of them, but some of them had been doing, is they caught wind that The way that customer was monitoring and tracking their productivity was if the CNC machine was on.

Not if the CNC machine was cutting chips, making chips, cutting the part, right? The team members would dial down the spindles, so they wouldn’t have to have, say, certain amount of change overs per day, leave it for the night shift guys, stuff like that. That’s what I saw right away is, yeah, it shows that you’re up because you’re monitoring your powers on, but you’re not monitoring your spindle load.

Showing that you’re actually being productive on that machine. So once they started tracking that, then you get into the real truth of, okay, are we really at 100 percent efficiency here? No, you’re at about 63. That’s why you’re not getting parts out. They have since changed their logics and their controllers that The operators can’t dial down the machines when it’s running these programs, unless they get supervisor passwords or buy offs or whatever it might be.

So their throughput has improved and they are able to get product out the door now. But it, yeah, their efficiency was never really at a hundred percent. They just thought it was. Yeah, I can imagine. And it’s, and I suppose it happens in any business and sometimes it’s not really meant with malicious intent.

It’s just, we can ease things up here. We don’t have to stress out and they’re not thinking about the bigger picture because there’s the element of people being employed and yes, they’ve got some some pride in their work. But it’s limited to those who are sitting at the top and are going this is about making money.

And this is about being able to pay for all of those team members that you’ve got sitting there and everything else that you want to be able to do. So it’s finding that balance, isn’t it? Between that strategic need and what is happening at a human level. On the floor. Yeah, 100%, 100%.

But yeah, at the end of the day, you gotta go and see. So you take your data that you capture, whatever that might be, whatever’s important to that specific manufacturer or individual, and then go and see for yourself You’re not going to solve any problems by sitting behind the computer, right? You need to be out there on the shop floor with that data in hand, analyzing these, whatever those metrics were that you captured, and then what’s next, right?

Continuous improvement. What are you going to do with all that information that you’ve got? Is it because team members are dialing down the spindles, right? Slowing it down so they don’t have massive changeovers. Is it because you’re expecting too much out of somebody? Is it the process is imbalanced but it’s coming up with that countermeasure or that plan for change and then seeing that through, right?

Yeah. And I imagine there’s lots of. Other interesting bits of data that you collect along the way. And in fact, I seem to recall that you mentioned to me there was one where you collected about the amount of toilet breaks that people were taking and how long that was taking up in a business and how that can drive inefficiency.

And that can happen anywhere, right? That sort of thing. That sort of thing. So you’re collecting the data about when people are taking breaks and for how long and how often that’s can surprise a lot of businesses. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, like I know that I’ll speak to me as a maintenance manager.

I’d always often oversee production as well if I was covering for holidays or whatever from production managers. I would see team members either late to line late back to a process from lunch, excessive bathroom breaks, and, one or two a day, okay, great, that’s you’re right but, if you’re gone for a half hour at a time, three or four times a day, come on, that adds up if you’re hourly, right?

And I often found that, I’ll speak to my perspective, when I deployed this solution as a maintenance manager, I found that one of the processes, main reasons for never making target or having terrible OEE was not down time, which everybody blamed it on, it was team members being late.

Returning back from lunch on afternoon shift. Equates to about 430, 000 in lost product because the line wasn’t running at all, or that machine wasn’t running at all. Not because it was broken down or missing parts or a team member was working too slow. It was idle time, right? Idle time was a silent killer.

That’s what we, I noticed and identified on that. for that. Within probably four months of just watching, right? Yeah it’s amazing, isn’t it? Because often business owners will give some liberties to their staff. And it’s not necessarily that those stuff again are deliberately trying to take advantage, but you give a little bit and that little bit extends and it continues and continues.

And suddenly, it adds up if you’ve got a few people that are consistently taking 10 minutes longer for lunch than you would otherwise have allowed. That accumulates very quickly and the bottom line can be huge. And again, that applies to any business. It doesn’t, whether it’s manufacturing or whether you’re producing a product or a different product or service, that is a consistent thing.

You lose that time multiplied by the amount of team members multiplied by the flow on effect, even from some team members being late and delaying the others. And then take that over a week and take that over a month and over a year and it can be a significant amount of drop in efficiency. Oh, absolutely.

What’s a team member rate? Hourly and then if they were gone an extra 20 minutes a day times, I don’t know how many working days you guys have in Australia, but 268 working days here in Canada. So how many hours over those course of those days? What’s that cost to you in wages where the team member just wasn’t there?

And then you start factoring in, okay, all of those hours of non runtime or ridal time at the machine that operator is supposed to be managing and running. What’s that cost to the business? It’s huge. It’s a huge input, impact on non business for sure. And you times that by however many processes or team members you’ve got, it can be catastrophic, right?

And I think this is the hard part as we come full circle a little bit in terms of you’ve got this, on one hand, you’ve got this obvious thing of that there’s inefficiencies here that’s costing the business. On the other hand, you’ve got this idea that, hang on, Big brothers watching me and telling me I’m taking 10 minutes too long for lunch or taking too many toilet breaks during the day.

It’s hard to bring those two back together. Isn’t it? I imagine that, that it causes some conflict in trying to, a be able to implement that Idea of watching those kinds of things in the first place and be what those what the outcomes of those things are. I don’t think anybody really deploys a solution on the shop floor aiming to improve productivity.

With the intent that they’re going to monitor you know how often their team members are going for break or late back to the line or you know when they swipe in or swipe out. I think that Information just presents itself over time, like all signs point to Joe who’s late every day after lunch the story told itself, it doesn’t necessarily, you don’t necessarily need to go looking for it visualizing the shop floor or a process it will identify it.

Bye. If the line is late to start or the machine is late to start or if it’s lost some productivity due to a team member being late where they can police themselves, so to speak, or big brother themselves and make those appropriate changes oh, if I keep doing this, people are going to notice, right?

But it becomes pretty self evident. Through the data that you collect, where the problems are, and whether that’s bottlenecks or whether that’s team members late back to the line you don’t necessarily have to chase after it or take that big brother approach. It’s there for everybody to see.

You don’t have to showcase it to everybody it could be strictly upper management to view that or supervisors, but yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna air itself and show itself. You don’t have to look for it. Just wanted to come back to something that you talked about a little bit earlier on. And this whole idea of moving into, you talked about whether it’s a 5.

0 version of things. Talk me through the different stages because, I think often these terms get thrown around, right? And you go, okay this is the base model. And 2. 0 became this idea, very early on that we’re just introducing some tech or some initial efficiencies. But have those lines been broken?

Those lines are very clear now at what’s 2. 0, what’s 3. 0, what’s 4. 0, and indeed what 5. 0 is going to be. At this point in time, there’s, like I said, there’s so much made up stuff out there and fluff out there and marketing, just, let’s call it Industry 5. 0 today and yesterday it was something completely different.

I try not to, fall victim to that. Um, I don’t know, I find a lot of manufacturers out there are just trying to do their best, trying to stay competitive whether that’s through cost and or profits or throughput or maybe they’re moving sites to different locations, whatever it might be, maybe it’s continuous improvement initiatives, so on and so forth. And yeah, solutions, tech is part of it. Industry 4. 0 from my perspective is getting your major ERPs in place, getting your MRPs in place, which is, managing assets or inventory. Getting your MES systems, manufacturing execution systems in place, which is some of that visual management and reporting and KPI collection type info.

But there’s, CMMS and the maintenance management systems, call it what you want. It all falls under that Industry 4. 0 umbrella. And a lot of businesses, one, don’t have, like a lot of these solutions are, like an ERP system is pretty expensive. And it’s a big job for someone to take on, you need somebody full time dedicated to it.

A lot of companies running lean out there don’t have the assets to assign to this. I’d say a lot of them aren’t close to that industry 4. gap yet. Some are, whatever 0 is. Trying to catch up with All this Industry 4. 0 stuff. I think Industry 5. 0 is more like, okay, take all the solutions that you’ve currently got from Industry 4.

0 and now add AI into the mix, or it’s going to do it all for you. I don’t think it works like that. I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen some pretty cool tech out there. We have some too with AI, where it’s AI reporting or AI scheduling, where it’ll optimize your schedule. Whether it’s to run most efficiently or make the most profit.

Things like that, which, yeah, it’s cool. But, you’ve been in business for however long without this stuff. You know, You could probably get by without all the cool fancy tech. Yeah, I don’t know, I’d just say be mindful of what you’re looking for and what you truly, really need.

There’s, like I said, there’s a lot of stuff out there, a lot of fluff, a lot of, it’s just a, I don’t even know what to call it, just a hot topic for the week, flavor of the month, maybe, visualize your shop floor, get your, whatever solution is going to organize you the best. And set you up for success and then stick with it and build on it.

Not every solution is going to, take place of say four or five or six different key individuals. You can free them up or get rid of them, I just wanted to touch on lastly Toyota, because you had a lot of experience in Toyota and we look at Toyota as being this huge, big brand.

And I assume one of the technology leaders I don’t know if, in terms of not just manufacturing overall, but in terms of as a business brand, they’ve always seemed to be a real leader in that space. What can you learn from The way a company like that is operating and what can be relevant for smaller businesses in running.

And indeed, you know how much emphasis is there on a company in a company like that to continue to improve and to continue to bring new technology in. I know that I would try to do a special project as a team lead on. We had different KPIs that we were responsible for safety, quality, cost, productivity.

team member development, right? So I would try to do a special project on each KPI every year. Which could be a huge project, or it could be just a little change in a process that bettered that process for a team member. What I find is, Toyota was really good at monitoring and tracking, their throughput, their OEE, their downtime.

But also From a team member’s perspective, always trying to make the process better for who is doing the job day in, day out. And better meaning more efficient, less steps, less burden. And, that levelness or evenness of each process along the way. So that process flow. And that’s what I find when I’m going into a, Manufacturer’s environment where they might be struggling a bit is I take some of that mindset that I brought from Toyota with me and I try to adapt that in other places.

Where would this fit in their organization or where would this fit in that organization? And then that continuous improvement mindset where, once is never enough. You always have to build on it and better it and better it, right? Absolutely. Look, there’s so much that we could continue to talk about, but we’re pretty much out of time and I just wanted to finish with a question that I like to ask all of my guests is what is the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you want to let more people know that they’re going to have it if they come and start to deal with you?

The aha moment? Yeah. When they see how much money they start saving. When they see that ROI start populating, that’s the ra ha moment, right? They can take that either money saved or, that throughput, the production that they’ve made that they weren’t making in the past and start benchmarking and proving that out across different lines, different sites or locations.

But at the end of the day, it comes to profit, right? We’re going to see more profit, less downtime, less waste. Yep. And ah ha! I should keep doing this. I love it. I love it. And look, thank you so much for being generous with your time. And I think what’s really interesting for people that have been listening in, that are even from different spaces, they may not be in manufacturing, is that there’s so much to learn from each of these industries.

And that All the efficiencies and things that you’re looking at are exactly the same in most other businesses, that they can look at the things that they’re doing. The machines, maybe a big or small factor in what they do, but the human element is there and the efficiencies that you can drive and the way you can monitor and then the things that you can bring in to change a business are huge.

And I appreciate the insights. I appreciate the time and I hope to be back soon to maybe we’ll meet up for another. I definitely look forward to that one for sure. And of course, we’re going to include all of the information in the show notes about how to get in touch with you and to look at Shiftworks, which is the business and MachineMonitoring.

com, which is the which is the website. And people will be able to get a hold of all of that information in the show notes. Again, thank you so much for being part of BizByte. No, I appreciate it. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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