Operational Excellence, Part 2: People & Quality

Ed Ballina (00:05.382)

Well, good morning, I’m Ed Ballina.

 

Alvaro Cuba (00:08.238)

Hey, good morning, Alvaro Cuba. Well, good afternoon, and I’ll explain in a minute.

 

Ed Ballina (00:13.798)

For some of us, it’s early, some others it’s a little late in the afternoon. So Alvaro Cuba, great to connect with you again. I live my life vicariously through your travels. I told Sara that when I grow up, I wanna be just like you. And I don’t mean that age-wise, just being able to be in different countries all the time. There may be something out there. So.

 

Alvaro Cuba (00:29.518)

Please come join me.

 

Ed Ballina (00:37.254)

Hey, we’re gonna have another great show today. I can’t believe we’re getting close to double digits in our podcasts, which is exciting. I am all charged up because this weekend, I went to an air show at an airport in Binghamton, New York. And I am an aviation buff. You may, I don’t know if I mentioned, but I actually soloed in a Cessna 172 and never flew after that.

 

And we won’t get into those reasons. My wife had a lot to do with it. But that was amazing to see my tax dollars at work. The Navy team was there. They had an F-35. That was an amazing piece of equipment. So really, really fun weekend, of course, a phenomenal Fourth of July. So how about you, Alvaro?

 

Alvaro Cuba (01:08.845)

Hahaha

 

Alvaro Cuba (01:27.084)

Well, very, very interesting. I had similar experience trying to fly and someone… Yeah, we know that. So this time I’m abroad. I am in Finland, guys, and a couple interesting things, one interesting thing and one relevant. The interesting thing is in the summer, the sun goes down. Five hours later, it goes up. But during those five hours, no dark.

 

Ed Ballina (01:31.462)

Ha ha!

 

Alvaro Cuba (01:56.204)

You just see during the five hours, the aura, like in the sundown, all the five hours. So very interesting. And interesting and relevant fact is probably you read or heard about this, but for seven years in a row, Finland has the number one spot in the United Nations World Happiness Report. That has to…

 

do with proximity to nature, which gives a creativity, innovation, transparency, very low corruption, which is amazing. But what amazed me more is the formula that not only Finland, but I think that all the northern countries have gotten, which is they build trust. People feel trust, their neighbor, their government, their officials, and they feel the freedom,

 

political, press, and all that. And that gives them a sense of wellbeing, safe and relaxed. And that becomes productivity. And it’s a very positive cycle. Yes, circular. And I was reflecting on that and we’ll talk a little bit later, but very interesting on…

 

Ed Ballina (03:10.63)

Circular. How cool is that?

 

Alvaro Cuba (03:23.626)

and we can apply that to manufacturing. And actually is what we do when you are successful in operational excellence it’s because you apply this. Trust, relax, people engaged, wellbeing, then they produce productivity and magic happens. So for sure, we’ll talk more about that.

 

Ed Ballina (03:46.086)

Imagine that happy people produce better products. They feel better about where they live. That’s fantastic. So that’s the formula. Well, I guess we’re going to launch into this after sharing with you our exciting adventures. So welcome to the Manufacturing Meet Up Podcast, the show where we kick back on our downtime and talk about efficiency on the plant floor.

 

Alvaro Cuba (03:53.641)

Yeah, that’s a formula.

 

Ed Ballina (04:24.87)

Great. So if you’ve been, if you’ve listened to our show before, you know that we actually kick off with some particular piece of news that’s stuck in our minds for some reason or other. God knows there’s lots going on in the news cycle every day. But one that kind of caught my eye, and frankly, it was because I didn’t agree with it quite as much, was an article that I saw that was talking a retirement crisis. Boomers need to work longer. And no one will hire them. Well, I mean, we all know we’re experiencing some challenging economic times with inflation, right? And that the job market is kind of settling in. But because of that, some Boomers that thought they were going to retire decided, you know what? I need to go back into the workforce. And frankly, some of us decide that we still have more energy to give and aren’t ready for retirement, right? I think Alvaro Cuba and I, you know, have both experienced this, but I’m going to be the contrarian in this one and tell you that there’s a trend that I’m seeing that actually goes the other way, which is industry, especially manufacturing, are hiring back retirees. Now, not into full -time jobs, folks. So like the work model changes, right? But a little bit more in terms of a gig economy or as a contractor.

 

Because they realized that there is a really, really big experience gap that exists today. And we’ve got a great bunch of folks coming in, very smart people with great ideas. And in my mind, there’s always been a happy medium between what I would call the very seasoned player in an operations environment and the new person that comes in off a college campus with like, all kinds of enthusiasm, not that the more senior folks don’t, but they taper that a little bit more because of their experience, but they come with great new ideas, right? They’re talking about AI. They, you know, we, we’d learned that years later. These folks are learning that in college and having a balance between the stability and the experience that some of these more tenured, folks have with the new ideas and the energy of that 24 engineer, 24 year old engineer is amazing. So I think,

 

Ed Ballina (06:43.686)

I see that as a trend counteracting that they don’t want to hire Boomers I’m seeing the complete opposite. So what do you think, Alvaro?

 

Alvaro Cuba (06:54.724)

I’m seeing similar as you, and I think it’s a happy medium, because people, the Baby Boomers they want some quality time with the family, with the grandkids and all that. Still, they have a lot to put in. So finding this combination that allows them to do both.

 

Ed Ballina (07:02.15)

Mm -hmm.

 

Alvaro Cuba (07:22.116)

It’s great, it’s great for the economy, it’s great for them and it’s great. And this is related to the news that I read this week, related to the younger generations going in that as you said, they need a lot of support on the experience side. And these news that I read, it was Gen Zs plumbers and construction workers are making the blue collar cool.

 

And we talk about this, about a new collar And with that comes this, I don’t need bachelor degree to be happy. I can go to trade. And in this generation, it appeals a lot because they also want to have some time to do their TikTok, being influencers, go and work in their computers and all that. So,

 

trade, plumbers, welders and all that gives them stability and possibility to grow. But at the same time, it allows to them this kind of partial second job. So guys, as you can see between Ed’s news and mine, we are seeing new workforce dynamics in the workplace.

 

It’s important to understand those. And if you really understand those, I believe there is much more on the opportunity side than on the risk side. So I think it’s a good moment to go understand this full dynamic and take full advantage of it.

 

Ed Ballina (09:08.582)

No, agreed. I think I mentioned on one of the podcasts before that one of my big “a-ha’s” was walking through an airport and seeing a business book that said my plumber drives a Ferrari. Okay. Now my plumber doesn’t drive a Ferrari, but my HVAC guy drives $120 ,000 diesel truck, pickup truck. Okay. So there’s, there’s, there’s, you know, there’s a connection there, but the, the, the piece that I’d like to leave people with, especially those of you that watch this podcast, and look a little bit more like me in terms of experience. Don’t be afraid to reinvent your career, folks. I mean, you still have lots to give, you still have a lot of energy and enthusiasm. You know, either pursue your original field, right? Provide consulting on supply chain like I do, and Alvaro Cuba, right? Or, you know, decide that you might want to get into something different, whether it’s, you know, data analytics.

 

We are also handy with electronic, you know, with our devices these days that realistically, if you can use your cell phone, and most of us have one, you can really, you know, get into some of these newer technologies and reinvent yourself and maybe do it from a gig standpoint where, you know, you work half of the time or half of the year and you have the rest of the time to spend with your family or doing all the other fun things you like. So.

 

That is a little bit about the news. So I think now we’re going to get ready to take a deeper dive into our topics. You know, we try to pick two topics to talk about. So Alvaro, why don’t you sail us away here from Helsinki?

 

Alvaro Cuba (10:48.191)

Yes, connecting to the US. Well, guys, the last time we talked about operational excellence, if you recall. No? The episode five, we talked about operational excellence and we discussed about what is it? What are the methods? What is out there? What are some of the keys to success? What are some main pitfalls

 

Ed Ballina (10:51.782)

Yes.

 

Alvaro Cuba (11:16.799)

that we should try to avoid. And remember the statistics that we discussed, seven or eight of each 10 people out there is implementing right now operational excellence. And so it’s very important. So Ed and I decided let’s go a bit deeper in this and we are going to go deeper in two of the pillars.

 

No? Operational excellence can have eight, 11, 13 pillars, depending what version you take. But there are two that are absolutely critical. One is the base, which is People. No? They are the ones who make it happen. So we’ll talk about people. And the second one is Quality, because the proof is in the pudding. Everything we do at the end is reflected on the quality and in the experience of the consumer.

 

Ed Ballina (11:47.366)

Right.

 

Alvaro Cuba (12:11.774)

And that’s why we thought we’ll deep dive into this too. So let’s go into People. Ed, some of the ideas on how we engage the people in the floor or keep them engaged and make possible this journey and this continuous improvement in operational excellence.

 

Ed Ballina (12:36.314)

It’s a great topic. And the pillar thing is kind of funny, whether you’re talking TPM or integrated work systems, if you look at it, they may morph a little bit and add a pillar here and there, but the basic construct has remained relatively same for 40+, 50 years. And the people side of it, now look, can you drive operational excellence without people engagement?

 

You can to some degree, you could push and shove and get some result. But if you want something that is going to be long lasting and sustainable, you got to take the people with you. And by people, we mean everybody. We mean the person that is operating that piece of equipment. We mean the mechanic. We mean the frontline leaders and managers.

 

You know, one of my, one of the pieces of feedback I would receive at times when we talked about people engagement in the shop floor, first level management felt like they were being left out. Like the supervisors, sometimes they got cast as, well, you know, management is, you know, is putting up barriers, you know, shop floor leaderships, i.e., supervisors don’t want to change.

 

And you know what, I think to some degree they had a right to raise their hands and say, hey, what about us, right? We’re part of this too. So people with the big P, right, is really important from the top of the house all the way to the shop floor. And yes, yes.

 

Alvaro Cuba (14:04.83)

Yeah. And everyone is a leader. Everyone is responsible for something. You don’t need to have people that report to you to be a leader. You have to do the things that you have to do and you become a model for others in the way you behave. So everyone’s a leader, but actually the programs more successful that I have seen are more bottom up because the people in the floor discovered the value,

 

Ed Ballina (14:31.398)

Yes.

 

Alvaro Cuba (14:34.558)

and start pushing for more versus just the top down and I tell you, you have to do it.

 

Ed Ballina (14:42.502)

It’s a great point. I remember early in my career when I started with P&G I was a maintenance manager and the guy that was the maintenance lead, he trained me. I mean, I got sent into that assignment yeah, to do things, but it was learn how to be a manager, my first people leadership opportunity. And he said to me, Ed, you managers, I mean, you’re great, you know, bringing all kinds of interesting things and all that. He goes, but you guys are like the sand on the beach, okay?

 

The tide goes in, the tide goes out, because you’ll be in this job 18 to 24 months, maybe three years at most, and then you’re moving on. He goes, we’re like the pebbles on the beach. We stay here. The waves go in, the sand comes in, the sand goes out, but we stay here. Right. And the consistency and continuity that the shop floor engagement drives is incredible because that’s how you systematize it. You made a great point in talking about

 

Alvaro Cuba (15:28.19)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Ed Ballina (15:40.134)

charismatic leaders, right? And yes, a leader with a lot of leadership, ability and charisma can push and shove and even bring people with them, right? But unless the value is there and the systems are ingrained, when that leader leaves, right, the next person comes in, listen, we all come into jobs wanting to make a difference, right? And that is a bit of an issue for the shop floor because if you have launched on a five to 10 year operational excellence journey, right?

 

it’s a gradual progression and yes, you tackle new things and you deliver greater results, but you’re carrying out a longer term strategy. But sometimes people come in and it’s like, okay, what have I changed to make a name for myself? Right. And get quick results. And that mentality is detrimental, right, to long-term implementation.

 

Alvaro Cuba (16:23.55)

Yes.

 

Alvaro Cuba (16:28.478)

Yeah. And for that, to your point, we need to make leaders. The leader job is to make leaders in the shop floor, to make everyone in the shop floor a leader of the program. And I learned in my very first implementation of TPM or operational excellence, one thing that stayed in my mind, learn, do, teach.

 

Ed Ballina (16:39.334)

Yes.

 

Alvaro Cuba (16:58.654)

Everyone wants to learn, wants to grow, wants to know new things. Then they need to practice and feel proud that they can apply that. And then it comes the teaching piece, which they try. And I have seen operators being the leaders in safety for the entire site, or I have seen operators or mechanics

 

Ed Ballina (17:22.406)

Yes.

 

Alvaro Cuba (17:27.518)

traveling abroad and making decisions about machines and designs and things like that. There is when they teach and they can use all their knowledge in the benefit of that. And then you have the others saying, hey, how come that person is not doing it? How about me? And then it comes, no, raise the hand. I want to be, I want to do it. I want to be the next.

 

Ed Ballina (17:47.142)

How about me?

 

Alvaro Cuba (17:56.99)

Then you have a riot in the right sense because everyone wanna go.

 

Ed Ballina (18:03.654)

I have a very good friend of ours, has lived up here in Northeast Pennsylvania pretty much his whole life. He was an operator on a Bounty line, a converting line at P&G Mahoopany and very outspoken. Frank is almost like bullheaded, but he’s really, really passionate. Well, he got selected to go work with a carton supplier

 

Alvaro Cuba (18:23.294)

Hahaha

 

Ed Ballina (18:29.67)

to come up with a new carton for shipping out, new box for shipping out Bounty rolls, right? And he didn’t go anywhere glamorous. He went to Buffalo, New York and he worked with them, you know, was engaged over a matter of months. And today, 30 years later, he still talks about that experience, how he felt empowered. Like he went in there as P&G’s representative to work with them, to make sure that their box was going to work on the box erector that he ran on his line.

 

And I mean, we can tell stories like that all day long. The smile, right? The ownership. How much you think you get from that employee, right? It’s immeasurable.

 

Alvaro Cuba (19:03.294)

Yeah.

 

energy and excitement. No, and it’s an excitement that don’t stop there. They go home and they talk to their people in the community and all that. I remember this lady in Mexico, this operator, she ended up being the teacher in the small school that we put it. And at some point the people from university was coming

 

to listen and to learn from her. So how exciting could that be? What else, Ed? What else?

 

Ed Ballina (19:43.782)

exciting. Now, One thing I wanted to kind of bring up on this topic is I have seen some organizations where at first, when you start working  on people engagement and all that, there’s a little bit of a shift where people think, well, that means that I never got any tough feedback. That means that, you know, everything is always happy place and rah rah. Well, folks, we’re in business to make money.

 

Right. These corporations are making money for shareholders. So the people engagement piece, right, also includes keeping score, right. Who goes to a sports game, right. Football, soccer, whatever you want to call it. Where it’s like, you know, T ball. Oh, we don’t keep score. Everybody won. No, you want to know your team is winning two to zero, right. Or, you know, somebody made it a close to the flag. Exactly. So.

 

Alvaro Cuba (20:36.126)

Yes. And cheer for that.

 

Ed Ballina (20:40.262)

with engagement, right? Also comes a certain responsibility to communicate very often and very succinctly to the floor. If you want them to behave like business owners, provide them with business data. You know, so say, Hey folks, hey, pluses and minuses, we’re winning here. We’ve got some real issues in this area and we need to get around it. So, it’s not creating, you know, a kumbaya moment in a plant. We do that around campfires. But it’s, it’s about,

 

providing people with the information they need, the empowerment to control their future, right? And also with some expectations, some deliverables.

 

Alvaro Cuba (21:15.184)

Yes.

 

Yeah, that word “empowerment” is so important, no? Because once you empower and they feel really the ownership, then they will be the first to defend it. And when they see another colleague that is not doing what they should be doing, they will be the first to say, hey, watch out. It’s like when in safety we say the peer-to-peer check, hey, what you are doing is unsafe for you, but it’s also unsafe

 

Ed Ballina (21:49.862)

for me.

 

Alvaro Cuba (21:49.968)

for me. So please stop. And what you said about communicate, communicate and communicate is top down, bottom’s up, horizontal, business results, but also what other people is doing and give prices. Also show when something is not going well, show it.

 

And show what needs to go different.

 

Ed Ballina (22:23.59)

And that’s one area where sometimes we have a bit of a gap between what we say and how we support that. Because if you’re in an environment where you and I make the same wages, right? And you are go-getter and you’re getting involved in this and all that. And we’re operating under a labor environment where you and I get the same two and a half percent raise.

 

Alvaro Cuba (22:34.672)

Yes.

 

Ed Ballina (22:52.966)

That long-term doesn’t work, right? You have to find a way to share. If you do this, you’ll get better financial results, right? How do you share that with the workers? In the Denver plant, when I ran it, we actually had, at that point in time, whatever your wage was, it was, there was a $2,000 a-year bonus that was available to the shop floor. And it was based on better-than-average performance, right? Just like any other bonus. You get paid to do your job.

 

Alvaro Cuba (23:17.84)

Yeah?

 

Ed Ballina (23:21.35)

Above that, we’re going to reward you even more. And the folks loved it, right? Because it was, and we figured out the magic timing was quarterly. If you did it monthly, they didn’t see it in the paycheck. If you did it once a year, it got lost, right? But once a quarter, they could literally come home with an extra $500. And it drove, right? It’s a little bit of, like, putting your money where your mouth is. Okay, if you’re going to win, share it.

 

Alvaro Cuba (23:34.704)

Agree.

 

Alvaro Cuba (23:40.208)

Yeah.

 

Alvaro Cuba (23:46.8)

Yeah, I seen and used some of those and we actually were putting productivity, quality and safety. No? All together. One last one.

 

Ed Ballina (23:56.198)

Safety.

 

Ed Ballina (24:00.358)

And why do you do that? Why don’t you just pay them on productivity? Come on, Alvaro Cuba, you make it so complicated.

 

Alvaro Cuba (24:07.344)

No, because productivity without quality is not business. And if it hurts people, it’s not good business, not good for anyone. So these things are all tied together.

 

Ed Ballina (24:25.126)

They have to be balanced folks, be careful what you reward because as human beings, we are pleasure seekers, right? To some degree, we will go towards the thing that rewards us. And I’ve seen at the beginning of this, you know, kind of compensation idea, I’ve seen facilities that, you know, incentivize people on one thing. They got a lot of cases out the door, but sometimes those cases were not of the best quality and the waste usually went up or safety. So it has to be kind of a

 

Alvaro Cuba (24:26.576)

Yes.

 

Ed Ballina (24:55.078)

you know, a compensation plan that is balanced and lets people win across the board. So.

 

Alvaro Cuba (25:01.136)

A lot of tips there guys. Just one last one, make it fun. Competition, it’s always great. So with that, let’s go about quality and it’s the final test of the process. Everything we do impacts quality. So some of the tips to…

 

make quality, continuous improvement, focus quality, and some of your experiences.

 

Ed Ballina (25:33.542)

So I had, this is by the way, a great segue, right, from the previous discussion. Early in my career, I was very fortunate to get involved in Edwards Deming total quality approach. The paper machine that I ran was actually, famous. W. Edwards Deming I learned his name and his history. And to this day, I still use control charts. I have to…

 

Alvaro Cuba (25:51.088)

Famous Deming.

 

Yes.

 

Ed Ballina (26:01.67)

be honest, I haven’t done design of experiments in awhile, I’d have to get the textbook out, but it appealed to me because it was very technical, right? And it worked. So quality, listen, you can get away with some degree of shoddy quality for a short period of time, but your consumers will eventually abandon you. And one thing I do want to kind of clarify, quality and features are two different things, okay?

 

You can have a product that plays a little bit lower on the value scale, right? And I’m going to go back to my paper making days because everybody has an intimate relationship with toilet paper. Enough said. So I started working, you know, as you guys have tired to hear me talk about Procter and Gamble and, you know, I ran White Cloud. I don’t think it exists as a brand anymore, on a paper machine with the Bounty, with the Charmin, all premium brands. P&G usually competes at the top of the value scale. And after six and a half years, I went to work for Scott Paper Company, who’s now Kimberly Clark. Now, Scott Tissue was the crown jewel of the company. Scott Tissue, if you compare that to Charmin, has different features, right? It has a thousand sheets per roll. I don’t even know. Charmin might be 280 these days, right? But there’s a different experience. The Charmin is softer. It is more absorbent.

 

And you need a six pack to keep up with your family a week. If you live in New York City, you need a roll of Scott tissue with a thousand sheets and maybe one in the pantry because it’s got a thousand sheets, right? So value, right? They both made incredibly good quality products, right? They met consumer expectation. They were predictable. I knew if I bought Downy towels, I was gonna have a certain experience. I knew if I bought Scott towels,

 

I was going to have a different experience, potentially by the lower price. So I wanted to go into that because some people mistake features for quality. Quality is, to me, you’re making a product consistently to the same specifications that your consumer wants. So that’s a difference that has to be called out. But Alvaro Cuba, I know we’ve talked about this topic at length.

 

Alvaro Cuba (28:12.304)

Exactly.

 

Alvaro Cuba (28:24.688)

Yeah, I love your definition on quality. And I think it sets the topic perfectly. What your consumer wants in a consistent way. So, and for that, you’d have to put a system that every time gives you the same quality, no matter what. And that needs to be an end-to-end system. But quality does not end there. It generates a lot of other benefits.

 

For instance, if you do quality product, you reduce your waste, you reduce your reprocess. That means you reduce energy usage. It’s sustainable, landfill. Yeah. So you keep most of the pillars and most of the benefits once your quality is set and it’s always the same. And imagine if you produce 100 units, and the 100 are the quality preferred. It’s a perfect process. Everything less than that will mean more energy, more waste and effort. You need to reprogram and a lot of things. What else?

 

Ed Ballina (29:44.614)

Yeah, it’s and it goes beyond, you know, we we about the consumer, the consumer, the consumer, because we’re consumer, we’re CPG guys, right? And but but it goes beyond that your customer, right? If you if you’re packaging, let’s say you produce, you know, cans in a cardboard sleeve, right? If you don’t glue those flaps down well, and when the consumer goes to take it off the shelf, the box opens and it spilled soda all over the ground, right? Or soup or whatever it is you have or glass goods. Now you got a hazard. Your customer, your stores, your Walmarts of the world won’t take long before they throw you off the shelf. And to get back on that shelf is a huge investment financially and also in terms of leadership pushing it. And to your point, what is good for quality is usually good for all of the KPIs because, including safety.

 

Alvaro Cuba (30:31.664)

Yes.

 

Ed Ballina (30:41.158)

If you don’t have to interact with the machine as often to correct quality deviations, you reduce the probability of you getting hurt. And I think I tried to provide folks with at least my view of a pecking order of priorities. And this doesn’t mean we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, folks. But when you’re pushed to the corner and you’re forced to make decisions, I tried to give my folks a pretty simple, you know,

 

Alvaro Cuba (30:50.096)

Absolutely.

 

Ed Ballina (31:10.31)

pecking order to think about. One is safety. Okay, I don’t care what you’re doing. If you’re going to endanger somebody’s life, right? If you’re going to endanger life and limb, it’s not worth it. There is nothing that we do that is worth getting people hurt. So safety, first and foremost, quality and environmental, right? And I’m not necessarily going to kind of sustainability yet, but environmental compliance, those things are non-negotiable, right?

 

I mean, years ago, when I lived in Denver, they had an issue at the Coors Bottling Facility where somebody had inadvertently left a tank valve open and they dumped, I think, 7,000 gallons of something not really nice into the Golden Creek in Golden, Colorado. I mean, you want to talk about negative press and the cleanup efforts and just, you know, people identify with the companies they work at. So imagine meeting a Coors employee going down to the local bar there in Golden.

 

And people are like, dude, you just killed 7,000 of our beautiful trout, right? So people identify with it.

 

Alvaro Cuba (32:13.313)

And it can even go beyond that. The quality also goes into food safety. When you do something not right, look at the recalls that we are seeing most of the time. Not only cars, but when it’s food, it could be life threatening and very serious. And when you go down the road, one of those

 

Ed Ballina (32:22.246)

Absolutely.

 

Alvaro Cuba (32:43.425)

serious things is not only that people you are putting in danger, it’s terrible for the business, the reputation of the company. No? So, qualities in the good side that drives revenue. It’s also in the safety side, in the broader sense of safety of the community and the business and others.

 

Ed Ballina (33:03.91)

Yes.

 

Ed Ballina (33:08.422)

It is. And sometimes, you know, we get so engulfed in just day-to-day operations, right? We got to kind of stop ourselves and realize we make stuff that people drink and eat. OK, think about the trust, right, that a consumer has to have to open up a sealed package and probably not even sniff it, right? Just drink it, right? They trust us to give them products that are not gonna hurt them. And that’s a real serious responsibility. I wanna flip a little bit, I like to take the contrarian view at times. So here’s things that haven’t worked for me in safety, right? It usually follows some event, right? That caused a waste issue in the facility or caused the problem, but it was kind of isolated, one shot deal type of thing.

 

And I’ve seen people in the quality function overreact to the point where now they come up with these huge mandates. You got to test this thing like every 15 minutes, right? And where I see the disconnect happens is what I call unfunded mandates, right? So the folks are in quality at a senior level, right? They’ve got to, I mean, quality, that’s their 100% of the job, right? Like, okay, hey, you now got to test this, you know, three times, you know, as frequently as you did in order to keep this from happening.

 

And that rolls down to the plant and the plant says, last time I checked, my people are fully employed. Like, how do I do this? And a lot of times in the wrong way to do this, plants are left to figure things out by themselves because they get no relief for their labor, right? Quality says, you need to add 50 hours worth of testing a week, you know, to this particular process. And the plant manager is sitting there saying, I don’t have relief for that.

 

I got to pay for that. You force them to make decisions as to what they’re not going to do and what they’re going to do. And it’s the question, it’s what I call the instant death decision. What, you know, if I don’t do this today, can I get fired tomorrow? Then I do this today. If I can get away with not doing this for three to six months, then A, maybe it’s not that important and B, I’ll deal with that three to six months later. Don’t put your people in that situation, folks. It’s unhealthy and it drives bad decisions.

 

Alvaro Cuba (35:20.701)

Hehehe

 

And what  happens Ed, is when you don’t have a quality system. What you are describing is when quality is just there, it’s a word and it goes up and down. If you are going operational excellence, the pillar is not called really Quality, it’s called TQM, total quality management, which means that you check the materials that go in, you check the process, you check the system.

 

You check everything and then you do the continuous improvement. Everyone knows what to do, when to do, how to do it. That’s the point when quality become consistent, repetitive, and it goes the way that the consumer will taste every single cracker or every single soda or whatever. And it will be exactly the same. This is what I bought. This is what I love.

 

The business wins, we win, and the experience is a growth for the people. So it’s a win, win, and win.

 

Ed Ballina (36:38.246)

And employees are proud of their brands, right? It becomes part of their identity. You know, this is what I do. I’m a paper maker. I’m a soda maker. I’m a chip maker. And guess what? If you can brag by saying, I work for Frito-Lay, and by the way, we own salty snacks, just go look at the shelf, right? People take pride in that, but you don’t get that way without having, you know, really, really good and consistent quality. And, you know.

 

Alvaro Cuba (36:40.475)

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

 

Alvaro Cuba (37:03.482)

Yeah, and my share is the best. Imagine if you can share, my share is the best, which means the consumers are preferring the product that I make. So.

 

Ed Ballina (37:16.198)

Yeah, it’s all good stuff. And the two topics that we’ve discussed today, I hate to plow back to some of the early education that we received, but Maslow’s pyramid of needs or hierarchy of needs, right? At the bottom of that, as a human being, if you have basic necessities such as food, shelter, water and all that,

 

then you can aspire to higher things like community, engagement, and self-actualization. But if you don’t provide a safe work environment for your people, don’t think that they’re thinking about how they’re going to make the enterprise better and how we’re going to win together. They’re thinking about how do I go home with the same pieces that I walked in here with. And quality follows the same route.

 

Alvaro Cuba (38:07.961)

Yes.

 

And exactly. And let’s go back to where we started with the Finland example. No? you have to build the trust and you have to build the freedom. And when people feel like that safe and relaxed, then the magic happens. Yes. So bring us home Ed.

 

Ed Ballina (38:17.766)

Yes.

 

Ed Ballina (38:28.966)

The magic happens. Terrific.

 

Ed Ballina (38:35.654)

Well, you know, we as usually have had a very lively conversation with you. And I hope that you’re enjoying what we’re bringing to you. I have to tell you that we are seeing some really nice growth in viewership, and we thank you for that. Please continue to join this Meet Up community. You know, we’re in the nascent stages of this. We’re starting to grow. But we’re seeing the signs that we’re hitting some topics that

 

that are resonating with you, right? We can see that by the number of views that we get. And we are trying to make these segments shorter, right? You’ve already seen that Alvaro and I can probably talk for hours, but we’re trying to make them shorter, more bite-sized so that you can listen to it in a short period of time, less investment. Also, all of our podcasts have chapters, right? You don’t have to listen to the whole thing or view it. If there are parts of it that intrigue you or interest you, you can easily go to that part of the video and listen to our opinion.

 

Alvaro Cuba (39:43.001)

Yeah. And remember, this is for you guys. So all the feedback that you can give us will go. We are very excited to be able to bring this to you, but we are doing this for you. So join us into manufacturing meetup. If you like this episode, please subscribe. If you are watching YouTube, leave us a review. And if you are listening to iTunes, please

 

like us or give us a review, share the podcast and enjoy.

 

Ed Ballina (40:19.878)

Perfect. So if you want to keep the conversation going, folks, listen, I’ve run out of family members to subscribe to this. OK, we don’t have a big family. So we need that. We need you to engage with us. So you can email us at MMU@augury.com. You can also find us on The Endpoint, which is a free online community for manufacturing pros like you and I. And that’s at endpoint.augury.com. We’ll also have a link to.

 

We’ll also have those links in the show notes for this episode. So join us, meet up buddies, and we’ll see you next time.

 

Alvaro Cuba (40:58.137)

See you, buddies.