Podcast: Lean manufacturing Q&A – Industry professionals answer your questions

Dave Rizzardo is the associate director of the Maryland World Class Consortia, and he co-developed the Lean Peer Group service. He currently facilitates multiple groups and works directly with organizations in helping them on their lean journeys. Carl Livesay is the general manager at Mercury Plastics MD and has more than 40 years of senior operational leadership in the manufacturing industry. Carl is a lean practitioner and serves on the BOD for the Maryland World Class Consortia. Sarah Tilkens is a senior operations manager of operational excellence at GE Healthcare and the CEO and founder of The KPI Lab. She has over 15 years of experience in lean, six sigma, strategy execution, and project management. Dave, Carl, and Sarah recently spoke at IndustryWeek’s Operations Leadership Summit in June. During the panel, “Sustaining Your Lean Gains,” the three explored methods of embedding lean to minimize transformation stalling or backsliding. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Robert Schoenberger, editor in chief of IndustryWeek, shares the audience questions and expert answers from the session.

Below are some key quotes from the podcast:

I just think it's so interesting because I've been part of so many initiatives. We're like, OK, we're going after OEE, and we're taking a top-down approach, and every different part of our process is going to follow these rules, and we envision evolution in this one specific way. But, like you guys know, that doesn't work because every process performs way different. Measuring first-pass yield for one might be their secret sauce. Measuring uptime for another might be more valuable.

But what's interesting is, again, when you think of the way that we deploy leadership programs, we are still taking a very blanket-style approach where you're going to learn from this weird e-learning thing with this really diverse cast of people that we've put. And it's just like, that's not what actually creates next-gen powerhouse leaders. I mean, maybe it works for some people, but I think the opportunity is in thinking about talent development and talent optimization in the same way that you would think about optimizing a process. It’s slow and methodical, and one person at a time, and you get people like me, and you have these ripple effects, and you start a damn revolution.

But if you're not willing to innovate in that space, you're going to get what you've always gotten. So, it's like, who owns talent optimization in your organization? HR? Lean? The people leaders? Nobody? If that many people own it, who owns it? So, I think it's just worth challenging the ways that we're thinking about doing this because, again, you can have the best CI talent in the world, but if you can't keep your people and if you can't use your people well, that's a bummer. – Sarah Tilkens