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This podcast offers business solutions to help listeners develop and implement action plans for lean process improvement and implement continuous improvement projects, cost reductions, product quality enhancements, and process effectiveness improvement. Listeners come from many industries in both manufacturing and office applications.
Patrick Adams 0:16
Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. My name is Patrick Adams, I'll be your host today, and we are joined today by a special guest here in the Lean solution studio. Dave kippen, Dave and I have been friends for quite a while. Friends and colleagues worked on some different things together, and I'm excited to have him
Dave Kippen 0:36
in the studio. So welcome to Joe. Dave, of course, thanks for having me. Yeah, telling
Patrick Adams 0:40
our listeners just a little bit about who you are. Your background, sure.
Dave Kippen 0:45
Yeah, I've had a pretty blessed ride, really. So the current roles, business unit, performance excellence, lead for for the company I work for, ADM that's a mouthful. It is a mouthful. Yeah, I get to run all of our continuous improvement for our milling, our flour milling, and our ag services locations. So that's, that's the day job that keeps me busy. There is almost 200 unique facilities.
Patrick Adams 1:14
Wow. So are you traveling quite a bit then, yeah, yeah.
Dave Kippen 1:18
Okay, yeah. It's a pretty heavy travel job, okay?
Patrick Adams 1:21
And what about so Tell, tell our listeners just a little bit about the work that you've done with the Michigan lean consortium as well, because that's been a fairly large part of your life over the last
Dave Kippen 1:31
few years, right? Yeah, it has, you know, every now and then someone will ask, Hey, are you still doing volunteer work with the MLC? And I'll say, Yeah, I am. And I say, Well, how come? Because it's been so long, a lot of times when you volunteer, you come and you go, Oh yeah, sure, the group has been great. The group has taught me a lot over the years. A lot of my connections and friends in industry come out of the MLC. And so I love to give back. And so, you know, the MLC really wants to improve the lives of workers in Michigan through continuous improvement, right? And that's a motto I'm super close to. I can really get behind that, yeah.
Patrick Adams 2:11
What are the types of things that the MLC does for the Lean community? I know you've been involved in the past in some types of events and things like, Oh, yeah. What are the, what are the some of the things that the MLC does?
Dave Kippen 2:22
Yeah, yeah. The core of the portfolio are networking and learning events. I suppose I'll put it that way. So gamble. Gimbal walks, gimbal visits to local businesses that are practicing lean. We're never done. We're always practicing coffee chats, virtual coffee chats, low barrier to entry to there. All you gotta do is dial in. So those are fun, yeah. Then, of course, a few Keystone events, or Cornerstone events, the annual conference being one, and then some summits in the spring, in the fall, okay?
Patrick Adams 2:57
And the coffee chats. I mean, you don't have to live in Michigan to be involved with these events, right? Even, not just the coffee chats, but even the the annual conference or things like that. I mean, you get people from outside of the state, right?
Dave Kippen 3:09
Oh, yeah, every time, yeah, yeah. Even some of the smaller events, people come up from Indiana and Ohio to to participate in those.
Patrick Adams 3:14
Yeah, nice, nice. So, going back to your kind of, your corporate job, what? What does a day look like in in your shoes, you know? What? What is? What is it that you spend the majority of your time doing in that, in that role?
Dave Kippen 3:29
Yeah, that's a loaded question. When we first launched performance excellence, our version of lean manufacturing, we just call it PE, when we first launched it, we tried to do too much. And so we focused on almost all of the best practices or core tenants of lean. And so we'd roll into a facility and say, We can do anything you want, but here are the six elements of Lean you're going to get didn't work. I get long story short, didn't work, yeah. And so the last couple years, we really narrowed our focus, so daily management, okay, being Now the thing we're focusing on, gamble walks, really the second, the second big thing. So between daily management and gamble walks, that's where we spend a lot of our time, sure, and then this year, on our x matrix, on our on our strategy doc, a lot more support to the larger org with root cause analysis. Okay, and so supporting our safety group and our quality group with hopefully enhancing their root cause analysis skill sets,
Patrick Adams 4:32
very nice. So when it comes to, like, your daily management, your your GEMBA walks, you know, maybe some of the other things who's involved in those? Is it, is it only the frontline leaders? Is it mid management? Is there executives involved? What is, what does that
Dave Kippen 4:49
look like with an organization as big as ADM, you know? And I mentioned I have almost 200 facilities, and I'm the smallest business unit in ADM. I. There's a lot of all of it, okay? And so some areas have really well developed, like tier one, sure review and response, or daily management right out there in the work centers. Some areas have a have it developed all the way up through a tier four. I'm pretty lucky in my BU, they started practicing daily management, a version of it, I think five years ago. Okay, and so I can fairly confidently say we're doing some good version of it, all the way up through a tier five. Oh, wow. So yeah, great, yeah, yeah, it's not perfect. Well, it's a continuous part, the
Patrick Adams 5:41
fact that you're that you're experimenting, you're trying things, you're doing it is, I mean, that's a battle. And there's a lot of organizations out there that maybe are, are not even anywhere near, or they're not willing to try or right, you know, waiting for perfection or, right, you know, whatever. Yeah, be. So that's, that's good, yeah? So let's, let's back out of your corporate career MLC, and just talk in general terms. Because the topic that I want to talk about today is something that probably you've experienced at any organization you've worked at, you know, places through the MLC that you've been involved with or whatever it might be. But the topic that I want to talk about is executive leadership involvement, specifically in projects. So project management, larger, medium to large scale projects that are going on within companies. So you and I both know, to develop a continuous improvement culture, you have to have, you know, daily habits, behaviors, small improvements embedded in the organization, happening on a regular basis. But also, in addition to that, a lot of times we see organizations that are working on projects, project management of, you know, projects that are giving you maybe they have a medium severity, medium frequency type of problem, or maybe high frequency, high severity that, you know, takes a project manager and, you know, a really focused improvement effort around something. So what I want to talk about is the lack thereof, or maybe, you know, in some organizations, the amazing support that comes from the executive level when it comes to projects. So what? Why would that be important? Why would it be important to have support at the executive level when you're when you you yourself are maybe a mid manager, and you have a project that's been assigned to you, or you've taken on a project. Why would it be important to have executive leader involvement?
Dave Kippen 7:43
Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. I might, right off the bat, spin it okay and say, why don't we get that? Because I think people will know why it's important, right? You'll, you'll be able to get the resources you need. They help clear roadblocks, things like that. And so if you do have the support, it's going to help Sure. You know, I think the question we all wrestle with is, why don't we have that support? Right off
Patrick Adams 8:09
the bat, right? Yeah, that's a point.
Dave Kippen 8:11
Yeah, you mentioned the term buy in in some of our pre discussion, yep. And maybe a hot take, if you're running a project, or you're in charge of an initiative, you're trying to make some big change, and you're thinking, How do I get buy in? You're already behind the eight ball.
Patrick Adams 8:33
Yeah, that i i hear where you're going with that. Because I think about like, you know, when I would would do a project within an organization, there would be some kind of a charter that we would start with, right? And this would help us scope out the entire project from what are the goals, what are the problems we're trying to solve? Who's going to be involved? What metrics are we trying to impact? Maybe, what deliverables do we have? But also, one of the things that shows up on there is executive sponsor, you know, who's the sponsor. And so when you think, when you think about buy in, it's both buy in from the team that you're working with that's listed on your charter, but also buy in from executive your executive sponsor. And I think for a lot of organizations, we get this charter, we complete this whole thing, and then we end up with, you know, an executive sponsors name on there, but that's it. Yeah, like, there's a name on there. But what does that actually mean when you think about, like, buy in or support or whatever that might be. What should that mean when, when you place an executive sponsor's name on
Dave Kippen 9:39
that charter? Yeah, for sure. And I've had a personal love hate relationship with charters over the years. Early in my career, I thought those they were the dumbest things I've ever heard of to be completely honest with you, we all know this is a problem. Why do I need to spend time putting a charter together? Right? Old Dave now realizes that. Yeah, that was a miss that young Dave had. And so when I think about charters now, I actually I like them. I think they're super beneficial if you do a couple of key things. And I think the first one, when you're crafting a charter, you almost have to have, I don't know if it's some DMAIC thinking, some problem solving, thinking, in that you have to define that gap statement, the true problem with those executive sponsors. All too often, I've seen on charters a really wordy blurb of a problem statement or what we're going to go do, and everybody says, Sure, that's that's fine. That sounds great. I support it. They sign off, and away you go. And three months later, nobody knows what the heck you're working on. Right, right? Yeah, that's the problem. That's problem we see too. Yeah, yeah. And so tailoring the first part of a charter, almost in a way that it's you're into the problem solving, what's the specific measurable gap that we're going to go after? Right? And that's what everybody has to sign off on, you know? And I've seen versions of that, where you get to that first chartering, well, maybe not the first one. It's usually the second one, where you get into it chartering session and you say, All right, here's the gap, the measurable, specific gap, and the executive will say, that's not the problem. Okay, well, now we're getting somewhere, right? I think we don't get buy in when we don't have alignment.
Patrick Adams 11:36
I think also they may put in a sponsor's name on there and never even review the charter with them, right? I mean, yeah, that's another big problem, because as soon as you said, like, well, then you present the actual problem, and the executive might say, you know, that's not really the problem. I mean, I've been to a lot of organizations where I'm like, what, you know, what did your sponsor say when you presented the charter to them and reviewed it with them? Like, Oh, yeah, haven't done that.
Dave Kippen 12:01
I guess that thought didn't cross my mind. Every charter that I worked through that had a name on it, it's a team effort, at least in the beginning, to get that charter drawn up. Yeah.
Patrick Adams 12:10
I mean, it has to be, in order for, you know, again, the buy in everyone has to be completely aligned on the scope of the project. There has to be some level of clarity that, that the whole team has, what is it that we're trying to achieve? How do I actually play part in that? Like, what is my why is my name on this charter? Like, what is my responsibility in all of this? Anywhere, anywhere from the team, the project manager, the, you know, the process owner, the the executive sponsor themselves, like, what's everybody's responsibility and making sure that we see this through to the end and actually meet those deliverables, right?
Dave Kippen 12:47
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. You don't have buy in when there's not alignment, or there's not agreement that this is a problem that's gonna help the executive Sure. We could go all the way back to, you know, this the strategic plan or the goals of an organization, too. A lot of times I see folks working on a charter, and they say, I don't have buy in. And you say, well, which part of your yearly goal does this support? And you get the deer in the headlights look, right? Yeah, maybe it's somebody's pet project. Lots of reasons why we lots of good reasons we start charters, sure. But if you don't get buy in, that means somebody doesn't believe in what you're working on, right? And why? So true.
Patrick Adams 13:24
That's so true. Hey everybody. Patrick Adams here, this is the end of part one of this episode with Dave kippen. We are going to rejoin Dave next week for part two of this episode. Again, thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to subscribe. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai