Transforming the Auto Supply Chain Workplace Through Engagement, Communication, and Gamification

[Transcript]

Jan Griffiths: 00:00

Welcome to another episode of the Auto Supply Chain Prophets podcast, and today we are going to talk about the connected workforce. How do we connect people who are actually doing the work? Well, the QAD redzone product has a way of doing that. We wanted to talk to a real practitioner and tell us what that impact really is. And so today, we welcome to the show. Kevin Shayer. Kevin is the vice president of operations and supply chain at Allied Wire and Cable. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Shayer: 00:36

Good afternoon. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Jan.

Jan Griffiths: 00:39

It's great to have you, Kevin, tell us a little bit about your background.

Kevin Shayer: 00:43

I've been involved in this for about 30 years with a number of different organizations, most recently in the protein and the food industry, where it was a fast-growing family-owned businesses that were experiencing exponential growth and had the exciting opportunity to join the Allied Wire and Cable team just a couple of years ago, and to help them on their journey for sustainable growth.

Jan Griffiths: 01:07

And you've also been in the steel business, haven't you?

Kevin Shayer: 01:10

I have, actually, the first eight years of my career was spent with a steel distributor based out of Chicago that had 30 Plus distribution centers throughout the United States and started cutting my supply chain and operations teeth in that side of the world.

Terry Onica: 01:25

Kevin, so can you explain what QAD redzone is, and how you use our connected workforce solution.

Kevin Shayer: 01:32

Redzone allows us to communicate with our team members in the most simplistic ways that they're used to when they communicate with their friends and families every day when they're on their iPhones and iPads. And it's allowed us to engage our workforce in new and exciting ways. That is absolutely increased engagement and camaraderie throughout the workforce.

Cathy Fisher: 01:52

So, Kevin, what triggered your organization to decide that you needed this way of communicating with your workforce?

Kevin Shayer: 01:59

Coming through the pandemic and experiencing significant growth really kind of stretched the operation, and we went down the path of evaluating a number of labor management systems. I come from a background where I've implemented some very highly engineered solutions. Red Zone is a more simplistic tool that uses simple technology like iPads, Apple TVs, iPhones, that that allows us to connect with our workforce. It's not only a productivity measurement tool, but what we love most about it. It's really about the ability to communicate easily. And real time with team members. We're able to communicate and make quick decisions and really make sure that our team members are being taken care of in ways that were not possible in the past.

Terry Onica: 02:45

How has it helped you to increase your productivity in your manufacturing operations?

Kevin Shayer: 02:51

That's a great question. And in addition to the engagement side of things, redzone, at its core is around overall equipment effectiveness, or OEE, which was a new KPI for us coming into the project and one that we really rallied around. So, one of the cool things about red zone and the fact that we've got all these Apple TVs out on the shop floor and 70 iPads and the operators are engaging with that we've got real time feedback, to know who's having a we call a green bar Goldstar day, and who's struggling and everything that we've done with redzone has been around positive reinforcement. And it's so certain that real time feedback has been a huge component for us, where we use well, not only the TVs and the scoreboards that are out there. But we're using the daily shift, huddles that we hold twice per shift to evaluate how the day is going with the idea that we never want to go through the course of an entire shift or workday and know that we've got a problem, right? We want to identify those in short interval control periods, where we can course correct and make the appropriate adjustments or provide the right levels of training or support or maintenance health if it's needed.

Terry Onica: 03:56

Have you seen any measurable results?

Kevin Shayer: 03:59

Terry, we have. Throughout the course of our project, we saw productivity improvements of over 100%. And I'm half embarrassed to tell you that and I'm on the other side of it, I'm really proud to tell you that that we had that type of improvement. In our operation. I've got a great example. We had one of our key value-added departments that we call “striping”, had lead times that were in the 15-day range when we started the project through the course of our implementation and getting our feet under us. And within literally two months, we had increased productivity by over 100%. We had eliminated the backlogs. And this was really done by challenging the status quo. Part of the project is setting benchmarks for productivity for the different operations. And that for us was one where it was a little a lot of tribal knowledge, a lot of operators. We have more art than science. So, we were able to turn that process into a way more scientific quantitative methodologies and set some standards and benchmarks that everybody could follow. The results were just fantastic. We talked a lot about OEE overall equipment effectiveness, which was our new rallying point and KPI. At the outset of the project, it was, it was pretty low. Today, proud to say that we've more than doubled our OE percentage. Other metrics that have improved through the course of our redzone journey are certainly retention. And I like to measure regrettable turnover, and we've seen roughly a 50% decline in regrettable turnover over the course of the last 16 months, through the use of our platform, and the engagement tools that come along with it. So OEE has improved, turnovers decreased. And we've also seen improvements and on time delivery. Our quality metrics have gone up. So, you know, it's not all attributable to redzone. But much of it absolutely is and, and the teams have really done a nice job of, of rallying behind it and using it as our, our platform for improvement.

Terry Onica: 06:03

So, what is it that the employees actually see on the iPad and you as a manager?

Kevin Shayer: 06:07

So, a couple of things from a managerial perspective, and part of the implementation was the 12 Apple TVs that I spoke about. So, we have those in each of our departments that we use. So, anybody can walk up and down, we call it the main street of our production facility, and look at a specific department and know exactly how they're performing. The whole concept is around green bars and gold stars. And we can quickly take a glance at the TV and know how the departments are performing and if somebody's struggling, and on the other side of that, who's having an awesome day. So, from a manager's perspective, it's very visible, it's in our face all day, every day, the department leads are seeing them real time through the course of their shift. And then from an operator perspective, and probably most importantly, they can see their own personal performance. But they can also use the iPad to chat amongst the different departments up and downstream, they can use it to reach out to a manager, if they need assistance with something if they got a question on a work order, they could reach out to the maintenance group. And again, all this is real time, it's just like getting a message on your phone and that our workforce adopted to it very quickly. And I can follow along, and, on my iPhone, I can be sitting on my couch at night and see what the second shift is doing. And I know that they're having a good night or if they're not. And then right we've got a management team in place to assist them to, again, have that successful day.

Cathy Fisher: 07:32

So, Kevin, how has redzone helped your organization in terms of engaging your workforce as well as retention?

Kevin Shayer: 07:39

The very foundation of redzone is based on engagement and connectivity and communication. We talked a lot about that. And what we saw through our implementation, and I think one of the things that helped our project and implementation have the success level that did was we involved a ton of folks early on, we had a lot of, of net promoters and supporters of it that were scattered throughout the workforce, I think we had about 15% of the workforce was part of our what we called our practice team. So we had a lot of engagement early on in the project. But then, through the course of the implementation and the direction and guidance of our coach and our management group. People quickly saw the benefits of what we were, at the end of the day, right. It was all about change management to a high degree. And having a lot of people involved in the change early on. And then them seeing the benefits of it early in the project really helped us gain steam. What we saw was that what I haven't spoken about is the gamification side of redzone. So, engagement and communication, but also gamification. Most people are generally competitive, they want to win. And our goal is as the leadership team and managers and team leads on the floor is to help everybody win. So hence, all the scoreboards that are out there. And people at the end of the day, they want to know the score, they want to they want to leave at the end of their workday and know they had a good day, or they didn't. But that consistent and constant feedback certainly helps people keep people engaged in what they're doing every day. And then from a retention perspective, what we found is we have said we had 130 folks that were part of the initial implementation. We had one person kind of self-select out and say, you know what, I don't I don't want to be held accountable. I don't want to I don't want to be measured and they left they left the workforce but what we saw through the course of the project and the productivity gains that we that we picked up, we were over staffed and so we went almost an entire year without hiring and really kind of backed in and right sized our workforce to the to our new workload. Meanwhile right with the business continued to grow and what we've seen Through the course of everything we've talked about from the communication and engagement perspective, is about a 50% reduction in what I'll call regrettable turnover for our business.

Kevin Shayer: 07:43

Kevin, you mean to tell me by giving people on the shop floor a bunch of iPads, and connecting them real time so everybody can see what's going on? That the technology itself has impacted employee retention. Come on.

Kevin Shayer: 10:30

True story. Everything I told you is, is 100%. True. It wasn't it's not just the technology side of it, right? It's multifold. Technology is the enabler of the engagement and, and our team's ability to get the workforce bought in. And then utilizing that platform to give the team members a voice that's part of our daily activities include the shift huddles where we're talking about safety and quality and productivity, what can we do differently to improve and impact your work area to impact your work in a positive way to increase or improve the safety of your environment, part of the platform is that functionality that that allows us to kind of do a Plan, Do, Check Act. So we're generating activities related to safety, productivity quality, Kaizenish type things, through the course of our huddles, and other daily activities that get logged in the platform, and funnel up to the different department levels and to the leadership levels. And so, we're using people's ideas, more now than we ever have, right? They've got a voice, they've got a voice and the management team, and their colleagues are listening, and it's leading to positive change out on the plant floor.

Cathy Fisher: 11:47

Kevin, what kind of feedback have you received from the workers?

Kevin Shayer: 11:51

We launched the product and redzone warned us that we would have team members that would fall into three categories. One would be the folks that would buy into it without question. And we'd have a middle group that was kind of waiting to see how things played out and how it impacted them. And then another third, that would be on the negative side that, you know, we would have to try and pull over to the bright side, so to speak. And they were right. Although I would say our percentages were probably skewed towards the positive as we already had a very engaged workforce. We have a really strong culture here, a good environment, people were treated well and continue to be. We navigated through the change management aspect of the project. And, and today, it's embedded in our culture. So, anybody new coming in the door, it's all they know. And for folks that have been here, it's become part of the day, their day to day lives in a positive way. We use it to communicate all kinds of different activities. And we use it for recognition in many different ways. Whether that's calling out somebody that had had a great OEE day and had the most green bars and gold stars, or somebody that came up with a great suggestion that we were able to implement that improve their work area. So generally, the feedback was positive at the outset. And today said it's there's no complaints again, it's easy technology, we're talking about iPads people use those and tablets all day, every day at home, they've come to expect it here now. And so, it was a reasonably easy transition, I would say.

Terry Onica: 13:21

We hear so often that the younger generation doesn't want to get into manufacturing. Have you seen the solution that help you to attract retain the younger generation?

Kevin Shayer: 13:33

Absolutely. You know, we do a lot of homework on the millennials and the Gen Z folks and what motivates them and what doesn't. Redzone has given us that people are looking for technology that's easy to use, well, what's easier than using your iPhone or your iPad, right? People are just used to it, you know, they're looking for flexibility. So, we do things in with our workforce to provide a level of flexibility that you can't in manufacturing, it's not as easy as allowing people to work from home, right. That's not an option. But so, we believe those folks are looking for collaboration. They're looking for communication, they're looking to feel like they're part of something bigger and better. We had departments before the redzone. But today, we have department huddles twice a day, every day, where they're with their teammates, where they're, they're talking about the winds of the day, or they're talking about all the things that impact their daily work lives. And so there's, there's a lot more collaboration, we talked about the chat functions and the ability to communicate up and downstream. They're communicating more in ways that they like to communicate, which isn't always, you know, face to face, they can just send a message or chat. And so, they're able to communicate easier. So, we've given them that platform to be part of a team, whether it's their department or the shift. We've given them that opportunity to communicate easily. I don't care what generation you are; people want to know. They want to know how they're doing. So now, with redzone, they've got the ability to, to know how their day how they performed today, and was it a successful day or not? To go home proud, because most days, most folks do go home with green bars and gold stars.

Terry Onica: 15:12

How has it helped you to improve your supply chain, either with your customers internally or with your suppliers? What improvements have you seen there?

Kevin Shayer: 15:21

I would say at the end of the day, the the one group that has won the most with redzone has been our customers. We talked a lot about the productivity improvements that we were able to see as a business. We talked about the reduction in lead times. And that allowed us to, to be more responsive to get products out the door faster, to deliver on us on time, departure promises, in ways that that we weren't in the past. So, we've seen improvements and on time departure, we've seen improvements in quality, because we're talking about it as a component of our huddles all day, every day, up and down the supply chain, our cost of service has been reduced significantly. At the end of the day, it's really all about servicing our customers, which is not only our external customers, but our team members or customers as well. And everybody's winning through this platform.

Cathy Fisher: 16:13

Kevin, how will your organization be able to leverage this very unique approach to engaging your workforce to attract new workers to your organization or to your team?

Kevin Shayer: 16:23

I would tell you that anytime we bring a visitor into our plant, whether that's a customer, a vendor, or a prospective new team member, when we walk throughout our facility, what sticks out most of them is is the redzone platform, because it's so visible on the floor today. So, we've got 12 Apple TVs out there, we've got iPads at all the stations. And it's so easy for us to walk down what I call Main Street and stop at an apartment and be able to share that the technology that we're using, show them the ease of it, and to demonstrate how easy it is for them to get integrated into our business. It's become part of our DNA within our facility here and and so from a attracting talent, we talked about the millennial and Gen Z folks and what they're looking for, we can walk them through their art plant and show them exactly how technology can be used in a user friendly, non-invasive, and almost friendly way that helps connect them to their fellow team members, to our business, to the managers and leaders. And

Terry Onica: 17:29

Let's look at the other side from you as a senior leader, what does the tool provide you? What has given us benefits,

Kevin Shayer: 17:37

I would say from the very beginning, it gave us a rallying point to kind of recharge our operation. People had been doing things here the same way for many, many years. And to the positive side, they were collecting tons of data and information on Google Sheets or through the ERP system. What redzone gave us was that opportunity to completely revolutionize what has not been a high technology business and turn it into that connected workforce and workplace. The real time data is critical for my team to be able to manage the business and to be able to adjust and, and course correct and make sure that we're doing the things all day every day to make sure we're servicing our customers in the way that we pledged to. So real time information. It's given us structure from the standpoint of the huddle process. So, I talked about huddles at the department levels. I didn't talk about our daily, what we call daily vital signs huddle, where we gather both leadership of both shifts together. And we talk about similar things that as the Department huddles, but I've seen a little different level. And so, it's given us that, that platform and opportunity to make sure that we're communicating between shifts, which you know, and operations and manufacturing is not always the easiest thing to do. But it's given us that common ground to be able to have that daily huddle and meeting to make sure that we're aligned as a as a team. And then we have a weekly vital signs huddle, where we get the leadership group of our facility together. And we're looking at the week's data, we're looking at what opportunities we have or reviewing action items. We're looking at how do we ensure that we have a successful week ahead and that we had a successful week in the past, but structure is absolutely has been one of the one of the key things, we've got tools and technology in our hands all day every day that that helped us facilitate that and, and we got the management commitment to holding those huddles. I don't think the team has missed the huddle. And in months, it's just as I mentioned, it's part of our DNA. So, to summarize all that we've got real time information and data to make decisions to understand our capacities and, and weak points as well as our strong points. It's given us that that opportunity for communication and discipline around regular communication with our team members and our management team. And it's also really rated facilitates continuous improvement, which is what this is all about. So we talked about OEE, that's at the top of everybody's productivity goals. For the year, for the for the week, for the month is, you know, what are we doing all day, every day to drive OEE improvement? That means we're looking at our processes, our equipment, and our work areas and, and coming up with ways soliciting ideas from the workforce gathering there, their thoughts and ideas, or how do we make this better? How do we improve our safety and quality and productivity? So, you couple all those things together? And it's been pretty magical, the transformation that I've seen over the last year?

Jan Griffiths: 20:46

I have a question that's directed straight at Cathy Fisher. And that is, what do you think, Cathy? Would this help a company in terms of quality audits?

Cathy Fisher: 20:55

Oh, absolutely. That's what's been going in my mind, as you've been talking, Kevin is about workplace culture. And certainly the IATF 16949, definitely talks about that in terms of employee engagement, empowerment, there's a requirement right there about it. So, I think that this is a phenomenal way for organizations to meet the next generation where they are in terms of their desire for technology, in their jobs in the workplace. And at the same time, it's doing so in a way that's really valuable to the company and allowing communications to be seamless. And that's what I'm hearing you say, Kevin, is that communications are definitely improved across to your team. And even with the workers themselves being able to communicate with each other across shift and even within workgroups.

Kevin Shayer: 21:41

Sure, an allied is as 9100 D certified ISO as well. And, and we've incorporated redzone into most of our work instructions. And we've actually used it for a number of other daily checklists, whether it be powered industrial trucks, the daily operator checklist is performed in redzone. And many of the food manufacturers are using it for measuring first time quality and things of that nature, which would be next steps for us on our continuous improvement journey.

Terry Onica: 22:10

What I think is so cool, is we're so used to hearing about innovations and technologies coming from the OEMs and tier ones. And here's tier two, Allied Wire and Cable, implementing such a cool technology embracing it and the lower tiers. I think this is just such a great story from that perspective because we always think the lower tiers aren't doing anything. And here's one that's just excelling at making things go right at their level in the supply chain and engaging employees and getting more productive.

Cathy Fisher: 22:38

Kevin, what is one action that you would recommend other manufacturers take to achieve the transformation and the success that you've achieved, especially in engaging your workforce?

Kevin Shayer: 22:50

Now, I'm not sure I can dial that into one action. So, I'm going to give you a couple, the easy answer is go check out red zone for yourself, and have them come out and do the Blitz. And you'll learn a whole lot about your operation. The second thing is, and we've talked a lot about people, but at the end of the day, it's all about the people. So, I think ensuring that you're engaging the right folks on your team, both on the leadership side, but also on the hourly side. So, my advice would be to engage those folks early on in your process and invite them to be part of it. Certainly, anything you can do to ensure that your team is trained, and has the right leadership acumen, to be able to lead what tends to be a pretty significant fundamental change to the way you do business, if you're not already doing something very similar. And for us, it was pretty different, but exciting. And we had some quick wins and some early wins. And the team really just started rallying behind it. And it was like a, it was like a tidal wave that wave of positive energy that we really erode throughout the course of the entire year. The challenge is, you have got to maintain that. So, the continuous improvement aspect of this, and sustaining it is the next challenge for us, and keeping things fresh and but the cool thing is, it's all about positive reinforcement and rewarding and, and that's how we use it every day to keep people positive about it.

Jan Griffiths: 24:18

Kevin, it sounds like your organization has really been successful in leveraging this technology to achieve that thing that we all crave so much right, a connected workforce, and you're seeing the impact to the bottom line. We love that. And we really look forward to hearing more about your team's long-term results with QAD red zone in the future.

Kevin Shayer: 24:40

Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.