Featuring Perry Payne: Process Excellence

​Learn about how leadership and culture drive impact in a production environment. Travis and Perry Payne dive into the challenges of improving operational efficiency and how to align teams to achieve lasting transformation.

Transcript:

Travis: 
Welcome back to another MedTech Snapshot, the one-question, one-answer medical device podcast. 
Today we're getting into some global operations and global supply chain.  
 
With me is Perry Payne. Perry is on the executive side for global operations, and we're going to dive into a couple things having to do with product transfers, as well as creating product excellence and production excellence within operations. So stay with us. 
 
All right, Perry. So I hope you can walk us through a bit of a challenge that frankly, I think I've seen in so many different operations throughout my career. This is just an issue that we all end up dealing with at some point or another. 
 
How do you instill process excellence in a production environment if the current state is really lacking discipline, consistency, or even a cohesive team? Any thoughts there? 
 
Perry: 
Yeah, quite a few actually. I've seen this, like yourself, I've seen this quite a bit in the industry and some of the companies that I've worked with. In most instances myself, it's seldom been the process. It's been the culture of the people around the process. Invariably, the process is actually quite straightforward. 
 
If it doesn't make sense, and through manufacturing changes, you know, manufacturing engineering. You can make changes, but typically it's the culture that surround it. It encompasses it, but you have poor discipline. 
 
You really got to scrutinize how did you get where you are? 
1:31 
1 minute 31 seconds 
And the reason I mentioned that why--why do you do that? You are where you are. There's nothing that you do about it, but sometimes circumstances dictate your behaviours. 
 
And so particularly in a start-up environment, or where you've done a recent acquisition, or you've inherited something that wasn't solid, then there are things that you need to do in order to get to some point of stability and get yourself in the place you are.  
 
And now you've got to repair that. That's part of admitting where you are, right? If you don't understand, that's actually worse, right? If it's just drifted and that's just poor discipline. So it helps you center on the things that you need to correct. Because in most instances, people want to do the right thing all the time. 
 
If you don't enforce them and embrace that culture with people, you're never going to harness that. So it's great to start at understanding how you got in the position you're in. It's not making excuses, It's to understand what you need to fix. And that's where you start. 
 
And, and really, look, if the process is corrupt, you've probably found that out much faster than kind of getting here and going 'Well, we need better discipline.' 
 
You know, the process will work, right? It's just the fact that the discipline is that there's the shroud around it. That's where you need to put the effort. And that effort comes from cultural improvement. 
 
I think, both in regular life and in business, what we've seen is when there's a tragedy, we can regroup on the resolving that tragedy very quickly. And whether it's a natural disaster or it's another issue that's caused a problem, if you can get your team to rally around that resolution, they do so with gusto and energy because it's singular in this focus. 
 
How do you create that in a manufacturing environment where discipline is the problem? It's actually doing the same thing. 
 
It's finding that common ground that makes sense to everybody so they can be invested and give them the authority to make the changes, with accountability. But nevertheless, giving the authority to make the changes that they own. 
 
They can drive that cultural change that will then in turn give you the discipline you need for the process. 
 
But you know, there's plenty of lessons for us looking at different things. I, I remember, you know, Hurricane Katrina and things like this, right? Get food to people. OK, That's a pretty simple message. That's a pretty simple thing to get water to people, right? We can align on doing that. 
 
We understand why there's a tragedy the other end, that level of simplicity. Often in the case of transformation for business, when you're seeing issues like discipline causing problems with processes, it's because there's no clarity in respect to that vision. It's over complicated priorities. Things aren't clear. 
 
So if you have a clear objective, what we're trying to achieve here, we can all align--why should you care? Why should you care that I'm saying this stuff right? Have a vested interest, push that responsibility down. Don't try and enforce it from the top. 
 
Have the responsibility in the lower levels because that's how you drive that transformation. And that will build internal discipline as you go through process steps. And that's when good things happen without you looking. And that's what we're trying to drive towards. 
 
So it's all about the culture, not so much the process. In my experience, the process is the simple part. The culture is the difficult part. 
 
Travis:  
You know, in these situations of process excellence within a production environment, it's just lacking, perhaps severely or even just a little... Do you find that lack of discipline is because there's too many conflicting priorities going on in the organization? Or is it more often, maybe it's just a leadership issue? 
 
Perry: 
Again, if the if the leadership having problems, how confusing are the priorities that they're working to?--If your priorities are forever in spiral, right? 
 
If you don't have two or three simple priorities that you're focusing on and that you can rally people to say 'if you're not working on that, you better have a great justification because they're the priorities--brass, right?' This is what we need to fix. 
 
In terms of process excellence a lot of the times, you have to look at stability as well and maturity. So there's two key things, right? 
 
How stable is your process, and how much maturity does that process have? Because that in turn is impacted by the organization. 
 
So if you have a high maturity process--you've been doing it this way for years. But, you have low maturity in respects to the workforce, those things don't really combine, right? 
 
You've really got to look at that, create your own--based on your own circumstances--maturity index. And then and stability are the two pieces, right? 
 
If you're constantly chasing suppliers that these parts don't fit, well 'This is always out of spec.' It's causing problems and that has a knock-on effect to everybody, right? It affects the culture. 
 
'You never fixed this. You haven't fixed this for five years. Why should I care? You don't.'  
 
That kind of syndrome, right? That's what you want to avoid. 
 
So if your process has stability and then the rest of it, is that your maturity of your people for turnover temps or whatever, right? Or just there's a lack of aptitude to some respect, that's where you need to put your focus. 
 
In my experience, process is easier to fix when it's stable—so you have stable in both those respects. That's when it's great to go into kaizans and go, because all change is risk. So if you don't have stability in the 1st place, you don't know what you're changing. 
 
So once you get the degree of stability that you're comfortable with, then you can make those great operational improvements with Kaizen events. You know, you can, you can start looking at great efficiency process mapping. Those are tools that really work well. ​