s01e10 – Productivity: What Role for Automation & Artificial Intelligence

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

manufacturing, stuart, customer, technology, people, thinking, process, solution, business, podcast, touched, fitzgerald, productivity, flow, automate, information, australia, learning, share, bit

SPEAKERS

Graeme Fitzgerald, Stuart Ewin

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Welcome to manufacturing mastery with Graeme Fitzgerald, the podcast. My name is Graham Fitzgerald. And for over 30 years I’ve led some of Australia’s largest manufacturing organizations, right in the highs and lows, the occasional failure, and the plentiful successes that inevitably come with being in business. This podcast is aimed helping you progressive Australian manufacturer with practical, real world advice on navigating your pathway to sustainable success in manufacturing. Myself and my special guests will cover everything from how to embed a planning framework into your business, new approaches to innovation, the importance of culture and how to lead change and navigating the new normal as an Australian manufacturer. So manufacturers let’s master Hi, everybody. Welcome to today’s podcast. I’m joined by one of Australia’s leaders in work complexity reduction, cleaning process streamlining an application of software robots, sometimes called robotic process automation. Stewart human. She was one of the good guys when I say good guys, that means that he’s a metallurgist somewhere in in his past life. George started out as a metallurgist in the steel industry in Wollongong, then trained as a mechanical engineer. Stuart and I first worked together many years ago, bhp Steel’s Newcastle rod mill, where Stuart joined our team as part of our early steps to bring in customer perspective into our manufacturing operations. Like so many of us in the steel industry, we’ve crossed paths over the last 20 years working in many different industries, including mining minerals, Hadley, amongst others. Stuart’s a managing director of Gestalt ethics probation limited, and still, you can correct me if I’m not pronounced that, right. Yeah, that’s and it’s Alex is an organization that’s focused on helping clients to see the whole improvement picture. Over the last 10 plus years, George has expanded these knowledge across the process improvement space, including productivity, acceleration, across all aspects of the business, and hopefully, I’m gonna be able to get Stuart to share some of that stuff. Because that’s a new world for me. And I’m really, really interested in learning more about that and helping share that across manufacturing industries in Australia. You’re the person who’s got a genuine desire to see Business Excellence deliver for the customer. Stuart’s work with some of Australia’s best organizations from Australian Royal Australian royal track Corporation, Westpac, NBN, the GM, Holden and many others. today’s podcast things productivity, and what’s the impact of work complexity on it? The idea for today’s podcast came from a conversation I had with Jordan the second half of last year when Australia is just emerging from the first lockdown from the coronavirus pandemic, we’re speaking about what each other been involved in over the previous period of time. And we generally found that we’re in close agreement about the importance for Australian manufacturers to take advantage of opportunities available through technology, and use automation to really leverage how their businesses operate. As I listen to Stuart, then I realized the importance of sharing what’s possible in 2021 and beyond to many of our businesses in Australia tend to lack the knowledge and understanding what’s possible. And that generally holds him back so much. In our time, together, I hope we can share some of the secrets you will you will have learned Stuart and I are learning about what’s possible in the world of automation, artificial intelligence. So welcome, Stuart, to manufacturing mastery. And they will be able to talk for hours around something we’re both passionate about. But what I’ve done is I’ve got a couple of questions that might help us stay on track. Because I know people are generally pretty busy. So. So welcome, Stuart.

Stuart Ewin 

Thank you. Great. Thank you. That was a very generous introduction.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Thank you, sir. So maybe, just maybe share with us a bit of your background, you and I go a long way back. And I think we’ve met and shared a lot of interesting journeys, but it’d be great if you could share about your background and what’s created, who you are today and how you you’re exploring those exciting new fields.

Stuart Ewin 

Yeah, I think you’ve alluded to it already. Graham, thank you for the the intro they’re born and bred steel industry. So 30 years metallurgy, mechanical engineer. So that, you know, background has sort of brought quite a strong focus around manufacturing. And yeah, the the story of productivity, right. It’s always about productivity. And for me, it created that process thinking that needs to happen. So you know, a lot of that He touched on the word earlier work complexity, right? That’s the focus to try and reduce complexity to improve productivity. And it’s that tangible process thinking that comes from seal that, you know, these days, I’ve transferred that knowledge across to generally the services sector, right manufacturing and services, sort of a crossover. And what you find it’s about information flow these days more than the physical product flow, necessarily. And there’s a fair day’s these days of technology, so a lot more around the information and data that’s available, IT systems, the cloud platform, you know, those sorts of things. And it’s this shift to technology that’s really changed what’s possible. Still, the the principles of process thinking, you know, apply. So.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

So in that space, I guess you’re talking about most of the people listening will have heard of, what is it? manufacturing 4.0, or internet of things. So you’re talking about the, the application of monitoring and capturing data and the like,

Stuart Ewin 

is the real time business is the technology application. That’s exactly right. So you’ve got a lot more connectivity going on these days. And some of its around the infrastructure you might have, it might be, you know, the the systems that you’re using, or, you know, the, the platforms that you use for managing a business, or it could actually be, you know, the technology you’re using within your business, you know, it’s, it’s a lot more connected in real time these days than it ever has been. And the the shift that’s occurred, it’s more accessible, you know, you’ve got Software as a Service now, and you can pay subscription fees, and you know, a lot of these things are scaled, you’re actually able to access them quite easily. I’ll give you an example. Most people independently be part of this grant, but you know, your cloud based accounting packages these days, yeah. You know, which go back 10 years ago would have been a dream, right? Yeah. So you know, that’s an example sort of shift that’s happening, it’s become accessible to everybody.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

So I guess one of the things that my experience in that is that generally, many people would not know what they don’t know. So they don’t even know how to ask or a way to ask questions is the right, let me

Stuart Ewin 

That’s it. It’s this, you know, it’s in the cloud, right? It’s hidden within the cloud, it’s invisible. And so it’s generally that bit of thinking about, you know, how do I capture or understand where some efficiencies may be in my business, the productivity story, and what I’ve come to learn and yeah, the journey we just touched on earlier, it’s about the thinking about process, but thinking about it in modern terms, right. starting to understand those information flows is actually a key piece of thinking that goes on. Because technology now allows you to see that sort of information, you’re able to visualize it and get the data on in real time. And this scene, in a practical sense, this is the shift from paper forms and Excel spreadsheets, right? To some sort of software, workflow.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Okay, so so I’m, you’ve got me intrigued, so you probably will dig a bit further as we go. Are you looking to grow your manufacturing business, need some support to achieve your goals? My manufacturing mastermind group is a great place to start. This exclusive group receives monthly worksheets and guidance around the five key principles of manufacturing grow as a monthly live virtual q&a session, and the live mentoring call with a mastermind member where we troubleshoot the business challenge of the day. Plus, this group comes together on a quarterly basis for a one day workshop to ensure accountability in the delivery of your business growth plan. Find out more by visiting Ryan fitzgerald.com.au slash mastermind. When we started our journey, to bring the customer needs in how we approach manufacturing in a commodity like steel rod, technology boom was well underway. That’s what I thought. And that was the new early 2000s. So what what have you seen that if you think back to those early 2000s, compared to Now, how does that change? And what Maybe, yeah, she shared with us some of those things that you find

Stuart Ewin 

it’s, it’s the thinking around your your work processes. And as I mentioned before, it’s bigger than just the physical processes. You know, think about your information flow. And a lot of this has to do with your business operating right. So it’s around customer orders or customer delivery or the operation itself. You know, the technology shift has created that information and knowledge To be there real time. Alright, so whereas previously, you may have been reacting to situations as information became available these days, you’ve got that information at your fingertips, and you can almost predict what customers are doing and what the operation is going to do. So it’s this ability to dig into a bit of that data and information to grab hold of it. But it’s also a way of, you know, really stepping up your efficiencies and your productivities around that information flow. Because knowledge is power, as we all know, and the quicker you can get that information and more accessible, it is quicker, you can make decisions.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

So do you find that in businesses, you’ve been working in this space? That’s an easy connection for people to make that, that going from the customer what the customer needs, and coming back is that that’s

Stuart Ewin 

exactly the space that we’re talking about here. When we talk word complexity, a lot of people just say it’s too complex. It’s too hard. Yeah, the the insight here is just think process, right? start to understand end to end. What is that information flow doing? And a good example for people to think about is in order to cash, right, if you start to think about from a customer order through to the point where you receive the cash in the bank, that information flow provides you a different insight. So it might appear, you know, too large to grab hold off to start with. But the principles Yeah, manufacturing, people would know this well, right process thinking, understand the process that that that principles still plays within this modern world, you’ve got the advantage now that you’re able to find technology solutions, and this extends even to automation technologies, right, that, you know, can solve some of those problems and some of those barriers. So I think people may not just be aware of how quickly the technology has shifted, and how accessible It really is. Yeah, that base thinking is still the same think process? Yeah, well, the solutions look quite different these days.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

I was only talking to an organization last week about this very thing that they know that having they make process equipment, and at the moment they’re grappling with, what is the information they need to be able to capture for their customers? How would you go about approaching that? From the work you’ve been doing?

Stuart Ewin 

Yeah, the work that I do generally applies in a sort of area Graham. So there’s some structure toolsets, like process mapping, for example, that provide a pretty quick answer, you know, and these sort of things are very low tickets, post it notes and brown paper. And you know, you can get moving fairly quickly around that. Yeah. But then you can move to technology platforms, like there’s software out there known as primatte, we can replicate that handdrawn process, you can create a digital solution to it. Yeah, almost within a day or two. And this digital solution will manage the workflow for you information, right? So you may have information that’s coming in, that needs to be approved or reviewed. And then it gets passed on to another person, and will that flow can be automated very quickly. Some organizations you need a third party software solution, other ones, you may actually have it already in house, right? office 365. These days, there’s usually got a SharePoint about it. Yeah, if you’ve got SharePoint, you’ve already got the technology to automate a lot of your workflows. So it’s thinking that, you know, it really has been a step ahead, I think of where people are at. And I think people have thought about the fact that a lot of this technology is actually at your doorstep.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

I think that that’s, from my own personal perspective, I think that will be absolutely correct. Understanding the capability of SharePoint and how that might work. So

Stuart Ewin 

yeah, that’s Yeah, these things are very accessible. The scaled. Yeah, the smaller businesses now. You know, as I mentioned before, yeah, even the independence like you and I are playing with some of this technology, right, this cloud service technology, it’s, it’s that accessible. Yeah. And I think it’s the like making the link and the mindset to understand well okay, there is a productivity gain here. And the gain is around time right. The advantage there is time, a lot of the focuses around the physical cost or the product or the you know, the plant equipment. Move your thinking back to the customer and time, the lead time for an order how long it takes for delivery. The communication that’s happening with the customer.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

I was talking to that very same client last week or around was the challenge of their their plan going forward was how did they How did they get their design and delivery process? In a you know from 2018 So 3026 to 36 weeks down to 12 to 16. sort of thing. Yeah. So have you had any experiences in that? So

Stuart Ewin 

plenty of experience so that you know that one you just mentioned sort of triggered a thought in my mind grab that the local manufacturing here in the 100 years ago, and engineering design was part of their process, right, you receive an order, you got to design the solution. And it required a whole team of engineers to do this. Every order was designed from scratch, and it took 40 weeks to deliver that order. The they were so busy engineering and designing, I didn’t realize that a lot of their designs were actually copies of the previous one. Right, they were there was actually very similar orders coming through to the point that the customer was making that request, right, just follow the design from last time. But if they was to take some of this information flow that is happening around engineering and automate it, right, automate it, you could cut 40 weeks at a time by providing some of these technology solutions, starting with the SharePoint solution, and then looking for Yeah, there’s actually smart software robots now that, uh, you know, point solutions, where they can search documents for you, for example, you know, to find technical references or standards and those sorts of things. So they’re, they’re cognitively smart, they’re not just rules, they can also interpolate. Okay, so that sort of technology sits out there as well, quite accessible, like you’re talking under 10 grand a robot to be able to do this sort of work. And, you know, we all know the story of software robots, they can do it in minutes, what takes people days. So it’s that, that opportunity, right, where it’s grabbing hold of that, and then realizing that, you know, we could actually do things differently. With a great lift in productivity, amazing.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

If you’re wanting tailored one to one coaching for fast results, perhaps my mentoring services, the option you need, this package includes to one to one sessions each month, and a weekly accountability call, as well as access to the growing network of members in the mastermind group. Find out more by visiting Brian Fitzgerald comm.au, forward slash mentoring, or contact me directly via the form on my website to understand how I can best help you grow your business. So I guess one of the things that I’ve been trying to do in these podcasts is that providing our listeners with something that they can take away and apply in their own business today. So, you know, as a practitioner, you know, generally you’ve had responsibility for achieving real business results. Can you share one of the greatest challenges in productivity improvement that you’ve faced and how you tackled it?

Stuart Ewin 

Yeah, I think this is something you’d be very familiar with Graham, but is this thinking around process, right? It’s a bit of a mindset involved, you’ve got to think about the problem before you jump out the solution. And that takes a little while to learn, it’s this ability to take a step or two back, right, human instinct, you know, we know the solution, or we’ve got a, you know, immediate reaction to a particular situation, that the process thinking means just stepping back a little bit and having a look at the whole situation. And, you know, I touched on a great tool before the process map. Yeah, that’s a great way to sort of, you know, provide that stop and think, to yourself, so said discipline of just exploring the issue before you jump to the answer. I think that’s one of the, you know, the learnings there that people could take away, and it’s quite often the first bit of advice that I give people see, step back, have a closer look at Do you really know what the problem is you’re trying to solve? You know. And, for me, the, you know, the takeaway might be that there is an obvious trigger here that there’s a huge, you know, shifting your processes or huge gain that’s there. The trigger for me is when you’re using paper forms, or Excel spreadsheets, is that the red flag, it’s the, it’s a trigger, that you’ve got human glue, you got people who were performing the work and holding it all together, there. And you know, you could release them and get them to be providing higher value, better contribution through the use of some of this technology that we touched on before.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

So some of the things that you’ve some of the things you’ve been experiencing is where people have set up spreadsheets and those sorts of things. That’s all primed for automation and using technology to do that work in a far more detailed and probably even more powerful way.

Stuart Ewin 

That’s exactly right. Yeah, delegated to the machine, so to speak, for it to be done. And, you know, some of these platforms that we talked about earlier share points and prime apps and you know, that that technology is out there, that releases the people, we know they’ve got the smarts, they’ve got the experience to be able to solve greater problems and work on better things. So that releases them from that routine work to be able to add more value to your business. And you got the advantage as well, right? The double double E is the technology smarter, gets faster, you know, it’s it can follow rules, and it can be cognitive, to be smarter, you know, it’s real time. So all of those advantages flow through as well, you’re not just relying on the person to catch up to when they can. Yeah, so

Graeme Fitzgerald 

the third distractions don’t tend to do impact. That’s right.

Stuart Ewin 

That’s right. So you’ve got, you know, a very repetitive, reliable technology. Compared to people who are, you know, I think we have to accept, we all have a little bit of human failings about us, we, we miss things and duplicate things. It touches on a story actually around, I was working with a client just recently, actually last week around land access. So they have to deal with a process where people will request access to land, and I can’t name names, but you know, it’s a formal process of getting approval to enter the land. So the brief of work was to come in and sort out the spreadsheet for us, we’re finding that it’s just, you know, failing and falling over. And we think there’s probably a better way to design that spreadsheet, you know,

Graeme Fitzgerald 

and I use a spreadsheet for

Stuart Ewin 

that we’re using it to put all the access requests into Okay, yeah,

Graeme Fitzgerald 

yeah.

Stuart Ewin 

And, of course, it was on a shared drive, so only one person at a time could access it. And then someone deleted the file by mistake, and you know, all the stories, all the stories. So the idea was to invent a better spreadsheet. When I came in, I took the end to end view started to look upstream and downstream, and realize that they were reworking 90% of the requests that people were, you know, missing information or not supplying the right information for the request to be approved. So as you know, a massive effort of duplication and, you know, re processing requests multiple times, did a bit of numbers, and that was 90% of all requests were subject to some sort of rework. This was taking up a full time person to do it.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Right? manage the access control.

Stuart Ewin 

That’s right, the solution is as simple as Google Forms where you can get it for free sticker form up on a website, put required fields on there, you know, you can automate, essentially, or filter out a lot of this missing information that is being supplied or not being supplied as the case may be. And, you know, that then ends up into a SharePoint process to be able to be dealt with the cost nearly zero, and it released a full time person. The sort of stuff you need to think about I then that’s what I’m saying to shift gears away from the physical process and more into the information flow. Now, you don’t have to think hard about that land access story. How long do you think some of those requests were taking?

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And in front of that, I guess that’s what you’re saying is, productivity is really about how long it takes to get stuff done.

Stuart Ewin 

It’s time now starting to the inside our head. And you know, again, it’s a personal journey, I suppose, you know, my, my particular experience of the world, but he shifted from the cost and physical focus to more about time. And it’s a competitive advantage for manufacturing, if you think about it is actually around time. The lead time for an order, you can quote and beat your competitors by being able to deliver quicker, right, you can quote and capture the order quicker and have the cash in the bank quicker. You know, it’s this type of thinking, it’s the smarter thinking. It’s enable pod technology.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Yeah. So it’s been. So you just started to touch on on your journey in productivity improvement. What do you think’s been the greatest lesson in that time? And how’s it influencing you? Now? I know you’ve probably touched on that a little bit, but a little bit behind the Your thoughts?

Stuart Ewin 

Were principles, almost, you know, the learnings I’ve had it first one here, we have touched on before, think about the problem, not the solution. Yeah. That’s a life lesson there.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Many, many people I find have the perfect solution. It’s just for the wrong problem.

Stuart Ewin 

That’s exactly right. Shed shed a bit of insight there go. It’s also a lesson I have learned myself, right. I’m not immune to that. But the second part to this is it’s aligned, it’s about listening to people. The perceptions they have and what they experience. That’s their reality, right. So a lot of what they believe is driving their action. And so it’s that little bit of exploring the problem with him or exploring the you know, the the idea that we’ve got with them.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

So the important thing here is what is actually understanding what people believe is happening. And then that may or may not be true. And if it if it is true, then you learn something. And if it’s not, you can educate them about what really is happening. So that we can then design, what happens next from there.

Stuart Ewin 

That’s exactly right. It’s a little bit of a journey, right. And this helps the whole, you know, their, their thinking and their understanding of the issue. You know, process mapping, as I mentioned before, it’s a great tool for this purpose, you know, just to help the thinking mature and grow a little bit around, you know, what’s really going on. And I think probably the third area, I’d look at, you know, that one of the lessons here is just thinking customer back. So taking a broader view of the situation end to end, rather than just the local situation. So it’s not uncommon for me to explore upstream and downstream of a particular issue,

Graeme Fitzgerald 

you know, so when you’re, you’re talking there about thinking from the customer back is actually, have I got this right, that you’re saying? those businesses that understand what their customers do with the products or services they buy from you, will help you to design that even better, and deliver even better, is that right?

Stuart Ewin 

That’s it? That’s exactly right. It said, you know, fit to their needs, understanding of their needs. It’s that little bit of thinking and a customer, you know, in my mind, say the customer is just the next downstream step. Right? It may be actually internal in your business. Yeah, it could be that or it could be the true end user, the external receiver of the goods or the receiver of the output. Yeah, I

Graeme Fitzgerald 

certainly found have found in a number of different circumstances where people do things, because they believe that’s what the customer needs. And the customer has absolutely no care at all about it.

Stuart Ewin 

That’s exactly I was just about to share a story around that very similar learning. The reason it’d

Graeme Fitzgerald 

be good if you could,

Stuart Ewin 

yeah, the reason I’ve had this lesson goes back to manufacturing days throwing out a lot of product. You go and ask the customer about specification limit. And and it was not really a specification, it was just a desired. Yeah. threshold

Graeme Fitzgerald 

wish list. Yeah.

Stuart Ewin 

So you know, there’s there’s that regret moment of all the product has been thrown out because of it.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Are you talking about the learning? We added the rug mill?

Stuart Ewin 

Yeah, there, there’s been It all started there. But that learning massive? Yeah. Yeah. And as simple conversation, right, as a simple, you know, go and have a coffee with someone and meet a few people. And it was actually a walking around on the shop floor. And that’s when the question came up.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

My recollection of that was, it was something like, you know, half a percent of yield was being thrown away. And the customer didn’t really know, because he’s still cut off these two extra coils.

Stuart Ewin 

Well, that’s it. That’s it. Yeah. So we were, you know, trimming off or pruning off what we thought was reject product at the start of a particular bundle, and the customer was actually repeating the same activity themselves. Yeah. So

Graeme Fitzgerald 

yeah, that was one that was with hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year.

Stuart Ewin 

It’s huge. It’s huge. And there’s a lot of those stories scram. Yeah. It’s not only manufacturing, it’s also services. Right, exactly the same conversation around what are your expectations? understanding about, you know, the timing, the quality, you know, the content of our service. Those conversations don’t happen often enough. Yeah. It’s a quick way in right, it really is a quick way.

Well,

Graeme Fitzgerald 

as I suggested at the start, we can go on for hours on shore talking about different ideas for creating world class businesses in Australia. That’s probably a good place to wrap things up short. I’m all right to say that people can contact you on LinkedIn. Just search for Stuart, Stuart, un change agent. make contact on your website, your celtics.com.au. Yeah, no

Stuart Ewin 

problem at all. Reach out. I don’t spam so it’s all good. Yeah.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

I don’t have enough time to spam. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for your time and sharing some of your knowledge with us.

Stuart Ewin 

Very good. Promote. Oh, thank you again, grant for the opportunity. Thank you.

Graeme Fitzgerald 

Thank you for being part of this week’s episode was great to have you. I’m always keen to hear your thoughts, questions, ideas and suggestions for future topics for the podcast. So please get in touch to my Facebook page. Graham Fitzgerald, manufacturing growth specialists, my LinkedIn page or via my web site Graham Fitzgerald calm that’s a that’s gra me Fitzgerald calm that a if you’re enjoying what I’m putting out here, please rate review or subscribe to the podcast so more manufacturers can find out about it. And we can build our community masterminds, manufacturing this great nation. Talk to you soon.