Data, Alignment, and Action: Lessons from Lean Transformation

Transcript

[00:01:02] Josh Santo: Today’s guest brings more than 30 years of experience leading complex programs, driving operational excellence and transforming manufacturing organizations. She spends over a decade at BorgWarner, serving as a senior operations leader for a $350 million Automotive plant. During her time there, she led Lean transformation, continuous improvement, production control and logistics program, and change management and major customer launches, all while shaping plant culture as part of the senior leadership team.

[00:01:35] Josh Santo: Now across all her roles, she’s driven strategies to eliminate waste, optimize operations, strengthen cross-functional execution, and develop high-performing teams. She’s trained in coach leaders in Lean and continuous improvement, managed mission critical launches, and helped align operations to business goals through disciplined project and change management.

[00:01:57] Josh Santo: Now in her consulting practice, she continues supporting organizations on their Lean operational excellence and transformation journeys. PlEASE welcome to the show, Julie Adkins.

[00:02:08] Josh Santo: Julie, thanks so much for being here.

[00:02:10] Julie Adkins: I appreciate you having me

[00:02:13] Josh Santo: Yeah, appreciate us setting this up. You know, it was, logistics war, getting a little iffy there just because it’s the holiday season. I think this episode should be airing right around Christmas time, so Merry Christmas. Happy holidays to

[00:02:29] Julie Adkins: Yeah. Happy holidays.

[00:02:31] Josh Santo: and to you as well.

[00:02:33] Josh Santo: Yeah. But today we’re talking about change management transformation and what it really takes to make progress in manufacturing. So like always, I’ve got a ton of questions to throw your way, Julie, but we’d like to start with similar question that we ask all of our guests. We really wanna understand what a day in the life.

[00:02:52] Josh Santo: Like, or in your case was like, ’cause congrats on your recent retirement. That’s a big milestone. So would love to hear about what a typical day looked like for you as a senior manager of Lean transformation, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

[00:03:10] Julie Adkins: at the beginning, so we went through, gosh, from like 2019 through 2022, restructuring COVID and, two plants consolidating into one plant. So that’s a lot of change over the course of, of that particular timeframe. And so at first, I would say that there was no such thing as a typical day.

[00:03:32] Julie Adkins: And, we had to really, we had to really develop our processes and our standards from scratch coming together as sort of this new entity, this new plant. And, and there was a lot of firefighting at the very beginning of the, of the plant consolidation that my team was really focused on. But once we could really get our arms around where we wanted to go, we developed what we called managing daily improvement, which was, it’s probably not unfamiliar to most manufacturing organizations that use Lean, but basically a tiered.

[00:04:04] Julie Adkins: Set of meetings where we start out with the frontline meeting to talk about, you know, did we win yesterday? yes, no, what do we have to focus on today? Any, you know, any, immediate concerns about the, the production or the, or the, the functional, task for the day. And then that flows up culminating in, a leadership meeting with the plant manager and the plant leadership team.

[00:04:27] Julie Adkins: And so the first several hours of the day were focused on those standards, both developing them, but then executing them once we really got. get our feet under us and then, and then finished with the gemba walk. After that, the day would consist of a variety of actions related to our Lean transformation.

[00:04:48] Julie Adkins: So meeting with my peers, developing standards, understanding really where we need to go with our vision. a lot of coaching training, like actual classroom training, but also on the floor, particularly with team leads in production. so it was different every day after our standard, you know, set of tiered meetings.

[00:05:08] Julie Adkins: but all focused on this managing daily improvement. How do we move our transformation forward?

[00:05:15] Josh Santo: So there was some aspect of standardization, like you talked about, we’re gonna meet, we’re gonna cover, did we win yesterday? Dig into both. If, if yes, why? If no, why not? What do we, what happened? What are we doing about it? And then still having that flexibility to deal with whatever the day is bringing you or maybe following up on items that you either uncovered during those standards set of meetings or during the, the gemba walk that came afterwards.

[00:05:42] Josh Santo: So, okay. Yeah. A little bit of mix of here’s what we do, here’s the discipline that we stick with, but still needing that flexibility to adapt to the certainly dynamic conditions of. Working in manufacturing now. In your role, were there any specific metrics or KPIs that you or your team were focused on managing and improving?

[00:06:04] Julie Adkins: Yes. So through our process managing daily improvement and, and the tiered meetings, we would focus on SP QVC, which, you know, different organizations have, different, you know, different set of, of tools or, or, you know. Guidelines around how they focus, but it always incorporates safety, people quality for volume and cost.

[00:06:26] Julie Adkins: and so the difficulty with the leadership team is really identifying. I mean, you can have dozens and dozens and dozens of KPIs around all of these factors, but we really wanted to have, in our daily meeting, one key metric for each of those S-P-Q-V-C. so for instance, safety, it was, did in the last 24 hours we have any safety incidents or near misses, and that would turn the little bubble green or red, depending on yes or no.

[00:06:54] Julie Adkins: And so for each of those, we had one metric that we looked at every day and then, of the five days. Of the week, we would focus on a few more metrics for S-P-Q-V-C. So we would flow through and then we’d finish on Fridays, looking at our top five board, which would be our top five actions related to any trend that was not following those KPIs.

[00:07:19] Julie Adkins: I think additionally you look at, you know, your strategic plan and the project work that we are involved with, with transformation, you’re looking for both bottom up and top-down, initiatives. And so the larger top-down initiatives that were bigger projects, we also tried to understand like how do we put KPIs around those?

[00:07:42] Julie Adkins: So sometimes in project management, you know, you’re looking at, are we on track to timeline percent complete? Are we on budget? You know, those kinds of KPIs, we would look at those on a monthly basis.

[00:07:58] Josh Santo: Real quick clarification. on y you know, the, the one key metric that you focus on, was that one key metric, every single day was a different key metric that you talked about, or in your example of the incident or near miss for when looking at safety, it was, whenever we talk about safety during these meetings, we always talk about this metric related to safety.

[00:08:20] Josh Santo: And then you’d move on to, you know, let’s say the queue for quality. We always focused on this metric. Every single meeting, or was it Monday was safety, Tuesday was, you know, on time delivery. Thursday was, I’m

[00:08:34] Julie Adkins: Yeah, it was both. So we had one, one metric that we all agreed was the, the, the main top metric for each S-P-Q-V-C every single day. We would talk about safety every day, quality every day, people every day. And, and that’s sometimes difficult to get to. What is that one metric that we wanna really hone in on?

[00:08:55] Julie Adkins: And it changes based on the business, changes based on the evolution of those metrics. Then on Monday we would take more time and dig into a couple of additional metrics. So we were going for an environmental certification as part of our health and safety, initiative. And so we, we might look at the metrics related to are we achieving our, our ISO standard for environmental or you know, are there other safety 5S?

[00:09:22] Julie Adkins: We put 5S, we called 5S plus because it was 5S plus safety. And so we always put that with our safety piece. So Monday we would look at how we’re, how we’re tracking on our 5S initiative, and, and metrics around areas that have achieved their 5S plus. Gold. So, so it was both, every day we would look at, at one key metric, that we aligned on and that we would rediscuss every month.

[00:09:47] Julie Adkins: Do we need to make changes to that? And then the set or, or make changes to the target, right? So if on time delivery, when you’re struggling and you’re setting it at, you know, 80, 85, 87, 89, you know, we’re gonna come back together every month and say, can we notch that up? Are we, are we winning? And if we’re winning, we need to hit a higher standard.

[00:10:08] Julie Adkins: and then deep dive one day a week for each of those, of those focus areas.

[00:10:14] Josh Santo: You know, one thing that you said that really stuck out with me is you said. We all agreed, meaning there was consensus on what is that metric that we’re going to be focused on in there? I’m, I’m curious about that. ’cause on, on one hand, I think you could make the argument that for, these types of metrics and KPIs, there are, you know, tried and true.

[00:10:37] Josh Santo: These are the things that you should look at and prioritize. And on one hand there’s may not really be a debate about it, but on the other hand, agreement is important for getting people to work together effectively. I’d love to hear from you why it was important to have that agreement that these were the metrics we were gonna focus on, when discussing these

[00:11:03] Julie Adkins: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a really good question because there are tried and true metrics for manufacturing. There’s no doubt we’re looking at inventory turns or we’re looking at, absenteeism or, you know, other, Other metrics that cost metrics. There’s dozens of them, probably hundreds of them, but you can’t, you can’t fledge yourself with those metrics, all those metrics every day.

[00:11:25] Julie Adkins: So alignment on what we agree is the most important metric is important because they interact. So if, For, for volume, for instance, we’d wanna look, you could look at, you know, OEE or did we produce the number of pieces we were supposed to produce? But that doesn’t really, in the end, focus on the customer, which is the on time delivery piece.

[00:11:51] Julie Adkins: And you know, to be quite honest, we were struggling with our shipping processes when we consolidated and we really wanted to see, like, we might have made the product, but did it ship? So, you can get into some, some, conflict and debate around, you know, this metric that everyone’s gonna look at. And some people feel, you know, oh, that’s just a, a factor of whether the shipping team did a good job or not.

[00:12:14] Julie Adkins: But that’s not true because many times we can’t ship it because we didn’t make it or we didn’t have the inventory. properly, you know, scheduled or planned or our, our supplier didn’t deliver it on time. So there’s, you know, there’s a lot of factors that come into it, and it depends on your maturity, I think, because when we first consolidated on time delivery was probably not the thing we needed to look at.

[00:12:35] Julie Adkins: We needed to really, understand, our inventory. You do, we have the right parts in-house to make the product. so it, it, that’s what we mean when we say sort of based on the business need. You might have a, a different focus. I mean, if you were running perfectly then, you know, it’s just the very last, you know, did, did the customer get this on time as, as they planned.

[00:12:58] Julie Adkins: But there are other, you know, issues that you might face where you say, you know, this month or this quarter, we’ve really gotta take a look at supplier on time delivery as part of our, our volume focus.

[00:13:12] Josh Santo: One of the questions that you asked, you mentioned the example of OEE, and then you kind of, you didn’t say this, but where my mind went is, well, does that metric really matter when, and here’s the part that you did say, like, does this really focus on the customer? Right. And so it’s almost, you’re really having to put that work to put into context the what, what’s actually being measured and who does that affect?

[00:13:38] Josh Santo: And like you said, is this really helping our customer right now? If so, maybe it’s, or if not, maybe that’s not what we focus on at the moment. And then to your point, the maturity. Where are you struggling? Where are the breakdowns happening? You know, ideally the product is received by the customer when they need it, when they expect it, in the condition that they expected the way that they needed it.

[00:14:02] Josh Santo: Like all of that to, to really meet that satisfaction satis satisfaction, satisfaction. Man satisfaction requirements to really make sure your customers are satisfied, in, in, in that. so then driving that alignment with the team of what are we gonna focus on? Where are we struggling? And you mentioned earlier, taking a monthly review on that to make sure that we’re always putting first the metric that matters most for us right here, right

[00:14:35] Julie Adkins: Yeah, I would say that for sure.

[00:14:39] Josh Santo: Well, with your focus on Lean transformation, continuous improvement, operational excellence, was this a department that you were running or were you, this, this kind of expert that they brought in to corral a lot of folks together to drive them towards achieving operational excellence? What was the, what was your organization

[00:15:01] Julie Adkins: Yeah. So, so in our plant with roughly 500 operational employees, my team was very small. It was myself and I, It came from a background of, of program and project management, change management as systems, and production control and logistics. and so my plant manager plucked me and said, I’d like to send you to training and, and really learn, go on some benchmarking, trips around the world to our other plants and understand, you know, how we’re implementing operational excellence across BorgWarner.

[00:15:34] Julie Adkins: And, and so it was myself. And then I had a systems analyst that is really good with SAP and good with kind of execution of projects and really understood the systems. And the systems were, you know, a huge part of where we get our data and how we understand how we, schedule and, and, and operate. So, he joined my team and then we had two contract industrial engineers, one focused on, logistics and material flow, production control, and one focused on sort of the, the, production operations side of things. And so, yeah, it was a, it was a lot of people that, that, wanted a lot of us, you know, when they understand, oh, there’s some resources here that we can use to try now to, to pluck into our area and, and make some improvements. But you really had to understand how to take a small team and scale what you’re trying to accomplish, because of course, you’re gonna be asked to do, you know, more things and go faster.

[00:16:32] Julie Adkins: So that was. The big challenge was how you take one person that, that has this knowledge and sees how other organizations are doing it, and bring it back and implement it, but be able to really amp that horsepower up by training other individuals, my peers, and other, supervisory team, lead level folks to understand how to drive it themselves as well.

[00:16:59] Julie Adkins: ’cause once you really, and that’s the, that’s the goal of Lean is that everybody, understands that the concepts of continual improvements, standard work, improving your, your systems and your processes.

[00:17:12] Speaker: It is time for an ad break. Now, unlike other shows, our ads aren’t advertisements. Our ads are advice, quick tips and insights from your fellow manufacturing pros in the shop floor top floor community. Here’s the one now.

[00:17:29] riverside_ishant_gajbhiye_raw-synced-video-cfr_shop_floor, top flo_0069: Hi, I’m Han Gpi. I work in quality management and here is my advice. Uh, if you are in manufacturing, focus on building systems, not heroes. A great operation does not depend on one engineer, one quality manager. It depends on the process that withstands turnover, mistakes and pressure. And lastly, invest in documentation, training, and error proofing, because production owns it, engineering designs it, and quality guides it.

[00:18:01] Josh Santo: in

[00:18:01] Josh Santo: the long term. Scalable and sustainable, always building towards that. Well, that’s interesting. Benchmarking trips. That sounds like it could be a very

[00:18:11] Julie Adkins: It was.

[00:18:12] Josh Santo: What was that experience

[00:18:13] Julie Adkins: It was really good, you know, for runners and global organizations, so was able to, I’ve been able to, to go all over the, some of our plants in the United States, in the northeast or the north, so sorry, around like Detroit and, Michigan, Illinois. We have a couple plants up there, that were pretty mature in some of the way that they were rolling out Lean training.

[00:18:35] Julie Adkins: I was able to visit, England, Bradford, England, they had a plant that was very similar to us. We have a high mix, component to our complex business, but the low volume high mix is run very differently from like the high volume manufacturing one production line with one part. so that was really good benchmarking to understand how managing inventory across a low, a high mix, low volume organization.

[00:19:00] Julie Adkins: I got to go to China and visit several of our China plants where they were, quite a bit farther ahead in, in implementing some of their operational excellence practices, particularly the, the dojos and the training, you know, the training, processes and how they’re getting to, every operator understanding Lean concepts, good material flow.

[00:19:23] Julie Adkins: out there I went to Hungary and to Poland, really good plants and, and, and, Europe. So yeah, all, and I spent a lot of time in Mexico. We had, in our region we were, the North America, included two plants in Mexico and they had some strong, Lean initiatives as well.

[00:19:44] Josh Santo: So out of all those locations that you visited, was there one that you kind of fell in love with? The

[00:19:50] Julie Adkins: Oh, the area, Oh yeah, good question. all my colleagues, if anybody listens to this will say, wait a minute. My area was the place that you really wanted to go. But I had not really spent a lot of time in central Europe, so I would say Poland. we had, we, and we also had a global workshop that our senior vice president of, of quality and manufacturing and, and operational excellence held a week long, conference for us in, in, Krakow or KRA off, as they say.

[00:20:16] Julie Adkins: And and so we spent more time there and I really fell in love with, with, that area and, and the Polish people and that culture. It was really a, a neat trip. We learned a

[00:20:26] Josh Santo: Yeah, there’s, it’s, I bet, I bet. ’cause not only is there the aspect of you’re going there to benchmark and learn from other BorgWarner facilities and what they’re doing, what that works, what can you take back? Right. But it’s also just the exposure to a different

[00:20:40] Julie Adkins: and

[00:20:41] Josh Santo: area of life, different culture, different scenery, different

[00:20:44] Julie Adkins: Oh, I loved it. Yeah.

[00:20:45] Josh Santo: Travel is, is absolutely amazing. Now that, my next question was, you know, roughly how long were these trips? Were you kind of just getting a, a glimpse? Or, or, or did they throw you on the line and, and, and put you right to

[00:20:59] Julie Adkins: No, these were, primarily quicker trips with the exception of the time I spent, in the, in the region. So the, the China trips, the, Europe trips, those were a little bit more kind of, they were very professionally coordinated so that we could get several of our co, our global colleagues through these plants.

[00:21:19] Julie Adkins: and we would spend some time in a, in a conference room. Doing some presentations of our systems. So being able to, before you go out there and see what you’re seeing, you understand kind of the foundation of their, their operational excellence systems. that’s helpful. Understanding their Hoshin Kanri or their, their strategic planning processes, how they roll out training, how they align, how they run their, their, improvement projects.

[00:21:44] Julie Adkins: all of that. So we got a lot of their systems information. And then we would do, what I would say would be kind of a fairly quick plant tour. So you’re just taking videos and pictures left and right, trying to align it, like, what did I see? Where, and then you’re getting nuggets, from every single place that you visit.

[00:22:01] Julie Adkins: Like, whoa, that’s a really great. Way of implementing that, that that works for our plant. And some are like, that’s brilliant, but that will not fly in our plant. You know? and so, I would say the, the time I spent in the, north America plants in the US and in Mexico, I would be there for maybe two weeks at a time, a week to two weeks at a time and go back.

[00:22:23] Julie Adkins: And especially we were our sister plant in Ramos, Mexico. We were both implementing a system, it was called operations management system. It kind of combined Lean manufacturing practices with a kind of similar to an MES, but like production, logging and qual first time quality data. ’cause we did not have that, that easy to.

[00:22:47] Julie Adkins: To, pull together data to understand how we were doing on OEE and first time quality and all that. So we were implementing some systems with the Mexico plant kind of in tandem. So we would visit each other’s plants and share, best practices and, and they were a little ahead of us at the start and said, don’t do it this way.

[00:23:06] Julie Adkins: And good learning. So benchmarking, I think you’re getting ideas, but you’re also getting, advice on how to avoid pitfalls.

[00:23:14] Josh Santo: Hmm. Which is honestly the, the whole goal of this podcast is,

[00:23:18] Julie Adkins: How to avoid the pitfalls.

[00:23:20] Josh Santo: o other professionals done? Yeah. And, and what, what were the struggles that they ran into? What are the lessons that they wish they learned sooner? ’cause you can’t have enough of that, right? There’s, there’s experience everywhere and there’s a notable, you know, issue in the industry right now of dealing with the transfer of that knowledge, expertise, and adjusting for the mass amount of experience that is going to be lost within the coming years due to

[00:23:44] Josh Santo: retirement, the recruiting retention issue.

[00:23:47] Josh Santo: So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s such an interesting, you know, a challenge that has been there since the beginning, right? Everything we do is really related to learning from one another and then taking that and moving ourselves, our industry forward,

[00:24:02] Julie Adkins: Now you’ve got a really good

[00:24:03] Julie Adkins: point because,I also know like from my days in program management, project management, one key tenant of, of our sort of, we had a, a certification in the automotive industry, IATF, and you require, kind of lessons learned and I think we do a good job of running maybe a lessons learned debrief after project launches.

[00:24:24] Julie Adkins: But one thing that is very, very difficult to do, and even with the certification, body, I’d ask them, you know, who has best practice lessons learned database or processes And and that’s really a gap, I think how, how you store all that. I think the best thing that’s come kind of with the, the Lean practice is building those into your systems.

[00:24:49] Julie Adkins: But it’s hard, you know, if you think who’s done this before. where can I learn this, this information or get, you know, get some, tips and tricks, or avoid the pitfalls. Like a a, a database doesn’t really work. You have to just sort of put it out there. Some companies have something like Teams or Pulse or like these, you know, Hey, did anybody, launch this type of software before?

[00:25:13] Julie Adkins: And can I talk to you about, you know, what you’ve learned?

[00:25:17] Josh Santo: Yeah. It’s, it’s certainly a tough thing to tackle because, you know, I’ve, I’ve worked with a lot of manufacturers, some who, like you’ve said the word maturity before. Great way to think about it. Some organizations even, you know, it really differs on a plant by plant basis as well. And, so some have really novel approaches to, to these types of, situations and obstacles.

[00:25:41] Josh Santo: And, and some are just busy trying to fight different fires and, and know that that’s a, you know, something coming, but they just don’t have the time or bandwidth to, to focus in on it. And what I’ve seen pretty consistently is, you know, certainly technology can help. It can make things a lot faster. ’cause really what you need is you need it to where someone doesn’t even have to ask the question.

[00:26:08] Josh Santo: Because if, if they have to ask the question and go and look for the answer, that’s where a breakdown is going to occur. And that’s on, you know, one side from like, how do you make information, more accessible information that you already have. you know, there’s also the discipline and the streamlining to capture that information to begin with.

[00:26:25] Josh Santo: But you know, that idea that you’re describing where you’re actually learning from experienced people, there really is no substitute for that, you know, mentor mentee relationship that that has to be embraced. And, thought of, you know, we’ve talked to many folks, not necessarily using the word benchmarking, but that idea of how do we expose people to peop to other people who are doing it or maybe doing it differently so that people can bring their creative talents, their diverse backgrounds and experiences, bring that together to ultimately identify a solution and take everyone forward.

[00:27:02] Josh Santo: E even in the last episode that we had with, Dr. Tees, that was a big thing about how do you enable the people? How do you effectively build that culture that consistently nurtures that type of experience? Because it really is like, it’s, it’s required at the end of the day and it has to be embraced.

[00:27:22] Josh Santo: There’s no check the box activity that’s going to satisfy that. It’s gonna take that real human investment in

[00:27:28] Julie Adkins: Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that your podcast is doing that, like you mentioned, for those that can find a way to to, to your podcast, there’s such good topics that people can get good ideas from. And like you said, maybe like hear something to avoid. we, we had kind of a mini Version of, of that sort of thing within our organization.

[00:27:48] Julie Adkins: Once a month we had a Lean sharing, call. So the call was maybe two hours long. And, we had a coordinator that sort of assigned different plants, different sharing dates, and you would come and sort of share what you’re doing. And it was funny at first I felt like, you know, I was listening to all the successes and success after success and I said, look, I’ve gotta be very honest, like we’re struggling with this consolidation.

[00:28:13] Julie Adkins: and and, and I just went out and said, here’s what we’re struggling with, here’s what we’re trying to do. And it turned out to be a very good session because our vice president said like, that’s what we need to do. Like not just show all of the, you know, all of the, wins, but what are we struggling with and what failed and how can we work with, you know, helping support each other on ideas to, to overcome some of the bigger challenges that we had at some of the plants.

[00:28:43] Josh Santo: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, it can be a highlight reel, which is, you know, when you think about. Social media. And one of the problems with that, you know, that’s something that’s widely documented, is that people are showing their quote unquote, best lives,

[00:28:59] Julie Adkins: Self-promoting.

[00:29:00] Josh Santo: best selves. You know, not whether or not it’s accurate is a totally different story, but I I, I’m reminded of.

[00:29:10] Josh Santo: There’s a documentary out, it’s on the, the early days of Nickelodeon. Funny enough, I, I swear it’s relevant to this conversation. So what does a children’s TV network have to do with this conversation of, your example of, of a Lean sharing call where it’s sharing success after success? After success, Nickelodeon was trying to be a, a network for kids, and they were trying to pro provide content that was informative, educational, engaging, inspiring.

[00:29:41] Josh Santo: They really wanted to be a strong kids network. And so one of the types of content that they put together was really featuring kids who were doing extremely cool things or. Extreme, like extremely well off because they did some remarkable thing at their age, you know, like, like really featuring excellence with the goal being like, look at what these cool things these kids are doing.

[00:30:07] Josh Santo: You could be that too. Right? That was kind of the idea. But the reception to that was a lot of kids feeling bad because they weren’t doing that and they were concluding that like maybe they weren’t as good as these other kids. Right? So it had the total opposite effect. It had the same effect that like social media did.

[00:30:25] Josh Santo: And I think that’s interesting, because it’s, I think it really highlights just in us it’s important to really focus on these failures, focus on normal normality. ’cause failure is a part of life. In these calls. That’s something that you can learn together and ultimately drive progress. Hearing how people are winning is great.

[00:30:47] Josh Santo: You can learn from it, but really examining those missteps, super important. So I’m harping on all this because Julie, you’ve shared some really interesting ways so far in our early conversation just as sharing knowledge, spreading that knowledge, people who are listening. If you don’t have programs like that in place, that idea of like a Lean sharing call or a moment where you gather everyone together and say, what did you deal with?

[00:31:11] Josh Santo: What did you learn? And share that with the team. That’s a very simple, quick way to get started with this type of effort of promoting that mind share person to person.

[00:31:25] Josh Santo: Let’s talk about Lean transformation, continuous improvement, and operational excellence. So you were a in a, in a project-based team. It sounds like, how would you typically get involved with manufacturing operations?

[00:31:43] Julie Adkins: Well, of course, you know, operational excellence starts with, with understanding what your goals are, your business objectives, and looking to achieve, you know, achieve improved efficiencies, improved. Processes, you know, be able to use continuous improvement and Lean manufacturing concepts to, make daily improvements.

[00:32:07] Julie Adkins: But when you’re really starting that out, you have foundational work that still has to be done. So when we kind of looked at where we were, and again, you know, I’ll reiterate we’re coming out of COVID, a lot of things sort changed and shifted in our plant, culture and our plant. you know. The way that things looked, looked and felt after COVID.

[00:32:29] Julie Adkins: And, and in 2020, the announcement that two plants were going to consolidate into one in our area, that was executed in 2021 and final systems changeover and we’re working as one, one big consolidated complex plant in 2022. that was sort of like starting over, you know, for us. So I think the, the first thing that we did was understand that, that we really needed to focus on 5S That was the, the very first effort that we took on. we had a, a executive walkthrough and we had, you know. Boxes everywhere and material everywhere. And you know, we had a fairly good plan for where we wanted to put everything, but the flow wasn’t working very well from material moving and, and where we were gonna keep it.

[00:33:19] Julie Adkins: We lost a lot of space. And when you have space, you can kind of consume that space and, and use it to make, you know, make up for maybe not having efficient flow. But when you jam, you know, two, two houses together into one space and you both kind of expanded into the space that you have. And that was painful.

[00:33:38] Julie Adkins: but 5S was really kind of the, the tool that we wanted to hit on. It was going to help us understand foundationally what, what it meant to, you know, to, to focus on. Getting rid of the things that we didn’t need, putting the things we needed in the right spots, sustainable processes to, you know, to get the areas cLean and maintained.

[00:34:01] Julie Adkins: kind of the foundation moving towards, TPM. But, but at that point, that was our first opportunity to train the organization and also set some, project plans and metrics around, you know, getting where we needed to go. And ultimately it. And this. It took a lot of focus from all of the operational areas, including quality manufacturing.

[00:34:25] Julie Adkins: In fact, I think that I spent maybe like two weeks running around taking pictures of toolboxes, like tool carts and toolboxes and everything. Has to have a home. You know, if you wanna leave your tool cart in this particular manufacturing area or production area, you need to get with the team leads there and the supervisor and say, Hey, is this a good spot for my tool cart?

[00:34:43] Julie Adkins: And then you draw your little tape home, you know, on the floor and then put your name and your shift on your tool cart. And, I think, you know, kind of drove people crazy with that. But it, but it really, it really helped. Everybody in the end because, it started to look and I think it felt like maybe six months to eight months before you could really, really feel the difference.

[00:35:05] Julie Adkins: Like you could see it earlier, but I think that the plant just felt. Much more organized and much more professional after about, you know, six to eight months. And then by one year, I would have, I would use the word transformational. I think people were proud of the way that the plant looked. when we had executive visits, we no longer were spending like two days before the visit trying to figure out where stuff was gonna go.

[00:35:31] Julie Adkins: you know, it was just natural. It, it really took, so I think that there was a lot to that. Number one, how did we, how do we plan for and execute and get there? But secondly, when you do achieve what you’re trying to achieve, just the feeling that everyone gets like, okay, we can do this. it gives you a win and then you can start moving into some other, major initiatives that, that we had on our, in our vision.

[00:35:59] Josh Santo: So the consolidation happened and it kind of brought some issues to light, it sounds like. ’cause like you mentioned, you got all this space, things maybe aren’t as. Obvious, but all of a sudden that space is gone because now you’ve got two facilities now into one, and all of a sudden things are looking a little messy.

[00:36:17] Josh Santo: They’re feeling a little undisciplined to, to some degree. And, and now you’re tasked with, okay, we gotta, we gotta make sure everything’s working together. We’re all working together. Things are, you know, the work is able to be performed. So 5S being a focal point. And, you know, it sounds, it sounds almost, you, you, you know, you described the, here’s where my, tool cart should go, gotta have my name on it, my shift on it gotta, you know, map it out with the tape.

[00:36:48] Josh Santo: And if that’s not happening, I’m sure you have to get on people like, Hey, you’ve gotta do this thing. It can feel a little

[00:36:53] Josh Santo: nitpicking. Right. And then the, the whole, how do you sustain that? So it’s not just a matter of like setting that up, it’s making sure day after day right, shift after shift. People are.

[00:37:07] Josh Santo: Continuing to abide by those standards. So I’m sure at first there was a bit of a, I don’t wanna say, I don’t wanna say rough, but maybe just a, a transitionary time where people were maybe resistant to the change that was happening. but it sounds like it reached an inflection point where people started to see, hey, this, this new way of doing things is kind of working for us.

[00:37:33] Josh Santo: You mentioned there was a feeling in the plant, you felt, people felt like they gotta win and that ultimately set you up to, pursue other things.

[00:37:41] Julie Adkins: that’s true. And I would say for sure, you know, there, there, it was rough at the beginning because I would say that, Each plant prior to the consolidation felt like, Hey, we were doing okay. We were, we were both doing just okay before we pushed us together. You know, you did this to us, you know, pushed us together and now we don’t have, you know, the space we need to be successful.

[00:38:04] Julie Adkins: So it, it was, it was kind of this feeling of, of like, we, we were operating fine before and now we’re not, and it’s because of this, right. So I think the 5S project also helped us get past that and we could see that we could, inhabit this space to together with these very disparate kind of, complex pieces of business all in, in one facility.

[00:38:28] Julie Adkins: But yeah, you’re right, it was the inflection point, and I think that was a turning point for us.

[00:38:34] Josh Santo: Now this is a, a good example because there is a very clear why behind it. Like, we have to make this work because these two plants are consolidating and we’re all responsible for continuing to, you know, meet our operational goals, satisfying our customers, et cetera. So it’s, it’s, it’s, I don’t wanna say easy, that’s the wrong word, but, getting.

[00:38:55] Josh Santo: Initiatives on people’s radar, getting support, getting buy-in, it really helps when there’s that driving force, that urgent, compelling situation that comes up. Let’s, let’s put that compelling urgency aside. I’d really like to hear a little bit about, you know, in the absence of something quite as compelling like that in your experience, what does it take to get an organization together and on the same page about an initiative that needs to be prioritized and then getting the actual support and resources and, and just time and effort to make that initiative come to

[00:39:39] Julie Adkins: Yeah, so I think a good example for that would’ve been the, the next big initiative that we took on. So once we had really implemented the foundation of 5S and kind of the structure of our managing daily improvement cadence with the morning meetings, in the production areas, there were whiteboards that would be identifying their S-P-Q-V-C.

[00:40:03] Julie Adkins: APIs for the each production area, they would have their, you know, their top five board and their, you know, their smaller initiatives, the top, the bottom up initiatives. But what we saw was really the need for a system that could provide us with data. So we were still using spreadsheets in a lot of our production areas to track production.

[00:40:25] Julie Adkins: we have a lot of legacy equipment and it’s very difficult to kind of hook those up, to systems that can use the PLCs to, to drive the, the counts and the, like, the MES data for the manufacturing systems data. So we had a, a system that came to us through, an acquisition. It was easy to make that case because it was essentially, we didn’t have to spend money to get it and we could, you know, use our own resources at the plant to just launch it.

[00:40:57] Julie Adkins: It was sort of the easy button for us. while the larger external, like IT organization evaluated other products that they might, you know, be implementing years down the road. So, we found other plants that had this system. We benchmarked the plants that used those systems specific to what they were and weren’t using from features.

[00:41:19] Julie Adkins: It was sort of a homegrown system that had been built up over many years and had a lot of features and, we fortunately found a guy in, in, the IT world that helped us, from the backend side of things and brought us all together and we all showed that we were going to be using this system. So that said, we.

[00:41:37] Julie Adkins: We went to, I, I had talked to my peers about it and we went to the plant manager and said, said, this is, you know, what we wanna implement, this system. Here’s why. obviously the fact that we didn’t have to buy licenses was a driving factor in her being able to say, yes, let’s go for it. And, and here are the resources we need.

[00:41:58] Julie Adkins: We identified a pilot, area, one or two pilot areas that we would launch first and then set up, you know, the project plan. So for that, obviously the KPIs were going to be the hardware budget. We were gonna go from these whiteboards to a screen that showed, you know, the, the production information. It had an and on to it.

[00:42:18] Julie Adkins: If you were falling below, it would flash. You could use that as a visual tool on the production floors. but we had to spend some money there. And then we had our controls engineering team that would have to spend some time integrating some of the newer equipment with the system so that we didn’t have to manually enter in data.

[00:42:36] Julie Adkins: And then other areas were being taught to, to enter the data. So it was a big initiative. We were gonna roll it out across the entire plant, over the course of maybe 1, 1, 1 and a half years. and, and to stay on track with that, I made sure that. When we used the pilot program, the pilot area, every morning in our standup meeting, we’d pull the data up so our leadership team got used to seeing it.

[00:43:00] Julie Adkins: If the data wasn’t there, then we would go back to the team and say, Hey, it looks like, like you guys didn’t utilize the system last night. Let’s go back to the drawing board. What kind of training do you need? You know, it takes some time. the, the team lead was out. The, the, person that was covering for that team lead didn’t understand what they were doing.

[00:43:22] Julie Adkins: You know, you get through this and you hit all the hiccups over and over again until they see, oh, you know what, we’re not gonna make that mistake again, because clearly the management team is opening this system and looking at the data every day. So that was something actually that we picked up from our colleagues in at the Mexico plant, was, right away.

[00:43:41] Julie Adkins: Even if you feel like they need another month before. They’re independently using the system on their own, just go ahead and start opening it up. Bring the supervisor over so they can see what we’re looking at. They start realizing like they’re serious. They’re really gonna be using this data. and then we, we had, you know, a deeper project review once a month, but I would say that just getting it into the daily routine for both that production area and in our leadership meetings helped get that traction quicker.

[00:44:14] Julie Adkins: And then the second thing that really helped us was that we had a supervisor in an, in another area, sort of like the subsequent area to launch, who was, he was struggling with losing access to the control of his data in the spreadsheets. And so that was, you know, we felt, okay, this is gonna be a tough nut to crack, but once we gave him access.

[00:44:37] Julie Adkins: To all the data in the system and he could write, you know, power BI reports off of it. he just went to town and became one of the, like most vocal advocates of the, of the system because he went from worrying about this is gonna take control away from me to be able to look at the data the way I wanna look at it, and actually gave him more control over, you know, what he, how he could look at data, what he could do with the data.

[00:45:08] Julie Adkins: I mean, data’s not everything in, in manufacturing for sure. But if you’re, if you’re trying, for me, what I learned the most about the data is that that’s going to show you where your weaknesses are and that’s what is going to guide you. To the continuous improvement projects that are going to improve your, your output, your efficiencies, your quality, whatever it is.

[00:45:34] Julie Adkins: If you’re struggling to get the information about, you know, how, how, how are we performing? Then you can’t talk about are we winning or losing? And that was a critical area where we were really not doing the best we could be doing at, at the level we wanted to, to get to with spreadsheets.

[00:45:55] Josh Santo: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean it’s still an issue

[00:45:59] Josh Santo: today, right? There’s so much of manufacturing that has made its way into the digital ecosystem, and then there’s a lot of aspects that have not. And that’s one of the things we focus on here at EASE. You know, one of the last things you called out is the criticality of data.

[00:46:15] Josh Santo: And really data in itself is not really valuable. It is the action that you take from the insight that you gain looking at the information. ’cause after you mention that data, the criticality of data, you’ve talked about how it’s really information on how we are performing. And when we started our conversation, you talked about the importance of we’re meeting every day and we’re asking ourselves the question, did we win?

[00:46:43] Josh Santo: Did we win the day? And it comes down to, you cannot answer that question without accurate. Timely relevant information and data is just a type of that information. ’cause you also want feedback from real people, perspectives, et cetera. So I love that that data has come up. ’cause it’s really all about, you know, you need to take action.

[00:47:05] Josh Santo: That’s what we’re doing every single day. To take action, you have to understand what it is that you need to action to do that, you need the right inputs into that conversation. Data is one of those inputs there. I took a lot of notes on, on what you just shared. And, and, and I want, I’m gonna play it back to you and our audience a little bit.

[00:47:22] Josh Santo: And some of this is to recap and some of this is to help it sink into my own mind. So in that initiative that you were describing, where you are essentially advocating, we need to implement this system, this, this, this digital system. and I’m sure a lot of people thought like, another thing that we have to do, we’ve got so much work, we’re we just brought the entire plant together.

[00:47:46] Josh Santo: There’s always. A reason not to pursue a project or to change. And one of the first things that you called out was that another plant or another, you acquired this system through

[00:48:02] Josh Santo: acquisition and the benefit there. One, there’s actually two benefits, I think that I hear within that one. It’s been proven, right?

[00:48:11] Josh Santo: So you’ve got real people that you can talk to to say, do you like using this thing? Has it helped you? That’s, that’s a big deal to have that social testimony from, from folks that you can trust. And then you also talked about the amount of investment that would be required to get up and running. And in this case, you already got a license, so you just significantly lowered the investment that it’s gonna take.

[00:48:36] Josh Santo: So that’s gonna open up some doors and from people’s perspective of like, okay, here’s, here’s one area that I could protest that you just eliminated. It’s not gonna cost you anything in terms of extra spend. It’s gonna take a little bit of elbow grEASE, but what doesn’t? The next thing that you called out was buy-in.

[00:48:55] Josh Santo: You went to the plant manager, here’s what we wanna do, here’s why we want to do it. And guess what? It’s like we already have access to it. And on top of that, there’s already people that we can talk to who like using it. So you go in there to get support from leadership. ’cause it is critical that leadership is bought in.

[00:49:13] Josh Santo: ’cause you brought that up later on when you talked about accountability. When you open up the system to see are people actually using this system? Because one, it it helps you gauge like are there any issues with the implementation? And you approached it that way, what’s going on? You’re not coming out accusatory of like, you’re not doing what we told you to do.

[00:49:30] Josh Santo: It’s. How can we help? What’s blocking you? What’s stifling progress? But at the same time, you’re indicating that leadership is taking a vested interest and is already looking at this stuff. Right. And without that leadership type of support, whatever project you’re pursuing, it’s gonna be much more difficult to drive that change.

[00:49:51] Josh Santo: But if you’ve got leadership at all levels, looking at it, checking in with their team, asking the same questions you asked, what would help you make this a reality? You make it clear like there’s no option here. This is the change that we’re making. We’re gonna do it together, but make no mistake, we’re making the change.

[00:50:12] Josh Santo: and then finally, one of that last points that you brought up was getting peers bought in you. You talked about that colleague who was struggling with an issue that you knew this solution could help. But you also brought in, there was a little bit of, of fear of change. You mentioned that he was.

[00:50:28] Josh Santo: Concerned about losing control over this aspect of something that he’s probably been doing for, you know, his way for an amount of time. But by being able to address that and focus on the gain, here’s what it’s gonna solve for you, here’s how it’s gonna make your life easier and getting them bought in, now you’ve got that multi-level approach to ultimately driving change.

[00:50:52] Josh Santo: So I think it’s important to to break that down. ’cause no matter what the initiative is, there’s elements to that, right? Who needs to be bought in, who needs to provide their support, what it’s gonna be expected from them? How can everyone work together to make sure that we effectively make this change?

[00:51:09] Josh Santo: So I think that was just such a great example that’s worth everyone listening to reflect on. These are elements that have to be in place in order to make those types of

[00:51:18] Julie Adkins: Yeah, definitely. And I think that, the, the supervisor that was able to. Take the, take the system and take it to the next level in his area, is a good example because he saw the value of it and then now his supervisory peers see him embracing it. And he actually asked if he could lead the next level of the system, functionality, which was, kind of a training database.

[00:51:46] Julie Adkins: It was, they call it poly valence, but basically like, programming in or being able to identify who has been trained on what areas within the system. That was another kind of component that we hadn’t initially put a date on when we were gonna roll out. We just knew it was a valuable part of the system and he just took it and said, I’m putting this in.

[00:52:05] Julie Adkins: Okay, here you go. Here’s the keys to the, here’s the keys to the, the operation O over there. You do it, test it out, and then you can help us implement it. That was really cool. But then another was, an entire kind of production area that was struggling a bit. They knew they were struggling. They knew they needed investment on the line.

[00:52:23] Julie Adkins: They knew they needed some, you know, some attention and focus. And by having the data, it really showed, the leadership team and the plant manager. Yeah, this is gonna require, in order to fix this operational problem from OEE, this breakdown area in the line, we need to invest, we need to bring in, you know, some additional equipment.

[00:52:43] Julie Adkins: We need to bring in the controls engineering team. And they got what they needed. Because we had the data to show, I mean, they probably complained like, Hey, we need you to replace this thing, but without the data to show that yes, that is the bottleneck, that’s what’s breaking down. Here’s the number of hours that were lost, from production time.

[00:53:03] Julie Adkins: Here’s all the extra overtime you’re spending to run this line on the weekends. really did the trick. And then, and then people understand, okay, that’s what the data buys me. It buys me. They’re, they’re able to, you know, they’re able to see, with, with their own eyes the, the problems that we’re having, that need to be overcome.

[00:53:23] Josh Santo: Yeah, and it, it reminds me of one of the things that we started out with, you know, talking about how it’s important for people to be able to get it, understand it and run on their own with regard to, to Lean. And it’s kind of the same thing here. You, you, you focus on enabling people and when it clicks for them and they understand it, now they’re empowered and they can run and they can.

[00:53:43] Josh Santo: Tackle the things that they need to tackle in the way that’s aligned with how the organization wants these things tackled.

[00:53:51] Julie Adkins: that’s cool to see when you start seeing like, okay, I’m one person with my little four person team, and then you start seeing supervisors, team leads, like, like getting excited about their own initiatives and training each other on how to use the systems or how to implement, 5S in their area.

[00:54:09] Julie Adkins: That was the most rewarding part about it, was to really see that, that spread. We didn’t get all the way there yet, but we were, we were made a lot of, made a lot of progress and it was really cool to see individuals kind of clicking.

[00:54:24] Josh Santo: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, given that you’ve got, a, a lot of experience, not just in project management, but even program management, you’ve been a part of major initiatives and I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of failures like we talked about earlier. I’m, I’m curious, what have you seen that people in manufacturing operations typically get wrong about project management?

[00:54:55] Julie Adkins: I think, I think that my struggle has been, a team or leader that maybe takes on way too much and, and wants it like. Really, really fast without privatization. Like I get, I understand aspirational goals, you know, wouldn’t it be great? Wouldn’t it be great if we could, you know, if we could, accomplish all of these things within this set amount of time.

[00:55:25] Julie Adkins: Right. And the resources that we have. and I’ve listened to a couple of your most recent episodes and, and, one of the advices, you know, do the best you can with the resources you have now until you get more. And then most recently, you know, the, the leadership with, with, Dr. Becca and, and, and understanding that the strategic planning part and that process is so important.

[00:55:49] Julie Adkins: So, kind of coming back to your question, I think that it really requires prioritization, which comes from the understanding of your resources and the vision of where you wanna go, and using your strategic planning process, your hoshin, cony process, whatever you term it, to be very realistic when you’re having discussions, with a leadership team around what are the top. You know, three that we really need to get done. Like whatever the number is, like these are the ones that we will do, like this is our focus. And then, boy, wouldn’t it be great if we can also get these other seven or 12 or 20 things done. And. The, and, and I think that if everybody worked in a silo, you’d assign these projects to all these individuals and they would just get ’em done.

[00:56:45] Julie Adkins: But the reality is that most valuable initiatives are cross-functional. And so you may assign your PC and l person the assignment to reduce inventory by X millions of dollars or incrEASE your returns, but it’s really going to also require the production teams. it’s gonna require the supplier quality teams and working with the supply, you know, supply chain to get better there.

[00:57:09] Julie Adkins: like it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s so much more than just one person owning the initiative. And so I think what, what people get wrong and, and I’ve been part of, you know, some. Some years where we struggled with this a lot, but I’ve seen mature organizations do it well, is being real realistic with the resources that they have and the initiatives that they wanna accomplish.

[00:57:36] Julie Adkins: And understanding the cross-functionality of that. Aligning the leader leadership team on the top focus projects, and then holding that team accountable, meaning that they are also holding their teams accountable. ’cause typically it’s not just the, the top leaders that are doing it, it’s you’re gonna expect your, you know, your, man, your manager, supervisors, and even even your frontline workers to be involved in these initiatives if they’re bigger ones.

[00:58:05] Julie Adkins: So yeah, that would, that would be my, what, what people I think can sometimes get wrong is just an over overload of do this, do this, do this go faster, and then, and then not really having a, a good. A good process and prioritization alignment around it.

[00:58:26] Josh Santo: Yeah. ’cause you can’t do it all. So you, so something has to take priority. Now I have maybe what might be a little bit of a controversial opinion, but I think you can only have one priority. What are, what are your thoughts on that?

[00:58:46] Julie Adkins: Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good thing to, to pose. I, I don’t know. I feel like in my work, you know, we had many initiatives. I do think that, I, I’ve heard it even, I think there’s like a theory around it too. Like x percent, like only 5% should be your priority A and like 20% your priority B. Somebody taught me that at one point in time, but I think I spent way too much time trying to calculate these things.

[00:59:13] Julie Adkins: But, but no, I think, I think that. I, I subscribe to the top three. I always have kind of a top three. I I was asking, I like to ask people how they organize their days and I had one, one senior leader one time I asked that question in a panel and they said they’d write three things on a sticky note every day.

[00:59:32] Julie Adkins: Like I, yellow, sticky, probably a 3M sticky. And they would write like their top three things that they are either focused on or going to accomplish that day. And there’s a million other things that they get involved in meetings and maybe have to turn this thing in or this is due or whatever. But that’s like in their mind strategically their their top three.

[00:59:52] Julie Adkins: So I don’t know, I don’t disagree with you, but maybe in my mind I have three

[00:59:59] Josh Santo: I think it’s, I think it’s fair to say that there, these are three things that I want to tackle, but my argument of there can only be one priority is that you’re gonna have to pick one of those things and get to work on it. So which one do you put first? Which, which one are you gonna start contributing your efforts to?

[01:00:18] Josh Santo: Now that priority may change, it may

[01:00:20] Julie Adkins: Yeah, there you

[01:00:21] Josh Santo: it’s like you said, with the, the project you might, the resources might change. You might run into a blocker and now all of a sudden you cannot make progress. You’re gonna shift and now you’re prioritizing this one thing. But my point really comes around to.

[01:00:36] Josh Santo: I believe there’s really only one priority you can have at a

[01:00:40] Julie Adkins: At a given time. Yeah, I agree with that.

[01:00:44] Josh Santo: And I think it’s important. You also mentioned alignment and accountability, because you could inadvertently give different priorities to different groups. But if these groups, then they can’t work in silos. It’s, you gotta work cross-functionally to make it happen.

[01:01:02] Josh Santo: But if their priorities are different at that point, then they’re going to be incentivized to put whatever that priority is first. If it’s not aligned with each other’s, then now we’re no longer working together, right? We’re working in different directions, or we might inadvertently be blocking each other

[01:01:20] Julie Adkins: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, definitely that, and that’s, that’s a, that’s a pitfall with that is, and you have some mean, I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of collaborative people in my career, but you know, you have the individualistic, like, I see what is on my, my goals for the year and in my yearly review by goodness, I’m going to have done that no matter what it takes.

[01:01:42] Josh Santo: And, and, every man from self attitude and that’s, yeah, that’s not a place that I like to work, but yeah. But, but sometimes that ruthless prioritization is needed and it’s like, it’s, you know, and, and you brought up the point, right? The, the Hoshin Kanri, what is that north star, right? And how does that unite all of the priorities together? So, you know, Julie, a lot of great lessons in this conversation. I certainly feel like I’ve learned a lot.

[01:02:10] Josh Santo: I feel the wheels spinning in my head, and I, I know that we could keep going. but for the. At the sake of both of our times, maybe there’ll be a part two. But what I do wanna do, I wanna pause here and I wanna say thank you for making the time to come and share what you’ve learned and the experiences, not only with me, but with our audience.

[01:02:30] Josh Santo: Because like we talked about, it is the only way to help people, maybe not avoid the pitfalls, ideally avoid the pitfalls, but sometimes you just have to go through the pitfalls. So at least you’ll have a plan of how to tackle those pitfalls when you run into them. So Julie, thanks so much for

[01:02:46] Julie Adkins: Oh, thanks so much. I’ve learned from so many wonderful people and, so I’m glad to to share some of this feedback. It’s coming from a lot of other folks that, that I’ve learned from. So hopefully I’ll, I’ll,this will be helpful to people and I’ll look forward to continuing to listen to your podcast.

[01:03:02] Julie Adkins: Re more advice.

[01:03:03] Josh Santo: Alright, well thank you.