Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If we don't correlate our projects directly to their effect on our company's health right then a lot of times what happens is we sub optimize. We've got a six step process and somebody puts up a project to fix step number three. But step number three is not the constraint in the process and we improve that process or we make it look really good and people in that step are really happy. But our ability to create product, there's no effect.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Welcome to why they Fail, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on why continuous improvement efforts fail. Buckle up because we're not here for motivational fluff. We're dissecting the short sighted decisions and leadership agendas that sabotage CI success. But don't worry, we'll clue you in to the few simple keys to success to avoid these pitfalls. If you're ready for the truth, let's do this.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: Welcome to the podcast. Today we're taking a deep dive into the world of continuous improvement at a global powerhouse Danone.
Our guest is CeCe Haynes, the continuous improvement manager for Danone North America who has been with the company for over 20 years.
Denone has a unique approach, empowering employees at all levels to identify and tackle problems.
Some might call this a shotgun approach, shooting at a wide range of issues and hoping to hit the mark. As you listen today, I want you to think about this method. What are the benefits? Does it build a stronger, more engaged culture? And what are the potential drawbacks? Could it lead to wasted effort on problems that don't ultimately impact the bottom line?
Let me know what you think in the comments section. I'm really curious to hear your perspective. Now let's get into our conversation with CeCe Haynes.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: What was your catalyst that really got you into continuous improvement?
[00:02:11] Speaker D: I was doing continuous improvement for a long time as an employee.
I think a lot of employees are doing continuous improvement. We just didn't have that vocabulary to call it continuous improvement. And I didn't have the tools. So I would always start in the middle at looking for root causes without defining my goal in the current way. It's working. So it was a little bit more of a struggle if you don't have those tools to find solutions that you can manage or how to get leadership buy in or how to get stakeholder approvals. You don't necessarily have those tools. So when we had our yellow belt training that started that journey of understanding more about what what the order of operations is in making improvements in process improvements and the difference between quick wins.
Still, you can Use those tools, one or more of the tools that we teach in Yellow Bell and in Lean Six Sigma, and what's in your sphere of influence for change.
So that's really where it started working with Patricia, as you mentioned earlier, who I started just as a champion for my particular team, an ambassador of continuous improvement, gathering ideas, updating our Kaizen boards. And it just started small, just like any continuous improvement should, and then grew from there.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: What, what kind of an infrastructure do you have at Denone? You know, so that your, your yellow belts take on the right projects. They take on projects that are, are supported by all levels, that they, they don't go into a department or an area to solve a problem that they've been given and then come into a roadblock, because that area may not understand even what's going on. So what kind of a structure do you have, you know, for that to happen?
[00:04:16] Speaker D: So each of our teams, both in Mexico and in North America, will have a continuous improvement champion. And we meet with them monthly, along with the leader of that particular team, to discuss what initiatives are in progress, update our Kaizen boards, and what ideas we have out there that fit the objectives of the team for that year.
And they then gather that information from their teams because we're talking about hundreds of people that we're trying to coordinate with ideas amongst different teams. So those ambassadors and the leaders of the teams are really the catalysts that gather that information and help focus the initiatives that are in progress.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: The ideas, are they placed in a, in a suggestion box or are they something that is prioritized to their effect on, you know, the company's key business metrics, or are they just shotgun blast on a board and we say, okay, that one looks good.
[00:05:23] Speaker D: Yes.
Both of those.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:05:26] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:27] Speaker D: It depends on where the team is on their improvement journey. So we do encourage people to bring all of their ideas to the table. We put them on the board, and then we can prioritize them according to what the benefit is, how it's going to improve our metrics or improve performance or improve work life balance. So that's prioritized by the leader of the team. So not everybody is sophisticated enough or advanced enough that they're bringing every idea to the table in advance. So sometimes there are fires that have to be put out and we need to prioritize an initiative right away, and we can't necessarily do both.
So it really depends on where they are in the dirt, in the.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Let me get an idea of your structure. I'm hearing things like team Leaders, different facilities, Kaizen boards. Give me a top down structure of you know, what exists. Because what I'm hearing is you've got facilities in Mexico, you've got facilities in the US that you are in charge of continuous improvement in all of those facilities.
Each one of those, you have different team leaders and each of these departments you have a Kaizen board that helps the, your, the people in that area, be it a LCD screen or a cork board or something like that that says that they're present production safety 5s.
So give me an idea just so we can understand what a, what a structure looks like.
[00:07:07] Speaker D: So regardless of our physical location, so we do have it split into Mexico and North America. Those boards that we're talking about, one for Mexico, one for North America and we'll just use North America as example. Each department will have a section of that virtual board. It's online, it's the software that we use. So our I2C invoice to cash people, we're an accounting business, we're a business services organization.
So I'll just use invoice to cash for example. Basically because they have the most employees in their organization, have a place where their ambassador comes in and can put the ideas, update their status. If they're in the define phase or the improve phase, are they almost done in the control phase? Who's working on, on it? We track the team members, who the member of the team or department is that's working on it and what the benefit is or if it's efficiencies, what are the hours, if it's added value, our dollars, maybe there's some compliance elements where we're meeting more controls or we're meeting quality expectations.
So we track all that in a single space for our North America organization and then another one for our Mexico organization.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Something that helps you to understand where you are in that, in that project. So you can look at that, this from a very high level or a very detailed level.
[00:08:37] Speaker D: Right. And then we keep all of our completed ideas there as well. So if somebody has a continuing issue with something that should have been fixed, we can reference that other idea and those materials to revisit the control phase or whatever phase. We need to, to have that improvement.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: You know, you got these, you got these different projects, but how do we know that those have an effect on, you know, the key business metrics of the company or that facility?
[00:09:06] Speaker D: So there are, I mean that's tracking some quick wins. So we know we're saving a person from having to work through lunch A few times a month. Right.
And then there are bigger project types that impact our key performance indicators. That's how we can see where the improvement made an impact on the KPI. If we're paying more vendors on time or if we're collecting more cash on time, that's the key performance indicators that might be impacted. So not every project is going to be specific to KPIs, but there are improvements to our KPIs that are attracting continuous improvement.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: So these, these are more of quick win cultural building projects that somebody says that I've got to walk 30 yards to a printer and back 40 times a day.
Is that something that can be alleviated?
[00:10:05] Speaker D: And we have some bigger ideas in there that maybe we need some technical support on things like that, where we really need some team support or some sponsorship.
But yeah, for the most part we have quicker wins in there.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: I'm going to give you kind of debate because if we don't correlate our projects directly to their effect on our company's health, right. Then a lot of times what happens is we suboptimize.
We've got a six step process and somebody puts up a project to fix step number three. But step number three is not the constraint in the process.
And you're right, we improve that process and we make it look really good and people in that step are really happy. But our ability to create product, there's no effect. So in essence that could be considered waste wasting time because we're not focusing on the right process.
That's a lot of what I see in companies is we take that shotgun approach to improving processes and it does a lot for culture and maybe morale. But at the end of the day, you know, our job is to create value.
[00:11:20] Speaker D: Well, that's why we do. We meet with the ambassadors and the leader of that department on a monthly basis and go through what's in progress and what we're working on. Because they should be the first line of defense in making sure that we're working on the right thing in the right step that actually impacts the voice of the customer.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: So they're really your guideposts as far as what projects to take on for that facility. Because they have visibility to what's happening in that facility.
[00:11:52] Speaker D: Yeah, I really depend on them and their expertise as subject matter experts for their department to know what is the right step in a process or the right process to be reviewing what are.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Some yellow belt projects. So people can kind of delineate between different levels of a lean Six Sigma practitioner. From black belt to green belt to yellow belt. And Danone is really stuck with, with the yellow belt because that's kind of where the quick wins come in, or picking up the ground fruits, starting off with yellow belts to. To pick up those ground fruits.
[00:12:26] Speaker D: Well, things change so much in Danone. It's a. It's in our DNA to adapt to change.
So new softwares, new processes, new ways of working, then bring more opportunity to create improvement. So there's always something new to look at. I mean, and we have seen a lot of those initiatives that you mentioned earlier about morale and employee satisfaction that allow people to have a lunch that day. Because when you're working in an accounting organization, specifically like our general accounting team, that have to have their books closed by a certain day so they could be working late into the night to get things done. So if we're able to improve that process even by two hours a month, they're going home on time instead of working till late in the evening.
So on paper, it doesn't look like a lot of time, but it improves the life of the person who benefits from it.
Have we. And we've seen that in some of our yellow belt wins that we've had where we had.
We had one where they were reducing the time to create a cost center for one of our teams that was doing it. And they were taking on average 11 and a half days to create this cost center, and they wanted to reduce it to eight and a half days.
So that was their goal on their project charter was to reduce it to eight and a half days, and they actually achieved five and a quarter days.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:14:04] Speaker D: So they exceeded their goal by using the lean Six Sigma tools, and they were able to track that improvement over time.
That was one of their big wins. By using these tools, they were able to come up with, instead of one idea for improvement, they could implement three at the same time and exceed their expected benefit.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: You have ambassadors that are maybe green belt level. Who are your champions? How do, how do you pick your. Your champions?
[00:14:33] Speaker D: Well, I mean, I think anybody can be a continuous improvement champion if they have the passion they have. I think they have to be, at minimum, a yellow belt trained to understand that structure and to understand the vocabulary alone.
But to have the passion for continuous improvement and working with other people, working with their teams, working cross functionally. If you have that interest and that passion, the rest can be taught the rest. We can train through Greenbelt or we can coach in other ways.
So I do encourage champions and ambassadors to become green belt trained it's harder for us to do. It has been harder in the past for us to do internal green belt training. So we don't have that training as often and therefore we don't have as many green belts as I would like.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: Your executives, are they, are they educated on lean Six Sigma? Is the yellow belt administration more at, you know, your level or are they looking at the projects from some of our C level?
[00:15:40] Speaker D: I'll, I'll just use vice president level, for example. Many of them have gone through the yellow belt courses and understand the vocabulary. And even above that, you know, if they're not.
Haven't taken the yellow belt training, there's a population of C suite level who can't dedicate that time to going to the entire yellow belt course, depending on what's happening in our business. But they definitely are educated and support the continuous improvement efforts and champion our efforts by attending our committee meetings and attending presentations by our yellow belts when they finish their certification presentations.
So they're definitely invested in the results if they haven't had attended the training.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: How do you, how do you catalog your projects? So, you know, if somebody takes on a project to improve your financial closing and then somebody else experiences that same problem, but maybe from a different dental facility, how did, how do they, how did they get visibility to problems that's been solved so they don't try and reinvent the wheel?
[00:16:55] Speaker D: The first is the leaders of that particular department are attending team discussions with their global leaders. So there's some ways to share those wins and compare notes in best practices.
But also these boards that we keep for North America and Mexico, every region has one of those boards in the state, same place that roll up into a central dashboard, and those dashboards can be reviewed by anyone. So I can go to dashboard for our procure to pay or accounts payable and see if they've done any initiatives that meet my needs.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: So what, what, what do you think is in the future for dental staying with the yellow belts, moving, moving it up to, to taking on more complex problems?
[00:17:52] Speaker D: I think taking on more complex problems, especially in the technical environment that we have today with AI and trying to utilize these tools. There's new tools every day.
So something that we improved last year, there might be a tool that we can improve it even more.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: So what's the next step for Christine? What's your, what's the next chapter in your journey?
[00:18:16] Speaker D: You know, I think we're continuously defining that. I'm always in the define phase when it comes to that journey.
I have a colleague Like I mentioned in Mexico and I think working even more closely, that's where the bulk of our business services is in Mexico. The bulk of our employees that we serve, they're our main stakeholders and our customers. And we have again a population here in North America.
So being able to connect with, reconnect with some of the people who fell off the journey for some, we've had a lot of new softwares, we've had a lot of new big projects that have taken the focus of the champions and of the employees and re engaging them in this journey. I think we started this conversation because we wanted to talk about not just creating the continuous improvement mindset, but maintaining it.
So I'm constantly looking for new ways to encourage continuous improvement and voluntarily reporting your wins because people are doing continuous improvement even if they're not telling me about it or telling their manager about it.
So looking for new and interesting ways to engage employees and in this journey is always on the agenda for me.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: If you could give me one word or phrase to sum up your journey at Denone, what would that be?
[00:19:48] Speaker D: Change. Adapting to change. Constant change. I mean, and I think that's true not just for Denone, for business in general, there's always change.
[00:19:57] Speaker C: What a fascinating look into Denone's continuous improvement culture. A huge thank you to cece for sharing her experience and and being so open with us. It's clear their focus on yellow belts and empowering employees has created some fantastic quick wins that really improve the day to day lives and morale of their team. But it also brought up a critical should every improvement project be directly tied to a major company KPI or is there massive value in these culture building projects even if they don't move the big needle? It's a question every organization has to answer. If you're wrestling with this question in your own company, I want to help. You can grab a free PDF copy of my book why they Fail and the Simple Key to Success.
It dives deep into building a sustainable foundation for continuous improvement. The link is in the shownotes below. And speaking of a successful foundation you will not want to miss Our next episode will be talking with Richard Graham, the former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana and author of Performance is the Best Politics. He used these exact principles to save the city over $30 million and slash service times like fixing potholes from 48 hours down to just three. It's an incredible story of high performance government you won't want to miss.
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