Conquering Chaos: A Show for Manufacturing Leaders

Jim de Vries, Founder & Managing Director at Enhance International Group, has helped countless organizations navigate change and achieve organizational excellence. He shares why culture is so important to driving change and how to create a culture that supports a resilient enterprise.... Read more

Recruiting and retention come up a lot on this show, and for good reason. They are top of mind for leaders across the manufacturing industry. But Tony Lopez, Vice President of Operations, Manufacturing and Logistics Services at PRIDE Industries, explains that there is one often overlooked group that could help solve manufacturing’s workforce issues—workers with disabilities. Tony breaks down the many ways that manufacturing organizations benefit from employing this untapped labor market. ... Read more

Machine learning and AI are critical to the future of manufacturing operations. To get you up to speed on the topic, we spend this episode explaining how they work and showcasing the incredible ways in which industrial companies are implementing them into workflows.... Read more

In this episode, Wendy Pease, a Language Translation Expert and the CEO at Rapport International, joins the show to discuss how manufacturers today can attract, engage, and retain local members of foreign-born communities. ... Read more

Increasingly, companies are investing in ESG initiatives (environmental, social, and governance). Partly, it's due to a realization of the impact of climate change and a recognition that something has to change. But promising to make a change and actually making that change are two very different things. What are the practical steps you can take as a company to start developing more sustainable product offerings?... Read more

In today's world, socioeconomic changes are happening at an increasing rate, which means manufacturing organizations must constantly adapt to keep up. Hyobin Sung, Director of Learning Solutions at STANLEY X. Their work revolves around innovating for the future of work, including developing solutions to attract, retain, and empower the maker's workforce.... Read more

In our next episode, we chat with Sarah Dale, Plant General Manager at International Paper, about how she landed in manufacturing, how she leads her team, and what organizations can do to recruit and retain the next generation of manufacturing.... Read more

Continuous improvement is the backbone of an organization's longevity. Without innovation and an incentive for change, the risk of collapse climbs. But it’s not enough to implement a change — you must equip workers at all levels with the knowledge, skills, and expertise required to sustain change. Ray Ardahji, Managing Director at MICHIANA LEAN TECH, LLC, knows this better than anyone after over 30 years of helping companies pivot and grow into new systems.... Read more

Data is essential to the supply chain process, but it's not everything. It’s a tool to be leveraged by the people who ultimately make the decisions. After all, data without business context is meaningless, or even worse, misleading. Megan Preston Meyer, writer, and publisher at Preston Meyer Publishing, is an expert in supply chain analytics and a proponent of finding the right balance between data and insight.... Read more

During this prolonged labor shortage in the manufacturing industry, there’s been a lot of talking ABOUT frontline workers, but not a lot of talking TO frontline workers. Recently, Parsable sought to fix that.... Read more

It’s no secret that manufacturing and industrial organizations are struggling to recruit and retain millennials and Gen Z workers. As an aging workforce nears retirement, it has become an urgent issue with companies scrambling to fill these positions. So, the million-dollar question is: How can we attract the next generation to manufacturing?... Read more

Many industries are struggling to recruit and retain frontline workers. Manufacturers are struggling to meet the demands of today with fewer resources than yesterday. The focus of this episode is on what you can do about it.... Read more

Have you ever wondered what you need to do to empower your people to use their creativity and unique perspective to tackle issues and implement sustainable solutions? If you have, this is the episode you’ve been waiting for. Jamie Flinchbaugh, Founder of JFlinch and Co-Founder of the Lean Learning Center and author of the book People Solve Problems, joins the show to explain what organizations need to have in place to make that vision a reality.... Read more

Retaining talent requires you to invest in reskilling and upskilling with a culture of continuous learning in short and convenient increments, and externally, recruiting new talent requires you to partner with universities to train for the skills we need. In this episode, we have a conversation about building the next generation of industrial leaders. ... Read more

In this increasingly connected world, data plays an integral role in understanding and improving businesses. People analytics, in particular, uses data to improve how businesses leverage the creativity and talents of their people.... Read more

Everything in manufacturing is in the process of moving from bits into bytes as part of the digital transformation. Welcome to Industry 4.0 — an era in which operations are getting digitized and net new revenue streams are being generated off of this influx of new data.... Read more

Manufacturing has had a damaging perception—one where the industry is male-dominated and potentially physically dangerous. Despite the modernization of the industry, more attention must be directed to marketing these changes. Only then will the industry see new employee talent, both men and women, enter the field. ... Read more

Making a supply chain 100% traceable is no easy task—requiring multiple standards and certifications within the business in order to prepare for the future.... Read more

When I say full operational, I mean, from the minute you step onto your site, or into your business and out the door. What's that experience? And that's how we have to make continuous improvement part of the complete structure. It sits hand in hand with health and safety... Read more

There's a big concern right now about how do we bring people into manufacturing? New people, particularly people from the younger generation. A significant portion of the workforce, made up of by baby boomers, they're reaching retirement and in some cases, COVID-19 has actually exacerbated that situation.... Read more

There's a plus side to sustainability and ESG. And that's value creation. Large companies now say, ‘If your sustainability program isn't where it needs to be, or you're not mitigating these ESG risks, then you just can't work with us.’ So, it's not an option.... Read more

If you have a faster rate of solving problems than your competitors, you're going to be able to solve more problems, you're going to be more efficient, and you're going to be more differentiated. You don't just want to solve the reactive problems and speed up the firefighting, you want to prevent the firefighting in the first place.... Read more

How do we get the input from all different personas and archetypes that we have in the organization, not just the predominately looking at those who sit in the white collar office space, but everybody?... Read more

People don't care about how much you know until they know how much you care about them. It's important to put people first, not policy, during a merger.... Read more

If you're trying to implement automation for the bottom line, and you're making your workers' tasks more difficult, those workers aren't going to be your workers for long. Companies who are not willing to implement and take new technology and evolve as a process just won't be relevant.... Read more

At a high level, obviously, data is important, but data needs to mean something. You got to have the right data, something that is actionable, something that is meaningful to people in your organization.... Read more

Managing the now, new, and the next in digital transformation is critical for your company's success. In these uncertain times, It's important to understand what did the crisis create and how can we use these new learnings for new use cases.... Read more

Change is inevitable. Investing in change is critical. If you’re just placing safe bets, you’re not going to be moving at the speed of business today. If you don’t pay the cost to fail, you will not be paying the cost to win.... Read more

By 2025, at least 75% of the global workforce will be millennials. To attract and retain a younger workforce, you must empower the workforce through leading the charge on sustainability. Utilizing sustainability as a competitive edge will be the key to longevity within the manufacturing industry. ... Read more