Kindly brief us about yourself and your role as the Lead Coach at QAD Redzone

I am a lead coach with QAD Redzone. I have more than 25 years of manufacturing and consulting experience. As a Lead Coach, I spend about 20% of my time on internal training and development in manufacturing plants. This includes a lot of one-on-one time with newer coaches and working with other lead coaches. The other 80% is coaching customers. I really enjoy working with our coaches and enjoy helping our customers. Many people working in manufacturing plants have a hard time finding time for Continuous Improvement and empowering the frontline workers. As a Redzone Coach, it’s what we do.

Tell us about QAD Redzone and give us an overview of its standout product and services.

QAD Redzone has been a truly great company to work for because the products set the standard for the industry and the work is very rewarding. Our product is the world class Continuous Improvement software called Redzone. Redzone currently has four modules:

• Productivity – tracks plant performance and enables short interval control and daily operations meetings to drive action cycles
• Compliance – Paperless Quality, Statistical Process Control (SPC), and plant audits and checklists for leader standard work
• Reliability – perform and track maintenance activities like Operator Care & Planned Maintenance, ultimately connecting production and maintenance teams
• Learning – videos become part of standards and learning packs to facilitate training and a skills matrix to monitor progress, think of it as YouTube for the shop floor

Other services include on site coaching packages we use to lead companies through each module.

How do you identify areas of improvement within your production processes?

The Redzone app helps us to collect and see the data live on the shop floor. Shop floor teams and leadership have several meetings daily to review the data while it’s in real time and allows the opportunity to take quick action to address top issues. Additional data analysis helps us see the top issues over time. These top issues make great topics for Continuous Improvement events (a.k.a. Kaizen). A Kaizen is a strategy where employees at all levels of a company work together proactively to achieve regular, incremental improvements to the manufacturing process. Kaizen teams will take a deep dive into top issues selection.

What kind of employee development and training programs do you have in place for production teams?

We start with user training, so everyone knows how to use Redzone, where to input downtime reasons, and where to see how we are doing. We then deploy shop floor huddles to connect team members to act in real-time. We’ll follow that with Root Cause Analysis training for Problem Solving week. Then finally we have two Kaizen weeks which always starts with Lean training.

How do you ensure that teams are engaged and motivated to continuously improve their work?

The visual nature of Redzone and the color-coded graphs go a long way to motivating the shop floor. Everyone wants to win, right? It’s critical to make sure the teams have the support they need to get better though. Good huddles and daily meetings can make all the difference when it comes to supporting the production team.

How do you currently manage and schedule the production teams? Are there any pain points in this process?

Coaches manage through the plant leadership team. The pain points show when there are competing priorities at the plant level. We can work through those challenges as long as everyone shows some flexibility, and we get participation from the senior leadership.

How do you collect and analyze data related to your production processes and team performance?

All the data is in the QAD Redzone app and you can see a lot there. We also have QAD Redzone analytics to review data over weeks or months.

What advice would you give other professionals from a manufacturing coach’s perspective?

Always provide value to the customer. Naturally, this means that you must understand what is important to them, build a plan on how to meet those needs, and deliver.

Can you share any success stories or examples of how your work with production teams has improved plant efficiency and/or employee performance?

KIND is a baking industry leader, and the company had several productivity-hampering issues. It was drowning in paperwork and suffering from delayed corrective action. I had audit, legibility and reliability concerns. One of the key obstacles to improvement was that the company was working in communication silos and had to operate in 11 different languages across two shifts.

Following the QAD Redzone deployment KIND has successfully inverted the communications pyramid by giving its workers digital identity and new opportunities for self-actualization. As the result, Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) went up by 48% on the bakery line and 57% on the Snack Pack line. The company recorded overall 61% productivity uplift in bakery, and 43% productivity uplift on Snack Pack line. And what a Townhall Celebration we had!

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