Hi everyone, welcome to everyone who joined a little bit early. The webinar will begin here shortly in around 22 to 3:00 minutes. Hello and welcome to today's webinar Championing Operational Excellence. Rejuvenate your continuous improvement program. My name is Shawn Shapiro and I'm a Senior Area Marketing Manager here at Mini Tab. A few housekeeping notes before we begin. The slides for today's presentation can be viewed in the slides section here which should be highlighted on your screen. Now, if you want to maximize this screen, you can hover your mouse over this section and select Maximize Screen in the top right corner. We will have AQ and a session after this presentation, so please submit any questions you have in the Q&A box here, which will also be highlighted on your screen now, and we'll do our best to answer them throughout the presentation as well as at the end during the Q&A session. We also have a related content section here which has a few related ebooks, infographics and blogs. If you experience any delay or sync issues with the audio and slides, please exit the webinar and rejoin or refresh the page. We will send a copy of the recording following this webinar so there's no problem If you miss anything or you'd like to review afterwards, I'm very excited to introduce our presenter today, Cheryl Pammer. Cheryl is a Senior Advisory Statistician here at Mini Tab. Cheryl, thanks so much for being here and presenting on this topic today. Can you share a little bit more about your experience in Roll at Mini Tab? Hi, thanks, Sean. So I have been at Minitab since 1993, believe it or not, and have been involved then in the continuous improvement movement really since the beginning of 6 Sigma, so lots and lots of years. I recently moved from Minitab R&D into marketing because I spent about a decade in Minitab R&D as one of the statisticians there. And now we're starting to see so much of my work come to life that I can't wait to talk about how I spent my last decade at Mini Tab. So I am now in marketing talking about a lot of the new things we have. All right, So let's get. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, no. Yeah. I was gonna say awesome. Let's get started with the presentation. I'll hand it over to you, Cheryl. All right. So our agenda for today is to talk about the current state of quality, whether you're doing continuous improvement, operational excellence, 6 Sigma, all of these things that fall in the quality, continuous improvement arena. Let's look at kind of our current state. We're going to talk about a lot of the biggest challenges and a lot of this comes up from research we've done here at Mini TAB and how to address these challenges. Finally, we'll hold off on questions until the end, but we will leave time at the end to do some Q&A. So we're going to get started because our focus is around quality in our current state. I'm really interested in hearing your current state. So we're going to start here with a poll. Where are you in your quality improvement? You can look at it from top down the top. We haven't started at all, all the way down to, hey, we're good to go. We're now just tweaking, right? We've optimized our process and are continuously improved them. So where are you in this? I'll give you a few minutes here to answer our poll. Just press your answer and let's see where we are on our continuous improvement journeys. So some, some, most of you have probably started. I know in talking to some customers recently there's been maybe a restart since COVID, right. So everything kind of shut down over COVID, especially when we look at things like healthcare where everybody moved to the front line. So that's part of our goal today is to rejuvenate restart. Some people are just now starting, but know there's a lot of opportunity there and some of you are maybe a little further along. So we'll give it another minute or so for you to answer and then let's see what the results are. OK. Drum roll. Still see some answers trickling in. So OK, so where we are on our continuous improvement journey? Oh wow. So it looks like we're kind of mixed. The most common answer was you've implemented some technology, but you're not fully there. So a lot of you have kind of are pretty far along on your journey, right? You've got stuff going, you've got your framework, your goals, but you're trying to kind of implement things. Not surprisingly, not a lot of us, 16%, have kind of everything in place. So most of us aren't at that place. And then it looks like, wow, full quarter of us are just now building the framework and understanding how this is all going to work. So that's a really interesting spread. It's a little bit different than, but not not too different than the last poll I saw. So this, this was done by the PECS network, their 2024 global state of the industry. So results here are pretty comparable to what PECS found in that about 1/4. So they had 29% building processes and framework. Where our group here is a little different was we had a few, we had 40% as opposed to 20% of our people have actually started implementing technology and want to go further. So interesting, all right, now we want to look at then where we are, that's where we are, where we want to go. The same survey from the PECS network said what do you want to focus on? And it turns out that I love the top answer here. People are focusing on process, customer centric, etcetera, aligning processes in IT that goes along with the technology. But most important here was creating a culture of transformation. So I wanted to really stop here and say this is really what we want to do, right. I love the top choice of creating a culture for transformation. So regardless of where you are on the journey, and we saw that we're all in different places. Our ultimate goal is letting CI be not just this siloed group, not just a function, right, not just a piece of our work. It's a culture in the company. And I can say for absolute certainty the best companies I've seen in their journey in implementing any kind of continuous improvement in implementing things like data and analytics throughout their company, they are the most successful companies that this are the ones that have truly created it as an organizational culture. So how do we get there? Let's see. All right. So just to catch you up on some newer trends. Now I will say this is based on Minitub's research data-driven problem solving is still at the core. So you don't see that on the list because that's not new, right. Anybody that's been doing continuous improvement as long as I have, it's always been about the data, right. So that's that's not a new trend. Some of the interesting new trends we're seeing, obviously we're in this new world of AI, advanced analytics. So looking at how to integrate things like ChatGPT type technology in our work. So integration of AI and technology, we see a lot more with risk management. So bear everybody especially around data, everybody is really concerned with how their data is being used and any risks they have around that. So risk management has been a huge theme. We're seeing more around remote and hybrid work and how that impacts how we work and also how we train our employees, right. So some of the recent Six Sigma projects I've looked at have been around handling that and adjusting our work environment to this kind of new world. We have an evolving regulatory environment especially around data with the GDPR and all these data kind of rules going in place. So just keeping up with that supply chain is still a popular area that we focus on in continuous improvement ever since COVID, we saw what happens when a supply chain breaks down. So now supply chain resilience has become higher priorities in many companies. And then we're also looking and this kind of falls around the remote hybrid work. We're just seeing the work workplace change a bit. So we're seeing a lot more focus on employee well-being as well as more focus in the workplace around diversity, equity and inclusion. So when I look at like the new 6 Sigma or operational excellence type project work, a lot of the newer trends in these types of projects and focuses are kind of in these areas. Now we want to move into what are the challenges. So here are challenges regardless of whether you're looking at one of these areas that that are kind of new or you're just looking at data-driven problem solving to reduce defects, right. The challenges we run into are kind of what maybe give us opportunity, but they're also maybe roadblocks for creating that complete culture of continuous improvement. So we're going to do another poll so you can put in what you see as your biggest challenge. I will say as a statistician I should have an other result in this category in here, but I didn't want that because I want to force you to make a an actual selection. I'm not going to have time to tally people that put in other as their poll or result. So go ahead and tell me what are your biggest challenges? Are they lack of leadership? Buy in resistance to change in your organization? Limited resources and budgets? Continuous improvements? A lower priority than some of the other work you're doing? We lost institutional knowledge and talent. This this happened a lot in the healthcare industry over COVID. People got burned out and left. We don't know where to start. It is overwhelming, especially now. We know we need data but we don't have access to it. We have data and datas are really messy, unusable. Having trouble keeping up with technology where we just have all these bits and pieces. So we have a group over here using this and a group over here using that. So disjointed homegrown systems and processes all over the place. That's probably, that's a really common one that I see. So again, I'll give you another couple minutes to respond to what your biggest challenges are and then we'll see what our results are. All right. Here we go. OK, interesting. So the top result here came out as continuous improvement is a lower priority than other work. Not a surprise to me, but that happens I think in many, many organizations where it's and I've even been told this to at times where you've got your real job right, the things you have to do. We would we look at continuous improvement sometimes as nice to have but not necessary. So that's one of the things that I think is our biggest challenge is just selling the importance of this work, right or we have related to that limited budget resistance to change. So I think all of these things are kind of related that, you know, in terms of creating this culture of continuous improvement, it needs to be a priority. And for almost 1/4 of us organizationally, it's our side job, not our main job and how do we transform? So we're always incorporating continuous improvement in what we do. So great. Yeah, not surprised at all by these results. OK. So how does that compare to our results at Mini Times Research? This is from VOC. So this is an idea map that I drew up and I was just dragging and dropping kind of the general themes that we got from mini Tub Research around this. So very much in line with what you just said. We found that really when I was organizing this, actually just pulling in all the different comments people gave about their biggest challenges, the biggest challenges kind of fell into four categories. They fall into lack of buy in, right, which is something we all said, you know, that's a problem. We've got a lack of resources. And our biggest challenge in the poll we just did right was this one competing priorities. So it's not always our top priority challenges around data. So we have data, but we can't use it, we can't access it or we just don't believe what the data is telling us because it's it's a bunch of noise. And then things related to technology, this was another one that came up. You have a lot of homegrown systems that are disjointed and not all kind of connected to each other. So we're going to talk about how we might address some of these challenges. We'll look at each of these areas buy in resources, data and technology to see what we found might be helpful for this. OK, so let's start with the buy in challenges. First of all, and I think most people know this, when we talk about buy in, one of the most important things is to make sure people know what they're buying into. So we need to create goals and one of the common ways some of you may have seen this, this has been around since I think the 1950s, this concept of smart goals. But we want specific goals. We don't want to say, oh, I'm just going to continue. I'm going to improve the call center process. We need to be more specific about that. I want to improve the number of calls that are resolved on 1st contact. That's a very specific goal, right? It's measurable. I can. I'm currently first contact call resolution is only at 60% and I want to get it up to 75%. It's achievable. We sometimes hear things like, OK, we want the company to make $100 million next year. Well, that's not achievable. It's measurable. But if you know I'm a $5,000,000 company and I don't have a specific road map to get there, that's probably not an achievable goal. It needs to be relevant and it needs to be time bound, right? We can't just have, yeah, eventually I'm going to make $100 million or hire 20 more people in my department. We have to make that not a stretch goal, but a time bound, realistic, measurable, specific goal. So once we do that and you know thinking about making this culture of continuous improvement happening right, we need to make sure these goals that are maybe part of our CI piece absolutely aligned with a corporate objectives. So your executives have set corporate objectives, right. You should know what they are. You need to know what they are. Every time you propose something you're going to do, I'm going to do this particular project, I'm going to reduce defects in this area. You need to show to leadership how they align specifically with your corporate objectives. Once you've done that, that's probably the most, one of the biggest, not most important, but a big part of buy in on the leadership side, right. So we know we have buy in challenges. We know we don't often don't have enough executive support. I think that was about 16 or 20% of you said that as one of your biggest challenges, right. But and in order to do that, it works both ways, right. So we need to understand what their goals are and then specifically line up our specific goals to our corporate goals and how they're going to meet our continuous improvement projects work etcetera is going to tie in and help us meet those corporate goals. Now I'm going to show you some other things that I think really help in terms of buy in for the people. So you know we've got buy in from the executives very important, but it's also important to have buy in from the people you're working with, right from your team. Again, if we want to create this transformation of improvement, operational excellence, we need buy in from everybody and buy in from the individual people can be tough too because you know, again it's not a priority. So I've got to get my job. Now you want me to do this other thing and and help you with this other project That's not. The bottom line day-to-day task I have to do one of the biggest solutions for buy in challenges is always going to be bringing people in. And so one thing that that we find is really, really helpful at Minitab, and I've seen very helpful in other organizations is give everybody a chance to speak, bring in everybody's ideas, allow people to propose their ideas and we can't pick them all. But at least you get a chance to say instead of, you know, at the water cooler, why aren't we doing this? Well, let's put it in, let's evaluate that idea with everything else. So idea management is really, really helpful for buy in. So we all put our ideas in. They are in a hopper. I have ideas and we can very carefully go through and prioritize and pick. We're going to do this for you know holding on this etcetera. But I can see all my ideas and what happened to them, OK. So really, really helps people engage I think OK, we also want to highlight successes. So here I'm showing you a project repository of things we did and things that went well. They're very healthy projects, maybe things that are struggling a little bit. So I'm highlighting these are projects that happened in a year in a particular, this is a food company in this case. But what I can see is also are some of these ones I want to replicate because they went so well. So we want to highlight and replicate our successes for buy in challenges. We can point to this other you know project, Look, we reduced customer lead time by 80%, right? Let's this is successful. This is why our program is successful. So let's do more of this. Maybe this project didn't do as well, these monitoring the food safety issues. Let's figure out maybe why that one's struggling a little bit and go look at it. But let's replicate all the successes. Let's point to them and say, OK, I want you to do something similar to what Jane did over here when she was working on automating the mixing process. Because a subject that saved us a whole lot of money and then related to that, saving us a whole lot of money. If you want, especially executive buy in, you need to show what savings you're bringing in, right? This is ironic to me because I've seen a lot of operational excellence and continuous improvement projects that have literally saved the company millions of dollars. Yet we're so resistant to change sometimes that we don't even get the opportunity to do some of this work. And I think it's because the focus is on the wrong thing instead of looking at, OK, it's going to cost me this amount of time and you know this amount of money and resources to do this. If we've done some planning ahead and we can say look this project, if we, you know when we are successful, sorry, not if when we are successful we'll bring in $5,000,000. That $10,000 or even $1,000,000 you're going to spend is nothing. You still have a win here. But we need to then really focus on every everything we do should have a business benefit to it, right? We need to always tie things to the business benefit. This particular dashboard we're looking at is related to a supply chain group in an organization. But they had specific corporate goals right around their supply chain, cycle time, inventory delivery. And what we're doing here is we're making sure, first of all, remember we want to align for buy in, make sure we're aligning our projects with our corporate goals. So I have these 6 corporate goals and I'm looking at how many projects or and where they're aligned with my corporate goals. Hey, right now, I see I might want to do a little more around inventory, by the way, because that's the goal. And I don't have any projects here around that. And then I'm following the savings now this is January, right. So my savings aren't that great yet, but we're going to get up to a half $1,000,000 in savings just with this group right here. So and we're at 10,000 right now. But let's keep tracking and highlighting, report all the benefits of your program, so everybody sees them. That's the best way to get buy in is starting to see benefits. So let's do that. OK, so now let's look at research challenges because that's kind of related to this. How do I get the resources? Well, sometimes you have to show some of the benefits 1st and then the resources will come. And I can tell you right now I'm in a project like that where I have to prove the benefits on one of my projects before I can get resources. That's OK. I'm going to start with this quote by Gartner down here, which is the greatest opportunity for most organizations to grow their talent pool. And this is talking about data science and machine learning. But I would argue that's part of continuous improvement these days. But it's through upskilling of your current staff, right? Most of us can't just go and say, all right, I I need a whole team to do this. You know, just give me 20 resources. If you haven't convinced what the benefits are, then you're not gonna get those resources. And sometimes, and this is what I'm kind of forced to do right now. I have a project I'm working on that I am really believe in and I know it has a great opportunity, but I have had to scale back and start a little smaller, making it scalable to expand. But once I've shown its success, then that's going to open up all kinds of possibilities. Certainly solves the buy in problem. But in addition, we also want to foster this mindset. Again, we're back to this. It keeps coming up. This culture of continuous improvement, continuous learning, it's all a mindset that we want to Foster and get people excited by giving them training tools, Rd. maps, right and getting people really engaged in this. Because the more people you get excited about this type of work in operational excellence, the more you're going to just start feeling the culture change. So we can do that. Let's do that. So some specific tools for that solutions. One is Rd. maps. So again, we talked about projects that can be replicatable. We also can create Rd. maps for things. So for example, on the right side of my screen here, I have a road map for just picking suppliers. This is the way this was with an organization, some very specific ways they go and pick a supplier to use, right. We're doing the same thing every time when we pick a supplier. So let's just create a road map for it. We're always going to fill out. We're always going to do this voice of the customer and this is how we do it. We're always going to compare suppliers using a comparison matrix. So let's set that up in our road map. We're always going to look at competent competency ratings. And so let's just set all this up so the more that we can create kind of standardized Rd. maps. This actually does two things it's going to going to make once you've set your framework in place, everything else is just following that road map, right? So it creates consistency and it makes things go faster with the resources you have. We also have, you know there are some Rd. maps that are kind of already used. So you're doing design for Six Sigma and your continuous improvement, maybe you're using CDOB type work. Most of us are familiar with the Meg, so there's a reason why we do some of these more formulate problem solving because it helps us just get started. We're just following the checklist. Follow the road map right around the way and that can greatly help with your resource challenges because you've given them a clear way to proceed. In addition to that education right? Everybody should be excited about being educated upskilling. I am so fortunate to work for a company that has given me a lot of great educational opportunities. And what's great these days is it doesn't have to be taking 8 hours to go to a class. It can be or it can be on your own. Just go and do this fun little learning module, right? So build that into your culture. You've got 10 minutes. Hey, take those 10 minutes and do, you know, fill that time with some fun learning, All right. So it's amazing what we have available for that. And then finally, this kind of relates also to idea management, but we have to prioritize everything and the one of the biggest solutions for resource challenges we all face is maybe doing a better job of prioritizing. There is some science around that. There is, you know, looking at the value and again we're tying this to our corporate goals, right. This was in a manufacturing project. They're looking at these corporate goals right here and then tying each possible project we want to do to these how important are each of these goals and then how well do we does this particular project meet those goals? So optimizing my inventory days of supply is a nine in terms of my cost efficiency. Maybe it's only a one in terms of improving the quality of my product. If I look at that, by my ease of complete completion, I get a nice pareto of the importance of my projects. So there are some, again, there's a lot of science around project prioritization that we can use to help us pick where we should focus our efforts. OK, one more little poll here. So we know as we move into the data segment of this, that 99%. This was a survey done in 2022, but I don't think it's changed. 99% of companies recognize that data is crucial for their success, right? So it is crucial in these continuous improvement programs. But what percentage of respondents do you think face challenges using data effectively? So we all know it's important, or at least 99% of us do. But organizations also said, are you facing challenges with using data even though it's a high priority? What percent said they face challenges in using data effectively? 23% face challenges in using their data. 57% face challenges using their data. 84 percent, 97% or 100% what's your guess? Give you a minute or two to guess here what what the survey found is being percent of companies that were having challenges using their data effectively. And you can think about where you are relative to this. All right, So I see some answers still trickling in. Yeah. What percent of companies have challenges using their data even though 99% know they need to? OK, got a few more results trickling in here. All right, let's see if we got the answer right. This one has the right answer because it's a survey that was already done. The OK, 84% have challenges actually good guess, but 97% is the right answer. So most those of you that guessed 97%, you had the right answer here. While 99% of companies recognize data is crucial for success, 97% face challenges in using their data. So not a surprise to me. When we look at the data challenges, they were really we don't have access to the data, lack of data or when we have data, we can't use it. It's all noise or things around. I'm just skeptical about the data. I'm not seeing how it can be used. So data skeptics, I would argue 11 big thing we tend to miss and probably the most important thing with data challenges is this one, right? We've got tons of data and I can't even tell you how many times I've been given a data set and told hey here's our data, what can you glean from it? That's really not the way data-driven problem solving works. You need a business problem. You need to know what problem you're trying to solve 1st. And we've talked about how important that is, how you know, we've got all these ideas out there. Let's prioritize them. Let's define our problem and specific, measurable goals, right. So step back, look at the problem you're trying to solve, and then let's go looking for the data. And I will say most people do that backwards. They get the data and they say, wow, let's see what we can glean from this. And sometimes there's a little bit of information there, but really we need to work the other way. We need to start with the problem. And part of the reason for that is if you're having trouble getting data data's currency right, you've got people that own your databases and own your data. They don't want to just give you all their power, right? And it's not only power, it's there's all kinds of rules around data security, data use, data privacy, right? They're not going to just give you the data you need to explain what specific data you need and why, right. And that that's the biggest thing. I think we we sometimes just give up. Oh, we can't get the data. Well, they need to know. And by they, I mean the people that own your data need to have a need to know why you need the data, what you're doing, what you're looking for. Because they might even say, well, here's our data dictionary. These are all the data fields we have. There's a word for you to know, right? You can even ask what? Don't say give me your the data. Say what data are we collecting? Is it possible to collect this? You know, look at that, see what you might be missing from what you need. Is it possible to collect this as well? So there's a lot of collaboration here and sometimes it gets tricky because they're busy, right? Anybody owning data in an organization is going to be really busy, but that's why you need to do the pre work. You need to really think about what data you need, be able to go and and pitch that to your IT or your data owners and say This is why we need it, right. We need this because this is going to solve you know, this is how we believe we're going to reduce the defects by 5% and then give them credit where credit's due. Hey, we collaborated with the, you know, John over here and got this data and we solved this problem. Consider collecting your own data too, right? Design of experiments has not gone away. But also start with a small amount of data just to don't get it all. Just start with a little bit to see is this kind of what I'm looking for. It's just something that sometimes makes this easier. You have data skeptics, right? People will say yeah, but but, but, but hey, don't ignore that. Those data skeptics are really important to you. Acknowledge the limitations in your data and see how you can validate your results with maybe, you know, maybe getting data from your process and then going and designing an experiment using the information you got from your observational data. You know, there's limitations. Now I do step two, start acknowledging those and collecting maybe new data around that. Data quality issues are constant in the data science world. One thing I've learned is usually when I'm working on a project, a data science related project, I spend about 85% of the time on just addressing the quality of issues. The fun stuff is just, you know, running my analytics. That's that's the fun, easy stuff. But a whole bunch of time is is spent on cleaning the data and once we've kind of solved some of this, how can we automate that? So these are some big ways to address data challenges and I'll show you what I mean here. One interesting one is data connectors. And if you're using things like Tableau, you might already have some of these in place. But there are two different ways to access data, right? One is to go to your data people and say I need data around this. Inevitably what they'll do is export an Excel spreadsheet for you. They'll give you a data dump, right? And that's what most where many of you are right now. You're getting data dumps. That's fine, but that data dumps out of date the next day, right? So even better is to work on connecting directly to data sources so that when you're ready, you can just get the latest information and you don't have to keep going back for another data dump. So one is looking at ways to be able to connect directly and you know, there's a there's empowerment here and sometimes that will take going and saying here's the benefit, if I can access this directly, I believe, you know, this project's going to save us $10 million. Also, data prep. There are tools out there that can make that a lot easier. And back to the data dump in Excel, every single month I have to go and transform, I have to make my data rows to columns, etcetera. Well, you know what? If you can connect directly and then have all that data prep done just automatically in your workflow, imagine how much money that's going to save you because you don't have to do the same work, you don't have to go back for the IT request every single time. You just have this all built into your process. Here I'm removing duplicates, right? I got duplicate data every single time. I don't want to go through the data by hand every single time I get that data dump. I want all of this to be automated in a workflow. I get my data and then it automatically does all this data cleaning, etcetera in a workflow. I've done it once. I've set it up once I've set up that connection to that data source, and I am good to go from there. Can you imagine how much time that saves? OK. And then finally addressing technology challenges, I have to say I went to ChatGPT to ask ChatGPT my friend how he thinks or she thinks or it thinks about technology. And I love the quote that came from my technology of ChatGPT leverage technology, strategically implement data analytics, automation, digital tools to streamline your processes. Technology should be a facilitator, enhancing human capabilities rather than replacing them. Love this quote. Thank you ChatGPT ChatGPT says, I don't want to be in charge, I just want to be your facilitator. But that this is really good information. We need to be strategic. We want to implement data analytics and automation, right. That's going to move us really much further ahead. So we suggest purpose built applications for specifically what you're trying to solve rather than cobbling together and retrofitting homegrown systems. Know that success is going to be what you put into it, so if you it's not foundationally strong, it's going to fail, right? This is back to let's create this whole culture of continuous improvement. Let's build a very strong foundation instead of cobbling together in retrofitting and then adopt solutions that reduce the need for IT involvement. Not no offense to IT, but they're busy, right? So again, the more we can just have automatically in place for us, the better. And then guess what, Minitab. Believe it or not, most of you are here because you're you are no love. Use Minitab statistical software. But having moved from R&D over the last 10 years, one thing I don't think a lot of people realize is Minitab is only a very tiny piece right here of our solutions ecosystem. We have been focused on data-driven problem solving, looking at your biggest challenges and how to address the whole challenge of continuous improvement. It's what we do. It's what we've been doing for over 50 years and we have every screenshot you saw, every tool I showed you in this presentation was actually part of the mini tab ecosystem. So we start with idea management, right. We have great tools for that, project planning, Rd. maps, etcetera, problem solving methodology tools. We can work with you on that tracking measurement, we have education training and I should I also add we have consulting services as well around that. We've got believe it or not a tool for data access automation, all of that predictive analytics, deploying predictive models. So we are not what I would call your grandmother's mini tub anymore. We are a full ecosystem of data-driven problem solving. And so I, we saw you have challenges, We have solutions. All right. So I'm going to go back to Sean for our Q&A. Perfect. Thanks, Cheryl. So we, we hope you all enjoyed the presentation today. Please submit any questions you have in the Q&A box. Now while we wait for some more questions to come in, we ask that you provide your valuable feedback by taking our survey. If the survey is not already open on your screen, it can be found in the pink survey box at the bottom of your window. I'll also highlight it on your screen now, so you should be able to see it easier. We'll be picking a random participant who fills out the survey today to win a $50 Amazon gift card, so it's a nice little incentive there. We'll wait for a few more questions to trickle in, and then we'll get started with the Q&A. All right, So here's a good one for you, Cheryl. We've just established A continuous improvement team. Where and how do we start? How do we find CI projects? Wow. Yeah, that's a little overwhelming, right. Well, I would say one of the things that you know always helps with starting is partnering with people that that have done this right. So you know you can bring in providers like obviously I'm biased because I work for mini tub, but bring in mini tab and let us help you because we have been working with people like you for. As long as I've been at Mini Tab, you know and like I said at the beginning of the presentation, I've been at Mini Tab since 1993 and I've seen how continuous improvement has has just grown and improved over time. So one of the best ways to get started is to partner with companies and people that that have done this and can guide you much more efficiently than just kind of looking all around trying to figure out what to do. So great question and I will. Say too. We are known for our customer service the way I want to do a shout out for phenomenal Technical Support, training and onboarding people. Yeah, if you've ever. Worked with them. They are just phenomenal. OK, Sean. So here's one kind of specific to what tools you were using. So what tool were you using for the solutions for buying challenges and tracking or managing project APIs and financial benefits? Yeah. So that's Minitab Engage. Minitab Engage is what we call more of the a lot of the softer tools in continuous improvement. It allows for Rd. maps, project tracking as well as a lot of just the the tools you need. So, you know, I started actually with a idea, a brainstorming tool, right, where I was just dragging and dropping words around to kind of categorize them into the four categories I came up with. So Engage also includes tools like that process maps, value stream maps, But in addition, it has the whole idea management, workflow, process improvement, Rd. maps, all of that. So that is mini tab engage. What recommendations do you have for a company that is trying to pivot from the existing to a different CI methodology? Oh wow. Well, you know, I think that's the the C in CI, right? It's continuous improvement. So I I think one thing I would suggest is maybe not doing a complete 100% pivot from let's say I'm using 6 Sigma and now we're gonna move to OpEx or something like that. I think regardless of how you package CI. The goal is the same, right we? Still. Have SMART goals, measurable metrics, etc. Where we've got a business problem we're trying to solve. So I would identify some specific business problems and say, look, we want to maybe move to a different methodology for this. And that actually brings up a really good point too, because I think sometimes we get caught in a very specific road map, so to speak. So every project we do, we always. Use to make. That's not necessarily the best way to go about because the nature of the problem itself go back to find the problem. The nature of the problem itself should determine what road map you use to solve it. So I would definitely just start with a few projects that maybe it doesn't make sense to do this methodology and we're going to gradually transition to some other methodologies and concepts. I have one quick anecdote My my father worked for Caterpillar, a very big Six Sigma company for many, many for his entire career. And he was not a big fan of 6 Sigma, even though I was, you know, very engaged and involved in Six Sigma, because he felt like everything had to be a dimeic project when sometimes maybe it should just be a just do it. Project. Right. So there is nothing wrong with finding the road map that actually makes sense for the business problem. It all goes back to that business problem. I think we have time for a few more questions here, Cheryl. So another one here is how do you measure and calculate soft savings? Wow. That's. A great question too. Everybody does it different ways. So I think the first thing you need to do to measure and calculate soft savings is define soft savings, right. So you need to go back and say, OK, so we have and we there is a form actually in in mini tab engage that does this. But here are some things that we consider soft savings and they are things like opportunity costs, right. They are, you know, how do you measure employee satisfaction, right. There are metrics out there to do that. So there is no standardized way to do that. But generally I think what you need to do is define them or you know, you can use some tools and engage that help define soft savings. And then there are kind of ways that you might go and measure the different things based on what you're talking about, but you want to create consistent metrics for that across your organization. So that would be the most important thing. And that's another thing by the way, I just love about Engage is it creates A framework that supports consistency throughout your organization. So however you're measuring soft savings, the group next door is measuring it the same way. And so that's really more important than the specifics there is the consistency across your organization and how you do that. And then we'll do one last question here. How do I convince my leadership to invest in mini tab training? Well, I think that if your leadership is not investing in training in general, right, that kind of says something, right? Good leaders want to invest in their employees, right? They want to invest in growing and getting better. And you know that is the sign of of a good company that it is wanting to grow, right? So basically you should, it should be reasonably easy to say, look I want to grow these skills, right in terms of mini tab training, there's lots and lots of great resources out or quotes out there. People do absolutely love our training. I actually came out of training, I was in training for a while as well. So we have a lot of training that is very specific to the our customers and our customers needs that's been developed over since 1997 was when our training actually started. So we have, we know your problems because we've worked with so many companies and people in these continuous improvement operational excellence environment. So I honestly don't know that you could get better in terms of the type of training we offer with people that have know your business. Got it. Thanks so much, Cheryl. I know there are a lot of great questions in there today. So if there's any that we weren't able to get to, we'll do our best to get to them a little later today and later this week. Thank you for your time. I really, really appreciate everybody hanging on with us. Thank you. So to close this webinar, I'd like to share some more information for those who may not be as familiar with Mini Tab. At Mini Tab, we help customers around the world leverage the power of data analysis to gain insights and make a significant impact on their organization. By unlocking the value of data, Minitab enables organizations to improve performance, develop life changing innovations to meet their commitments of delivering high quality products and services and outstanding customer satisfaction. Thank you all again for attending today's webinar. We hope you found this webinar valuable and thank you again Cheryl. This was a really interesting and great presentation. _1734797363369