Recently Zinata hosted “Thriving Amid Supply Chain Volatility: What’s Holding Us Back?” featuring speakers Peter King, founder of Lean Dynamics LLC, and Andy Durrant and Tracy Kosiarek, Principal Consultants at Zinata Inc. In this webinar, they discuss strategies for building and executing supply chain resilience when it matters most. Watch the full webinar above to see their thoughts on how to turn challenges into strengths and propel your supply chain forward. Gain insights on how to:

• Equip your workforce to embrace change
• Build supply chain resilience and master execution where it truly matters
• Leverage an advanced scheduling strategy to improve supply chain agility

Webinar Transcript

 Andrea Sikorski: Hello and welcome to Zinata’s webinar. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join us. Our speakers have prepared a fantastic presentation that is about 30 minutes in length for today, and then we’ll have 10 to 15 minutes to answer questions as well. So do be sure to stick around after the presentation.

And I think with that, I will hand things over so we can get going with the webinar. Thanks again for being here.

Tracy Kosiarek: Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we discuss thriving amid supply chain volatility, what’s holding us back? My name is Tracy Kosiarek, and I’m a principal consultant I am joined with Andy Durrant, also from Zinata as a principal consultant.

And we are so excited to have with us book author and expert, Peter King, from Lean Dynamics. Today, we’re going to spend time talking with Peter about his vast experience, and asking him why he’s written these books. So please stay with us as we listen to Peter King, who has a deep background from manufacturing at DuPont, also has his own company, Lean Dynamics, authored five books. He’s a frequent speaker, and we’re so pleased to have him spend some time with all of us today. Thank you so much, Pete and Andy. I’ll turn it over to you, Andy.

Andy Durrant: Thanks, Tracy. Wonderful welcome. And yeah, greetings again to Pete. So let’s just jump straight in. You know, we’re talking about thriving in the supply chain in a world of supply chain volatility and really what’s holding us back.

And, the first question we’re going to ask ourselves is how to equip your workforce to embrace change and not letting people get left behind. This question’s all about people. What we see a lot within the world and the business, specifically in supply chain clients that Tracy and I work with, is the need to come back in after the fact of doing a big technological project, whether it’s a system integration, whether it’s a change of process, and do work after the fact to bring the people on board.

And it’s just not the right way to do it. We all know that, but we miss it time and time again, because we put so much focus on the process, so much focus on the technology, on the system, that we think that it’s going to solve all of our problems. But then we find out that the people have not leveraged those new processes, those new systems and therefore ultimately, we still have similar results as we did before. So Pete, with that, I’m going to turn it over to you a little bit. We’re going to talk today about Product Wheels, but I want to come back in this first question to understand this Product Wheel methodology that you have.

Tell us a bit about it, but tell us how it allows people to come on the change journey with a client when you’re doing an implementation.

Peter King: Okay. Thank you, Andy. And before I answer your question, I’d like to say how excited I am today to be able to chat with you and with Tracy about these concepts that I’m so passionate about and in a way that can then be shared with a very broad audience.

To answer the specific question, the way I ensure that we engage the workforce has to do with the methodology I use for any manufacturing improvement that I work a client through. And Product Wheels are a very good example of that. Product Wheel scheduling is basically a methodology that creates a predictable repeatable sequence of everything you’re going to make on a major piece of equipment on a production line.

We decide what the overall cycle length ought to be, and it might be 2 days. It might be a week. It might be 2 weeks, whatever. We have analytical tools to help us decide that. So we decide what that’s that cycle ought to be. And then we always stick to that cycle. And within that cycle, we position each product to be made in a way that we minimize changeovers.

We look at all the parameters I have to change on changeovers and sequence things to minimize changeover difficulty and cost. And doing that does a number of things for us. The fact that we’re sequencing things to minimize changeovers ensures that we increase capacity, we get more throughput through the process.

And if you’re oversold, that means you’ve got more product moving through. You’ve got more revenue. If you’re not oversold, it means you have, you can run the asset less and save manufacturing costs. So it’s economically beneficial one way or the other. The other thing is that the fact that you’re always running this same predictable sequence creates a rhythm that can ripple up and down the supply chain.

So in a very quick nutshell, that’s what a Product Wheel is. It’s a scheduling methodology. The way we design the Product Wheels with any client is to create a cross functional team, which includes somebody from business leadership. Yep. So that they can make sure that the design agrees with their business KPIs and that it’s designed with that in mind.

We include a planner. We include a scheduler. We include somebody from the factory floor, usually a first line supervisor and frequently also an operator so we get their points of view and then we frequently have somebody from quality and somebody from maintenance who are part time members of the team.

So having all these people involved in Product Wheel design, having a voice in all the decisions that we make ensures that we build buy in, we build trust, we build ownership for the result. So we no longer have a situation where a planner or scheduler will create a schedule and send it down to the plant floor and the lead operator will say, why did they do it this way?

This doesn’t make sense. They now understand, they now trust the result because they know that either they or their peers have had a hand in designing the logic behind the schedule. So they trust it.

Andy Durrant: Yeah. Okay. So, it sounds perfect and how you described it, but I’m sure it doesn’t always work out like that.

You see any challenges? I mean, you bring in the people along the way they’re involved if those people are involved. They definitely support the solution, but does it always go like that or does it ever go a little bit wrong?

Peter King: No, there’s some real change management issues in that even though everybody understands logically why we’re doing it this way, sometimes it’s very, very difficult to break away emotionally from paradigms that they’ve been following for 15 or 20 years and think it’s made them successful.

One of the key things that we, one of the key challenges that we face is that most every plant I’ve dealt with has daily production goals. As an example, I worked with a plant in Florida that packages vitamin tablets. And their goal was always 25,000 bottles a day. Any day that they did 25,000 bottles or more was a good day.

If they didn’t quite make 25,000, it was a bad day. And this is something we continually faced. And so I had a discussion with the vice president of supply chain and explained the challenges I was seeing. And so he had a number of meetings with all his people, and basically what I told them was, if you want to maximize your production every day, Product Wheels are not your friend, but if you want to maximize production on a weekly or a monthly basis, there’s no better way in the world you can do that other than Product Wheel scheduling,

Andy Durrant: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s good. And it’s great that they were able to see that and you’ve needed that support from the senior leadership to get that message across.

Peter King: The senior leadership has to continue to push that because, you know, people don’t grasp it overnight. You know, it takes a while to overcome. So you have to continually work at this, you know.

Andy Durrant: So Tracy. Let me ask you this question on senior leadership. Specifically, if I’m a senior leader on this call now and listening to what Pete had to say and kind of coming back to the opening about the importance of bringing the people on the journey with change management. What messages do you have for these folks?

Tracy Kosiarek: Well, I want to start off with reinforcing what Pete said. Bring the people along with you on the journey is so key. So that’s so important. But as a senior leader, we use a term and Zinata called the “bridge of change.” And I’m sure all of us have grown up in manufacturing thinking about, you know, what is that transition state?

So you’re in current state. You’re trying to go to future state. What is change going to do to your methodology for decision making? How can I support my people through this change? And there’s a simple acronym that we use in change management. It’s the ABCs for leaders. And so it’s really, how can you be actively engaged, visible, very active.

B, how can you build a coalition of peers? It can’t just be the operations leader or just the planning manager. It needs to be the entire site leadership team. And then C, communication, communication, communication. Like Pete was saying, you can’t just explain one time at a town hall, you need to come back over and over again with what’s the value of this change and how is it going to make it better for everyone’s life at the end of this change?

Andy Durrant: Brilliant, Tracy. Thank you. Well said. And I think it’s important to zoom back out. You know, we’ve gone into the detail with Pete on the methodology, which is going to be important for those trying to get similar value out of those sites, but at any level, in any position, the messages you shared there for a senior leadership, kind of span across whatever project or initiative you’re doing.

Thanks, Tracy. Let’s move us on now to the second big question of today, which is how to build supply chain resilience and really mastering execution where it truly matters. And where it truly matters for us, it’s kind of what we’ve put on the make section. So the supply chain can be broken down between sourcing, planning, making and delivering, right? And we tend to have very good resilient plans upstream and also downstream. But at the make location, I’ve often heard it regarded as the as the most difficult 100 yards in the supply chain, right? It’s where all the different factors come together. So you have so many variables, so many things that can go wrong.

We often conclude slightly different points of view when we talk about resilience, but if I had to ask the opposite question of a resilient supply chain and talk about a fragile supply chain, in my definition of something that is the opposite, you know, when one thing in that supply chain goes wrong, then it has a huge impact and affects that customer getting the product on time.

So we’ve put so much focus on building resiliency these days in supply chain, and we think you need to do more at the make location. So, Pete, talk to me a little bit about how an advanced scheduling strategy like a Product Wheel implementation can build some real resiliency at the make locations.

Peter King: Yeah, and the way that happens is we make sure that we support Product Wheel design and Product Wheel execution with some sort of an advanced scheduling methodology. And what I mean by an advanced scheduling capability is one that can link to the ERP system and import all of the parameters that guide changeover, everything about the equipment, what the run rate of each piece of equipment is, what its OEE is, what capabilities it has so that it can run certain products but can’t run others, and everything about the product in terms of the parameters that guide changeovers.

So we import all of that into this production scheduling strategy. So that that can then guide the scheduler in the Product Wheel design and in the weekly product wheel scheduling that all of these things are built in and the advanced scheduling tool has the capability to do all of the analytical work involved in in Product Wheel design and Product Wheel execution so that our cross functional team can focus on what are the key decisions we have to make and then the scheduler week by week can focus on, you know, can we follow exactly the plan the Product Wheel plan as we’ve designed or is there any change that has to be dealt with?

And so the resilience comes in. If there’s any change that has to be made if we can’t follow the schedule as we set it up exactly the advanced scheduling tool will tell the scheduler that and will guide the scheduler through whatever decisions that have to be made to incorporate whatever change that was.

And so this might sound like it’s pretty simple, but it’s very powerful. And to give you an example of that, let me talk about Products Wheels we designed about six or seven years ago for a plant outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania that made puddings and cheese sauces. The scheduling there was done by a woman who had been doing it for 20 years and was very, very capable, very intelligent and did a great job.

But over the years demand for their products had increased fairly significantly and things got a lot tighter and she became a lot more stressed. She continued to do a good job, but she was very stressed and her blood pressure increased to the point where she went to to her boss and said, I’ve got to retire, I just can’t handle this anymore. So they then decided to implement Product Wheels and the advanced scheduling strategy that we recommended. And the result of that was after operating for a couple of months, her job became so much easier that she went to her boss and said, you know I’m going to stick around for a couple more years.

And the other benefit of this was it was then very easy for her to train a replacement, which had been impossible in the past. She could now train a replacement because the replacement didn’t have to instantly learn all of these parameters and all these conditions because they were there in the tool to guide and assist them.

Andy Durrant: Absolutely. And Pete, I think what’s important that you mentioned there is you’ve got a happy ending to that story. I unfortunately have seen very unhappy endings to the same story. And I’ve been able to, in certain sites, track the performance of the site from a customer service level in relation to when a key individual, normally a planning manager or a senior materials supplier, sorry, a materials manager has left the business because there’s been so much knowledge that’s left with that person. So to wrap it back to resiliency, what you’re really doing and describing is it’s that organizational knowledge of the team at the time when they know it and locking it into an advanced scheduling tool as part of your strategy.

So when a person leaves either unexpectedly or expectedly, that knowledge just doesn’t all leave with them, which is so important. I know we try and conquer this many times with many different systems, but I think what you’ve described and seeing a little bit more detail on this on the slide here, there’s just so many nuances of the manufacturing operation that can get captured in a tool by a handful of people at the right time. So I really think it builds a lot of resilience at this location.

Peter King: Let me let me point out one more key advantage of the things we’re talking about. And that is that because Product Wheels build supply chain predictability into the system, and you’ve got all this analytical capability in the background, the people at that vitamin tablet bottling plant in Florida that I talked about, they came to us and said, well, you know, all this stuff now, can you tell me how many 625 cc amber bottles I’m going to need in December and January and February?

And we could crank that out pretty easily. Can you tell us how many 53 millimeter white childproof caps we’re going to need in December and January and February? And it was very easy to crank that out. So, so having these tools with the right kind of support tools builds tremendous predictability into the supply chain.

Andy Durrant: Yeah, and it’s those support tools, right? That way it’s so important because people might say, well, I have that in my MRP. I’ve got that in my ARP system. But that’s just based on some target production where this gives much better detail as I understand that actually what’s going to happen in the manufacturing plant.

Tracy, let me just segue over to you here in terms of what you just heard. What are some takeaways you maybe want to share with the audience?

Tracy Kosiarek: Yeah, as I hear you all talking about resilience, this rings so true throughout my career. There’s a lot of focus put on the broader sales and operations planning.

And there are more tools that are now showing dashboards for decision making, which is great. There’s better tools for supply planning, better tools for demand planning. But we can’t forget about the heartbeat of the supply chain. And that is manufacturing. And where all these small decisions get made, it’s so critical to provide an advanced scheduling tool so that that can be carried out in such a way, which is an input to those other supply and demand planning and S and O P tools.

So really we’re talking about the entire suite that’s required to maintain resilience.

Andy Durrant: Brilliantly put. Thank you, Tracy. I’m going to move this quickly on to our third question here. We’re talking about leveraging an advanced scheduling strategy to improve supply chain agility. You know, this is one of the key components that’s required to answer our original opening kind of gambit, how to thrive in a world of supply chain volatility. So if I see what you’re putting in front of me, Pete, if I was critical of it, I could say, well, okay, I think gone are the days where we can sit here and do a nice repeating sequence of the optimum order because my upstream and my downstream are just not as predictable as they were, you know, my availability of labor and materials entirely different than they were 10 years ago.

So if I was critical to your methodology to say, it’s not agile, how would you respond to a critic like me?

Peter King: Well, I would say that the same things I talked about that build resilience taken to a different degree, build agility. If, for example, we’ve got this pattern that we’ve set and the pattern says that we may need to make 5,000 cases for Walmart tomorrow and suddenly Walmart calls the CSR and says, I need 10,000 cases.

Well, that will get entered into the system, and the advanced scheduling tool will alert the scheduler that we now need to make twice as many cases for Walmart, and it will also say, here are the difficulties encountered, here are any missed shipments that will result from that, and it will guide the scheduler in what you might call scenario planning to work through to see what adjustments can be made so that we have agility so that we can quickly shift gears from the predetermined pattern to a new pattern that’s effective that meets Walmart’s need, but also prevents any other disruption from causing any problems.

So, I guess it’s just the same thing to a larger degree, the tools there help the scheduler deal with whatever disruption be it large or small and does all the analytical work in the background and presents the scheduler with options. So that the person can quickly make the decision as to what the best course of action is.

Andy Durrant: I understand then just coming back for a visual with, you know, Walmart actually wanted here on your wheel, you know, item B, and they weren’t increasing the order they just wanted a different time, I guess we would be able to understand better the actual impact in a factory location has taken that order being putting on the other side, for example, in between G and F, we have a real understanding of the impacts of those decisions, both to that order and subsequent orders.

Peter King: Right. If you have to change the sequence to delay something or move something ahead, a good advanced scheduling tool will tell you what that does to your changeover requirements.

Your changeover is going to be longer here and there because you’re making an illogical changeover. It’ll tell you that and tell you what the ramifications of that are. Now you’ll see up there at 11 o’clock we’ve got breathing room built into the wheel. We always like to have where we’ve got enough capacity to build breathing room so that we can manage through some of these things that disrupt the Product Wheel and require more change over time so that we can absorb that.

Andy Durrant: Fantastic. Thanks for that clarification. Now, Tracy, I’ve got a slide in here for you. Similar to before, if I’m a CSO or a VP sitting in this audience and listening to the messages from Pete here and saying, well, that’s, you know, that’s great.

You’re talking about throughput. Yes, I want that. And you’re talking about agility. And yes, I want that. So, I mean, surely just go and figure out a way to give me a tool. Why can’t I have it?

Tracy Kosiarek: Yes, that would not be the first time that I had been asked when I was a supply chain director. Well, I want it all. I want 100 percent service. I want you to cut your inventory in half. And I want you to change over your SKUs every two days.

It’s hard to tell your boss you can’t have it all, but with the right advanced scheduling tool, which I really wish I had had at the time, I can work with the planning leaders to set up those scenarios that Pete talked about. And I can even do what ifs. What if the manufacturing operation cut their washout time in half?

What’s the impact to my cash? What’s the impact to my service? And the ability to provide data so that it’s not just gut feeling. We just had one customer tell us it was really great that they had an advanced scheduling tool because in the past, they just used their gut on what they should do when a machine broke down.

But now they’re able to say we could use data and we could provide that data to the key decision makers and decide the course of action. So that’s my answer when people say, well, I just want it all.

Peter King: Can I add one thing to that? Of course. Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s the reason that we include somebody from the business leadership in supply chain design so that they can make sure we’re balancing these three objectives, given whatever today’s performance is, that we’re balancing these three objectives in a way that fits the business needs.

Andy Durrant: Very well said Pete, because we know, and you all know why spending so many times like myself in manufacturing, the closer you go to the mate location, the more they want to optimize cost. Yeah. The more you want to run big, don’t stop. But the further you get away from the mate location, the more the business wants to be agile.

They want to be able to respond to customers. And so we can really help design at the right point where the business needs to be, come back to what we said at the start about change management, making sure that message is really clear all the way down to the floor, because then everybody is swimming in the same direction rather than pulling against each other a bit.

That was a nice summary, Tracy. Thank you very much, Pete. We love working with you and we’ve learned so much from you over the years and ARTRA as an organization has done many engagements with Pete and we’ve learned a lot. The rest of the world is, is also fortunate to those learnings because you’ve written a handful of books.

So, just tell us about, you know, why you wrote your first book and then, and then why you’ve written this most recent one.

Peter King: Well, let me talk about the recent one, and that is that I’ve been doing Product Wheels for 25 or 30 years, and through most of that time, I was using Microsoft Excel to do all the analytical work and it worked.

I could make it. It wasn’t great. It didn’t do everything I wanted to do, but we could make it work. And then when I left DuPont and started working with Zinata on some Product Wheels, I began to work with a couple of guys named Alan Nall and Mac Jacob, and when they saw what I was doing with Excel, and what its limitations were, they decided to develop an advanced scheduling methodology that was cloud-based and scalable that was built on everything that we had experienced and everything we learned in using Excel. All that logic and all those concepts were built into it, but in a way that could be expanded and easily add more capability.

And so they set about to design that. And once they had it ready for prime time, and we began to use it and designed a few Product Wheels using it and saw the immense power that gave us coupling and advanced sequencing methodology like Product Wheels with an advanced scheduling tool, we saw how powerful that was.

I went to Mac and said, you know, we really ought to share this with the world. We ought to write a book. And so we decided to write a book, but we decided there was a third piece. And that was none of this is going to work unless you have the right engagement and the right leadership for management. And so we decided to bring in Noel Peberdy, who was the founder and president of Zinata, who Mac and I had both worked with a lot, who has spent most of his career coaching leadership in change management and the things you need to do to drive the kind of improvements you’re trying to drive. So we felt with Noel talking about leadership needs and Mac talking about here are all the capabilities that any advanced scheduling tool should have should bring to bear and I could talk about advanced scheduling, advanced production strategies like Product Wheels or rhythm wheels or, um, fixed sequence variable volumes. We decided to write the book to tie all three of those pieces together.

Andy Durrant: Brilliant. Thanks, Pete. And, you know, just listening to you talk and reflecting, we’ve ended up inadvertently structuring our talk the same way as you’ve written the book. Yeah, so we’ve talked about not only the details of the process, but then the importance of the change management aspect and bringing everybody on track with it because otherwise all this fantastic learning that you have just can’t get leveraged within a site, so thanks Pete for writing the books.

I’m keeping up to date with them, so I will continue to read more as I’m sure you’ll publish more. So look, folks, we’re getting to the end here. I’m going to give you a couple of takeaways, and I’m just going to go over to Tracy just to close us out. We opened today by talking about how to thrive in a supply chain volatile world and what’s holding us back.

And, you know, the answer to that question is really, you know, we think we are holding us back. We’re not doing enough with the people to help them manage the change. And we’re not doing enough in this segment that we call advanced scheduling, specifically in these make locations. We think we’ve got the end to end covered really well, you know, the grand supply planning endeavors.

It’s been around for a number of years now, we’re not seeing enough good efforts and a good strategy that people really understand, like what Pete’s just taken us through. There’s lots of software providers out there, which will give you an AI algorithm, a black box solution, but something that people really understand that they’ve had a voice in making, and they feel like they own it.

And that’s why we’re such supporters of what Pete’s taken us through today. And, the comments that Tracy shared with us about change management are so critical to making that happen. So a couple of quick blasts, it’s critical to set up an advanced scheduling strategy that’s stable and predictable. Pete spoke a lot about predictability that can come by having a good system driven advanced scheduling strategy.

The strategy should be agreed and developed with a cross functional team, so they’re not only they’re prepared for the change, but they’re aware of the change and they have desire for the change. You know, if you’ve got me and Tracy on another webinar will speak about change management for another 30 minutes and talk about how important it is to have desire for the individual, what’s in it for them.

And so by being involved in creating it, not just taking something out of the box, you’re going to get far greater results. The strategies to be supported by modern capable and analytical tools. That’s what Pete’s career has basically taught us, you know, Pete’s been doing it for multiple decades and somehow managing to make it work in Excel.

And so thanks to the team that have developed an advanced scheduling tool to make our lives so much easier because we quickly learned it was just not sustainable to do it any other way. And with that, we think you’re going to build supply chain resilience and master execution where it truly matters.

And where does it truly matter? It’s in those 100 yards of the supply chain, that manufacturing, those make locations where you have all these variables coming together that we feel is most difficult to master. And that’s where we like to play. Tracy, back over to you.

Tracy Kosiarek: Thanks, Andy. And a special thanks to Pete King. It was great having your expertise and your deep dive into Product Wheels and really the advantage that these technologies and techniques bring to not only agility, but also resilience. And so thank you again for participating in our webinar. And we look forward to engaging with you further and answering your questions.

Thank you.

Peter King: Thank you.

Andy Durrant: Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Tracy.

Tracy Kosiarek: I wanted to ask if there are any questions from the audience. If you have questions, as Andrea said, if you could put them on the Q& A. We do have a few that have come in. So I’ll get started with that. So the first  question, Peter, what advice would you give to a company just starting to implement advanced scheduling tools, especially in industries with high variability in demand and resource availability?

Peter King: That’s a very good question, Tracy. The first thing you have to do is understand that variability and understand the characteristics of the variability. Is it common cause is it special cause? Is there seasonality involved in those sorts of things? And you have to quantify it. And then you need to make sure you’ve done everything reasonable to reduce the variability. And then from that, you’ve got to decide how to cover that variability. You can cover it with safety stock, but a more economical answer, maybe to cover it with some combination of safety stock and some contingency measures. For instance, if you want to get to a 99 percent fill rate, it takes an awful lot of safety stock to get there.

And sometimes the most economical solution is to design your safety stock to say, get you to a 90 percent fill rate and then look at things like expedited shipping or overtime or alternate suppliers to bridge that gap between the 90 and the 99 percent. So, you have to do that and then make sure you’re carrying whatever safety stock you need to bridge that gap.

And by the way, those are things you need to be doing no matter what scheduling methodology you’re using. Those are things that are just good practice, no matter what kind of scheduling tools or what kind of strategies you’re using.

Tracy Kosiarek: Oh, exactly. Thank you for that. And I’d like to ask a question of you, Andy, as more companies are seeking the end to end digital transformation.

You spoke earlier about this black box and folks thinking that that would be the answer. What role do advanced scheduling tools play in integrating these various facets of the supply chain sourcing delivery into this one unified process as you look across?

Andy Durrant: Okay, there’s a lot to unpack there. So let me try and be concise. I think my reflection would be, we just talked about it. We see a lot of companies, specifically large companies looking for single solutions. So going for one vendor that can do a digital transformation end to end in the supply chain. And there are pros and cons for that. There’s a lot of obvious pros of the simplicity of working with one vendor, but what we’re seeing is the con is, they’re not so good always at the specialist part of the function, and that’s kind of why we stepped into this advanced scheduling space because the, the big end to end systems, not naming any softwares, but they left some stuff on the table that we felt there was much more value to be had and so we’ve stepped in there and collected some of that value.

I’ve seen other parts of the supply chain specifically I’ve got a lot of history in QC labs. Specifically folks with real good understanding of the operation in there, building solutions to support that. So, the risk of kind of going for the end to end approach in a single provider is you miss some of that value.

So I think that’s possibly answering one part, but, but the other point here of kind of the various facets of supply chain sourcing and delivering the unified process. The other thing that kind of jumps to mind when I read the question now, also is by having this center heartbeat of the advanced scheduling process, it really sinks in with what the planning system should have directed to the factory already.

And once you have that kind of good cross between in terms of what the plan you want and what we actually is able to achieve through the schedule, and that’s acknowledged by both ends, you really start to kind of get this central heartbeat of the operation and that then can actually unify a lot of things such as sourcing of raw materials of testing downstream products of unifying delivery streams from DCs because we’re less responsive, we are less reactive. I should say that. Where we see a lot of companies get themselves in a mess is the plan is too stretching, the factory can’t deliver it, and then suddenly we’re playing what’s the most important order, and everything gets really out of sync. So, yes, I know I’ve kind of answered two different things there, but they’re the two main things that come to mind when I read this question.

Peter King: Can I add to that? If you have a repetitive scheduling strategy like Product Wheels that creates a rhythm that ripples up and down the supply chain. For instance, you know what ingredients and packaging materials you’re going to need next month or the month after that, and from that, you can provide much better forecast to your suppliers. And you can create better logistics and distribution plans because you know what’s going to be coming into the warehouses in the DCs.

Tracy Kosiarek: Yeah, I was going to also build on that. And I think it speaks to the earlier example that Pete shared with the 25,000 bottles a day. So if you don’t have that unification and planning might not want 25,000 upstream and corporate, but if the plant is fixated on a number to deliver, then that could cause a lot of disruption between what the overall plan is and then what the plant is executing. So this unified set of tools will help up and down the supply chain, making sure everyone’s on the same sheet of music.

Andy Durrant: We’ve got one more. Let’s try and get it because it’s a good one for Tracy. And I think we’ve got time. Somebody’s put something on the bridge of change, Tracy. Do you want to read it out? And I think you’re best positioned.

Tracy Kosiarek: The next question that’s come in is the importance of the bridge of change that I spoke about earlier and the role of senior leadership in change management.

What practical steps can leaders take to maintain consistent communication throughout a transformation project? Well, a couple of points here as far as practical steps. You need to ensure that you’ve picked the right sponsor. So the sponsor of the project needs to do the ABC’s that we spoke about earlier.

But the way that that sponsor engages with his or her peers with their employees is so, so critical. So pick the right sponsor because that is a pivotal decision for any project health as we’ve learned in pro-side methodology. The sponsor is the key role for project health and project success. The other thing I would say is you need to from a practical standpoint, your leaders need to define what success looks like. Somebody might want to come out of the project with half the inventory. Somebody else might want to be having half the planning staff. What does success look like? What’s the definition of success and getting the leadership team to align to those by vital few and I would tell you it’s a triangle. So if you imagine this triangle where at the top of the triangle is your sponsor, and then in the center of the triangle is success, and then the legs of the triangle are very critical. You have to have strong project management to make sure you can stay on budget, on time, on quality. Getting your people trained. You also have to have strong change management to integrate the people side of the change. So those would be some practical tips that leaders can do as they think about this bridge of change.

Andy Durrant: Well said Tracy.

Tracy Kosiarek: Thank you.

Andy Durrant: All right. I think well, I think we’ve been able to complete all the questions, which is great and we can let people go. Hopefully with a couple of minutes to spare.

Andrea Sikorski: Yeah. Thank you so much everyone for joining us today. And thanks to Pete and Tracy and Andy for the presentation. Before we end, I am just going to send over a quick poll so that you can share your feedback on the webinar. So thanks again very much for joining us.

Thanks, everyone.