David Crysler

Operator error, operator retrained isn't an effective corrective or preventative action. But I do think it’s a great predictor of a future recurrance.

Two most improved plant awards. 400% return for a client. Advising multiple F1000 companies. Zero of those wins came from implementing a tool. Empathy, communication, and teamwork are the things that move mountains… which is a sentence I would have rolled my eyes at for the first half of my career.

"There's just no way to know. You just have to know." A customer service rep said that about one of the quirks in their order entry system, during a session on how the work really gets done. She knew because a coworker happened to tell her once. Every new hire at that desk is one missed conversation away from getting it wrong. Write the quirk down the first time someone has to explain it.

"Do we really need a work instruction for every little thing? Because we'll have a million of them and it still won't cover everything." A leader stopped me mid meeting with that one. He was right to ask. You can't document your way to complete. The question was never how much. It's what each thing actually needs.

Is there someone on your team you've been dropping hints to about their performance, hoping they'd pick up on it? Before you finally sit down with them, there's a question you have to answer about yourself.

Think about a problem your team stopped seeing. Has it ever repeated unexpectidly?

If you're trying to grow your company, somebody has told you that what got you here won't get you there. I get the sentiment but disagree with how most people apply it to owners.

We were in a weekly ops review. Someone mentioned a labeling workaround the team had been running for months. Everybody about knew it but nobody had written it down so we stopped and captured it right there. The best moment to document a process is when someone's describing it, not later.

Something goes wrong, and somebody Googles how to run a five whys. The team gets in a room, asks why five times, retrains everybody and documents it. Everyone's 100% confident the problem is solved... until it happens again. In most shops I walk into, the tool isn't why the problem keeps coming back. Where the investigation stopped is.

Open your accounting system and click new invoice. Whatever payment terms come up, somebody chose them. Do you know who? One of my clients didn't.

Every growing company has a Dave. He's been there since the dawn of time and he just knows how things work. That's how you got this far. Then you hire Joe.

28 different order statuses. 15 production priorities. 10 of those flagged hot. When nearly everything's marked as hot, what's the hottest hot? These issues creep in to our systems with one well intentioned “fix” at a time.

A company spent years investigating the same recurring product defect. They would test. Run root cause sessions. Review their data. It would go away. Then every few months, sometimes 3 sometimes 12, it would be back. What finally cracked it was a process map of their whole supply chain along with interviews of their team and their suppliers. The root cause was a supplier to one of their suppliers that nobody was governing. No 5 Whys run in their conference room was ever going to help them get there.

Your customer will never see whether an order takes 100 clicks or one. What they will see: the 100-click version takes four weeks to turn. The one-click version ships in a few days.

80% of my bonus pool was return on capital and profitability. Revenue was the 20% nobody really cared about. The company grew by acquisition so often they were buying the revenue. What they wanted from me was a taking a single-digit-net-margin plant and turning it into one running at 20 or 30 percent net. Check what your leaders are paid on. That's what your plant will actually managed to.

$6,000 in unpaid invoices written off from two years ago. Everyone on the call remembered the customer instantly. Then they opened the customer profile in their accounting tool. No flag, no comment, not deactivated. Nothing. Their entire safeguard was whether or not somebody remembered when their next order hit.

"If we were ten times bigger, this would go away." I hear it from owners all the time. Be careful what you wish for.

Culture is not what you say about your company. It's how your people feel about working there. And what your customers experience.

“What do I do tomorrow to help?” That's the question behind every strategic initiative. If your people can't answer it... your vision hasn't translated.

If your last change rolled out rocky, rally the team and own it. Lead with empathy and radical transparency and people will give you grace. #leadership #changemanagement #operations #accountability