In this episode we speak to Gregory Ayers, the Director of Operational Excellence at Innovative Hearth Products. We speak about the importance of senior management in getting continuous improvement to stick and really impact the company in a meaningful way. We also talk about how CI has been turned into a farce and how it’s being undermined when leadership only provides lip service instead of an all out cultural transformation that includes quality and CI. 

Ben and Greg talk about 

• How he was inundated with data and reports at his first job that made him regret not finishing college but he moved into quality engineering through sheer will, hardwork and a willing mentor
• Why his advantage is his deep knowledge about operations, engineering and continuous improvement that helps drive forward customer centric processes that are as robust as possible without being over processed
• The criticality of getting senior management to focus on a measurable result and metric to ensure your continuous improvement processes are addressing what they need to
• How when the senior leadership starts running CI for the sake of it, the problem you're trying to solve becomes murky and the whole process becomes impossible to sustain 
• The failed Kaizen event on the shop floor that made him realize the need for CI is not about Kaizen, six Sigma or what you read in a book, it's about the real world outcomes that the workers care about like uptime of a strapped and how it hinders their productivity to have a machine that constantly needs to be fixed
• How his efforts to embrace environmental and green alternatives got him thinking about waste and why we do things the way we do. For example, are you just following orders because that's how it's always been done or is there a real, logical reason that's driving this process?

We hope this interview provides some food for thought and we'd love to hear your feedback. What do you want to hear about on the podcast next?