Tudor Saroiu talks to Ben Merton about the challenges that he’s faced in driving quality and continuous improvement in food processing companies as diverse as Campbell’s Soup, Club Coffee, and now at Steam Whistle Brewing. We learn about the importance of employee happiness, how to win leadership over to continuous improvement initiatives, and what to do with people who are resistant to change.

Episode summary:

• The challenges involved in driving continuous improvement across an organization with people from different geographic, educational and cultural backgrounds
• Bringing alignment to continuous improvement objectives in production, packaging, marketing and sales.
• Specific ways in which he was able to get cross-functional teams to collaborate, including process mapping and building consensus.
• Ways to manage people who are resistant to change and how to make them feel that their voice is being heard.
• Why it’s so hard to get sales teams to cooperate on continuous improvement initiatives.
• The differences in building a culture of continuous improvement in large vs small companies.
• How to recruit people into quality and continuous improvement.
• Focusing on the ways that continuous improvement impacts the bottom line as a means to get buy-in from the C-Suite on new initiatives.
• Examples of how Steam Whistle was able to reduce fermentation time by 10-15% and free up tank capacity.
• How the future of processes will move towards automation without the need for layoffs because humans will focus more on areas where they add value.