Isaac, tell us a little about yourself, your IE journey and your Lean journey.
I have been involved with IISE since my undergraduate studies as an Industrial Engineer at the University of Tennessee. I volunteered in various roles, including Student Chapter President, Society for Health System President, and most recently, Vice President for Technical Operations. I first learned about industrial engineering during a summer job in high school. I worked on the manufacturing line doing unskilled labor and had the opportunity to meet the plant manager and learn about his career, experience, and background. He was an industrial engineer and sparked my interest in the field.
After college, I wanted to learn from the source about Lean manufacturing and took a job as a Production Control Engineer at Toyota North America in Kentucky. While working at Toyota, I rounded out my education with an MBA from Xavier University. From there, I started a Lean department at ThyssenKrupp, working in machining operations to produce bearings for wind energy and military applications. I started reading about industrial engineering in healthcare and decided to transition industries. I started a new Lean program at East Tennessee Children's Hospital in Knoxville, TN. I had the opportunity to be involved with a Lean hospital design and also built the hospital's first Business Analytics department. From healthcare, I wanted to get a taste of the vendor world and worked as Director of Operation for the healthcare IT company, DeRoyal, working in RFID supply chain and software development. Most recently, I moved back into healthcare, working for a rural healthcare system, Ballad Health, as the AVP of Project Management and Operational Excellence.
Outside of work, you'll find me doing something outdoors, be it trail running, mountain biking, camping, or backpacking. My goal for this year is to finish a 230-mile section of the Appalachian Trail from the Great Smokey Mountains to Damascus, Virginia. I enjoy volunteering and spending time with my kids in Scouts BSA. I also volunteer as a mentor in the Tennessee Promise College Scholarship program, which provides two years of free college to all Tennessee high school graduates.
As a professional in the healthcare industry, what was one of the biggest lessons learned from the challenges brought about by COVID-19?
Find the right people to work with you and your company and translate their passion toward the mission. COVID-19 transformed the world overnight. Along with this, many people's work changed overnight. When COVID-19 hit, I worked as the Director of Operations at a tech company. Overnight we stopped software development, technology deployment and transformed operations to support and fight COVID-19. We built a new production line to assemble eye protection. We repurposed hardware and software solutions to treat COVID patients. Programmers, Installers, Tech Support, and Sales changed their roles overnight to support the company's mission and fight COVID-19. We worked production lines, shipping products, programming equipment, picking orders, and doing whatever it took to get the job done. Your job title did not matter. Finding people that can adapt, step up, and support the mission is priority one for leaders. Every year moving forward will bring on challenges we can't imagine today. We need a workforce that can adapt and make that happen.
We also learned a hard lesson in supply chain risk and reliance. Several articles blamed Toyota, Lean, and Just in Time for risky supply chain strategies during COVID-19. Lean inventories require frequent deliveries from nearby multisource suppliers. Some companies had fake just-in-time inventory systems that use purchasing organizations that stock enormous inventories of supplies from long lead time single source global supply chains and deliver to their customer when needed. This is a fake JIT system, and many got burned. Do we have vendors that are our trusted partners? Do we have a multisource supply chain for critical products? Are we practicing just-in-time inventory to save a buck without understanding the fragility of the supply chain? These are all serious questions for supply chain and OpEx professionals that will need to be addressed moving forward for long-term success and safety.
As an OpEx thought leader, what is your best piece of advice that the rest of us can learn from?
Align your work and your team's work with your company's strategic priorities. Creating focus around competing priorities and agendas is one of the most challenging aspects in most company cultures. If OpEx is not embedded in your culture and is a separate department, use that department to help facilitate and solve the already established strategic priorities. If there is no alignment with the strategic plan, the OpEx team will work on the flavor of the month pet projects that are more than likely not important to the company. Another benefit of working on strategic priority projects is that buy-in is typically more manageable with your stakeholders because it is aligned with what is important to the c-suite. If OpEx is embedded in your culture, use these methodologies to determine the right problem to solve and the correct focused strategic priorities.
Additionally, ask day in and day out, "How are you developing your team and yourself to remain relevant?" Your education and skills are becoming irrelevant by the day in our rapidly evolving world. Keep up to speed on new advancements in your field and look for complementary advancements in related fields. Never stop learning. Be ready to grow and pivot where your industry and customers' needs take you.
Tell us about some of the work you're currently engaged in professionally.
I have three departments working on must-do can't fail initiatives across Ballad Health. It may come as no surprise that they tie directly to Ballad Health's strategic plan. Operational Excellence is working on a systems-wide emergency throughput project to free up beds in the Emergency Department and move patients to the best place of care or home. Enterprise Project Management is migrating to new software to streamline the project management process and create transparency across our stakeholders with real-time dashboards. One project they lead is to help solve the staffing shortage by building a network of accessible, low-cost childcare facilities for Ballad Team Members. We are solving one of the root causes of the staffing shortage: employees miss work due to a lack of reliable childcare and the high cost of childcare. Ballad's Automation group is piloting projects using robotic process automation to free up staff time by automating back-end processes and unleashing that human potential in other meaningful work. On a personal note, I continue to learn and grow my Lean OpEx network by hosting events through www.leancoffee.club and www.leanbook.club. I'd love to have you join my next one by signing up through these websites.
What are you looking forward to the most in the future for OpEx and why?
By far, digital transformation with Intelligent Automation and Robotic Process Automation. Combining IA/RPA with OpEx and Lean is a powerful combination that will help advance and solve many of the problems companies face, especially around staffing shortages. Digital transformation through IA/RPA is where I am personally investing most of my continuing education time and building for the future.
