"Always keep people first. Without them, there is nothing to improve. So treat them with respect and involve them as much as possible."
We are said to be philistines. That we can get out of all sorts of situations. That we can help each other. That we're creative. And we're actually pretty innovative. I used to hear it in the corporate world, and I hear it today from my clients who supply multinational corporations.
But I don't think we're making the most of this great quality of ours. We are often inconsistent. We can't effectively turn innovative ideas we get on our own or from our own people into reality. Anyone who has never submitted an improvement proposal that they have not learned anything about in terms of its processing should throw a stone.
Fortunately, there are people and companies who don't care. And they're trying to pave the way for innovation in companies. For example, by setting up processes so that the administration of innovative ideas and the continuous informing of all stakeholders about the current status are as fast and pleasant as possible.
Luděk Cigánek, CEO of Ennvea, is one of them. That is why I invited him to the studio to discuss his approach to the problem in more detail. What did we discuss?
🔸How innovative are the Czechs?
🔸How not to kill the innovative activity of your own people?
🔸What are the motivations of people in production?
🔸How to prioritize the collected ideas?
🔸How to make collecting innovation ideas easy?
HOW TO SPARK INNOVATION IN PRODUCTION (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. In today's Ignition we're going to talk about innovation and specifically how to start and move innovation in manufacturing companies. We'll be discussing this topic with Ludek Ciganek. Hello.
Luděk Cigánek
Hello, thank you for the invitation.
What curious thing happened to his defection?
Martin Hurych
Ludek is the CEO of Ennvea. I always start the Ignition with one personal question. You run, and there have been a few here, but I haven't asked any of them one thing. You say you like to run long distances and a bunch of stuff has to happen in that hour or more. What is the most ridiculous thing that has happened to you while running or that you have witnessed?
Luděk Cigánek
Apart from those unpleasant things, like being sick, having a stomach ache and needing to get somewhere, a lot of things happened. I don't usually take my phone with me, that is, if I'm running in places that are at least a little bit familiar, I'm just running with my watch on my wrist and you can be surprised at all the messages on your phone.
Martin Hurych
Have you had any adventurous incidents while running, like being attacked by a boar?
Luděk Cigánek
The boar attack wasn't, the badger bite was.
How did he get to the innovation and his own company?
Martin Hurych
I said right at the beginning that we were going to talk about innovation, specifically in industry. Before we get to that, let's paint a picture in general so we understand the perspective from which you're going to comment on all of this here, your journey to innovation and to Ennvea.
Luděk Cigánek
I'll probably describe it all from the perspective of what is my daily bread. Since Ennvea is still a relatively small company, I do what I need to do. My path to Ennvea was such that I was a programmer for years, but not the kind of typical I.T. who enjoys spending time at the computer at night. Over time I found that I was much more comfortable being around people and talking about the solution, designing the solution, acting as a consultant of some sort. But I still had the background of that developer who used to program, so I could more easily imagine what was and wasn't feasible. Then it was easier to translate the ideas and needs of the people we were talking to, who were mostly people really from manufacturing companies, into those digital solutions. The path to those manufacturing plants was quite random. We won a big contract for a multinational corporation, a manufacturing company, in my previous company, in my previous job. I totally fell for it and found that there was a lot of room for implementation. Because as advanced as these companies are, they can be ossified in some ways. Things that you think are perfectly normal in B2C, because you do them every day and every kid can do them from their phone, don't work in those corporates, or maybe they would, but it's set up that way. But if someone trusts you and you have the opportunity to work with a customer for a long time, you can draw a pretty nice digital roadmap.
How innovative are the Czechs?
Martin Hurych
We Czechs are said to be innovative and not so afraid of German processes. What is the reality? How innovative are we really, if you look at your customers, for example, or at the situation you have the chance to observe on a daily basis?
Luděk Cigánek
I think we are innovative. Quite a large part of our customers, if they have a branch in our country or in Slovakia, are not afraid to pilot some digital solutions. Part of it might be because it's cheaper than piloting it somewhere west of us, but part of it is because we can handle a lot of things. It's quite common in those manufacturing companies to prototype something, to make there's some proof of concept going on and if we handle it right, it rolls on, which I think is great. There may be another way of looking at it, that many of the customers we work for do not have a Czech mother. So it's not exactly easy to get something from the Czech Republic and some people get so sceptical because they want to but they can't. It's science fiction to them, it's beautiful to them, but they still won't go for it because someone will cut it off from above.
What does Ennvea do for innovation?
Martin Hurych
So let's talk about what Ennvea does for these international companies.
Luděk Cigánek
Ennvea seeks to be inspired by lean manufacturing principles, established principles and to translate them into digital form. Anything that you know from traditional lean methods and can be digitized is fun for us. We have a few products in our portfolio, one of the most fun ones for me is eKaizen, which is about digitizing, improving and digitizing everything related to process improvement and innovation in companies. So it's mostly in the manufacturing ones, although I think the room for innovation is the same everywhere. Manufacturing companies have known it a little bit longer, maybe it comes from Toyota principles, but what we do can be applied anywhere.
What does a typical digital innovation company look like?
Martin Hurych
What does your typical customer look like?
Luděk Cigánek
Our typical customer is a manufacturing company, not a small one, not a company of a few people, but typically a branch of a foreign manufacturing company that has ambitions to go digital. The company knows what it needs to solve, it has some problems and it needs to convert them to the digital world. I've mentioned the word corporate a few times here and I don't mean that in a pejorative way, I really enjoy working for this market segment. These are big multinational companies that need to maybe even standardize, do s o m e proof of concept, do some pilot solutions and then maybe roll it out around the world. They understood that this is the way to further savings, to standardisation and to understanding the scale of those achievements. Then we have a less typical customer, which is also a manufacturing company, but it's smaller. Our smallest customer is an American company that makes guitars and other musical instruments. It's a company of up to 30 people, but somebody came into management who had established these principles, this experience, and found that these things can be applied in a smaller company. So it's not quite the company that our business is targeting, but I'm always so pleased when we can show that it works the same way everywhere.
What is the situation in the company before implementation?
Martin Hurych
The listeners of this podcast are not just large companies, I have the spectrum from small to larger. Some may know kaizen from the newspapers, maybe from some trade publications, but maybe they don't follow it in their own small production yet. Let's talk in general terms about the principles that, as you yourself
He said, they are applicable across company sizes. What does the company look like when you arrive and ask for help? What should I look for in myself to be able to say I need you?
Luděk Cigánek
Quite often, it depends on who from that company approaches us. For us, it opens up quite a bit of possibilities in business as to who we can reach, or even who our target audience is, who we want to talk to. It has to do with the fact that sometimes our typical customer is a lean manager, a process engineer, a continuous improvement manager who is in charge of the agenda of making sure that those changes are implemented. That's usually done by OpEx managers, CI managers and people who are close to the lean. They know that they need a solution because either it's not working and they need to fire up that engine, or conversely they've gotten to the stage where they have more of these initiatives and innovation projects and they need to process and standardize it in some way. Or it could be companies that have been given some KPIs and are supposed to kick-start it. That tends to be scary in that the seedbed in that company is not ready at all and that company is not mature enough to start and deploying software has never saved anyone. So that's where we start down a completely different path, where we talk about whether that's what they need, whether that company is ripe for it, and whether by deploying some software we're more likely to lead them astray because then they'll say it doesn't work for them anyway.
How not to kill the innovative activity of your own people?
Martin Hurych
I would stop at those companies that need to start an innovation culture for various reasons. One typical one that I see quite often is that up until now people have been passive and I've run out of ideas, so I would like to encourage those people who are much closer to the real production to start bringing those ideas. Those people shouldn't be afraid to be the first because the bunch will eat them up. How do you actually get voluntary hustling started in a way that's long-lasting?
Luděk Cigánek
This led me to why we started eKaizen in the first place. For one thing, it was a few years back when I was working on other digitization processes in manufacturing at my previous job and I saw that these improvements should be made everywhere. At the time, I didn't see any nice solution to it other than paper, pencil and clipboard, or Excel. There wasn't anything sophisticated that would address more than the first wave of somebody coming in, throwing an idea somewhere and we're ticked off. So I had an idea in my head for eKaizen, and that's why we started it later. For me, the motivation of working with people was very important in our company, when we were developing some software and we wanted to raise some ownership of the product we were working on among the programmers, across the team. We, as those owners of the company, were awfully proud of that and we would breathe slow for it and talk about it the way I talk about it here today and those people didn't have it in them. For example, a programmer came to us, a young guy out of school, and we were terribly surprised that he didn't know that he could bring some of his ideas to it. Then maybe after a while he brought it in and we just had 1,000 better ideas, so we threw it off the table and two years later we found out that these guys were working like machines and the ownership I was talking about wasn't there. In retrospect, I realized then what all these people came to us with and we didn't do it because we had that operational blindness and we had other priorities. So those people stopped caring because why would I go to the trouble of writing down some ideas for improvement and why would I bother with something that somebody was going to throw away. This tends to be one of the biggest barriers in the companies that we work for. Because those companies come in wanting to make some improvement suggestions, but there's not the facilities built in to take it further. It's only when you get it across to those people that this is normal and that it's not just good for the company, it's good for them, that they have the opportunity to earn some extra money and improve something, that they start to do it. You can't change it overnight, so it doesn't work, but if you communicate the right things to those people, then you can gradually get
the hang of it. There's no point in telling these people that we need to save money and find savings, because it's they don't care, it's not their problem. You have to come up with all the things that these people can influence and set some boundaries for them to think about and then they will be happy to do it, if they get some reward for it. The other thing that is closely related to that is, if you're going to spark it and these people are going to make these proposals, don't leave them in the dark. You need to keep working with them and those people need to know why you have rejected something, why something is going to take a while or why it can't be done. Sometimes you want them to elaborate more, those people don't want to, or they have to upload some photos and you have to set everything out for them like a platter of gold so it doesn't delay them or bother them. If those people want to do the good deed, it can't be too burdensome for them because nobody's going to enjoy it unless it's their core business.
What are the motivations of people in production?
Martin Hurych
Going back to the motivations, I understand and subscribe to the fact that at the level of a foreman or someone in manufacturing, the fact that the company makes more money or saves more money is of no interest to anyone. So what are the motivations, in your opinion, to get these people started, to spark them to start bringing those ideas? The standard method that I see quite often is that we need to spark innovation, we do a half-day or two-hour workshop on it, we collect it in a box and then nothing happens.
Luděk Cigánek
I remembered a mailbox at one of our customers' post offices near Mladá Boleslav, where when we went to look, there was a paper two years old stuck to it. I think it is important to explain to them at the very beginning why we are doing this. These people really know what they need the most when it comes to their daily routine and they know if their back hurts because they're bent over too much at their desk, or they see every day that they're carrying a box somewhere 3, 4 steps more than they have to, or they have to run to get water. Those people, in short, know what's bothering them and I think it's good to ask them in those practical demonstrations what's bothering them or what they would change. That success rate will be much higher than asking them where you could save money. It's also good to have that as part of some company culture, company strategy. That management shouldn't be floating on a cloud away from those people and shouldn't be discounting the little things that those people come up with. On the contrary, even these small things should show how much money, time, injuries, bad moods and so on have been saved. I think the vision that we're all in the same boat and if we do better, it's not just good for the owners or good for the company, should be communicated well.
How to prioritize the collected ideas?
Martin Hurych
I've seen a couple of times when this upsurge has been relatively successful and then it's been said that we can't do it, we won't do it, and so on. How do you manage expectations in that second phase of what can really be implemented, what is total nonsense and what needs to wait?
Luděk Cigánek
When we talk to customers that the business actively reaches out to, if they enjoy digital improvement and innovation, they will say yes. Most of the time they have those ideas sent through Excel, through Google Form, and that's the end of it. Then when we talk to them about whether those suggestions are actually coming in, whether they're being followed up on, and whether they have visibility over it, they find out that they're not. It is not enough to have just the suggestions digitised, I am convinced that it will only work if you master and ideally digitise all the processes that go with it.
After the idea, the next step is always to assess its feasibility. That's where you often run into the fact that when you talk to the improvement manager, he knows he's supposed to make improvements, it's his job, but then he goes to the people who are supposed to approve it, and that's where it goes. Because for them, it's a completely minor part of their daily activities. You've got to have approval from the security guy, you've got to have approval from the finance guy, you've got to have something from the technologist, and if you're touching a process that's approved by the customer, you've got to go to the customer. There's an awful lot of people that you need to orchestrate and quite often that lead time from that idea to something happening to a decision is very long. In that time, you've demotivated the person who came up with it, or they don't even care anymore, or they're working elsewhere. Here's the minefield where you have to tread and where you have to pull these people into the action so that they react as quickly as possible. If you give them a tool that doesn't make them feel bad about having to fill something out somewhere, but instead makes it faster and easier for them to do what the management wants them to do anyway, it will work. Here I think there is always room for improvement in all companies and this applies to all digitisation projects in general. Everyone should work with that mythical single source of truth, so that everyone is looking at one system. If somebody makes a proposal or has an innovation project somewhere, describes it and you want a budget for it, you need to make a presentation on it, you can't have it somewhere around SharePoint. Because then you don't know if it makes sense, if it fits into the company strategy, if you have the resources, the capacity, and if it's feasible now. If you don't keep an eye on all of that, then you're going to wither again. That's where I think a lot of innovation activities in companies fall down because they don't manage that second wave.
What does the final state look like after the implementation of eKaizen?
Martin Hurych
You created eKaizen for this. So what does it actually look like in practice when you successfully implement your product? Now, we've described a bunch of individual activities, a lot of listeners and viewers can imagine their boxes there, their Google Sheets, the more actionable ones maybe some task management systems or project systems. If I implement eKaizen on Friday night and come to work on Monday morning, what changes?
Luděk Cigánek
I'll start with where we are going and what we promise our customers. What will change is that everyone will know what is going on in those innovation activities. The person who made the proposal will go and know what's going on with it. In the same way that when I order a package from somewhere on the other side of the globe on an e-shop, I want to know where it is because I'm really looking forward to that new toy. Nothing makes me angrier than waiting for a package and now I see PPL driving past my house and it doesn't come. So I think that's a good thing to say, that will change the fact that at the very least, these people will know what's going on with what they went to the trouble to get. It's kind of a statement of respect for those employees because I want them to do something extra, even though the kaizen shouldn't be extra, it should be lived, but I think that minimum level of respect is telling those people transparently what's going on with it. I think that's good for that group of people who work on the front lines. It will certainly change a lot for those OpEx and lean and CI managers who will hopefully have everything in one place. They're going to have that reporting in there because they're managers, so they need to see those charts and they need to know if they're meeting targets and if it's kind of falling apart under their hands. Hopefully, we'll make their job easier by automating those activities that lead to that implementation or that successful closure from that submission of that proposal. Of course, that top management will see how much savings have been made, how much activity is going on, what the employee engagement is and what's actually happening one, two, three levels below them. So hopefully that will also motivate them that this is not a completely insignificant part and we're not just doing this because all other companies are improving. It's important to understand that there's a huge potential to achieve those goals with minimal cost.
How to make collecting innovation ideas easy?
Martin Hurych
We were discussing a couple of episodes ago that the most common thing on the shop floor that we don't have 8 to 12 hours a day in front of us is a screen, a computer of some sort, into which my idea is supposed to be digitally entered. How do you deal with making that entry of the idea into the system as user-friendly and easy as possible?
Luděk Cigánek
That's the alpha omega of making that barrier-free already in the serving. I've already mentioned that you don't want to make it harder for these people because they have to do something extra, so at least make it easy for them. What works for us, and we've even recently started to collect statistics on this globally, is to offer those people more options to file that motion. Somebody has access to a computer, let them submit it through a computer, it's also much faster for me to type something on a computer than to type it on my phone, not to mention that I type without accents and with typos on my phone. However, the vast majority of people on the shop floor don't work with a computer every day, but have the phone in their hands every day. At the very least, they leave work and are already checking their social networks or reading. So, I think that submitting an improvement and keeping track of what's going on with that innovation through your phone is a must have today. We've heard many times from some customers that these people can't carry their phone into production. But that's changing, I know it's not always possible, but it's changing. The other thing is that they should think more innovatively. Just because they used to file the improvement by going down the hall and having that mailbox at the entrance doesn't mean that today they can't file the improvement when they're having a cigarette, when they're sitting on the couch at home, when they're on the bus back. Where the phone is really not an option, we supply kiosks, which we usually try to put in a strategic place, canteen, smoking room, etc. Some of our customers have high-performance corners, or those places where they have morning meetings and there's a touch screen where they can come in, beep their chip and look at the relevant information that's relevant to them. It's also a place where meetings are held and I evaluate if there's any movement on those projects and I have a little bit of a kanban board of where things are. I think those people will find their way to that kiosk pretty quickly. Then you can keep working with that because on that kiosk, before someone pitches that idea, you can do that internal marketing and that management can use that to communicate that strategy. You can ask them how you can save energy and show successful projects and KPIs to people there, because when we've completed an innovation, there's been positive feedback from them that their life has improved. I don't need to show those people that it saved us money, that pleases me or the owner, but those people need to be told that it was good for them. Some companies go that route of showing the successful improvers out there and I like that, I guess it's really because I enjoy it. I really enjoy working with those people, even in a digital environment. It's not possible in some places, but I think you can show that a person has come here, submitted so many improvements, and out of those 10, we've already taken 3 of them, accepted them, implemented them, helped us with them, and maybe even made a little bit of money. I think you can also work with the kiosks in terms of marketing internally and again, nudge the culture a little bit.
Martin Hurych
What is mobile adoption? Because I assume I have to put my employer's app on my device, and I've already addressed a couple of times that this is something the shop floor more or less doesn't want.
Luděk Cigánek
I always use this incantation now that we don't develop mobile apps anymore for this very reason. The reality is partly that reason and partly we've found that the mobile app development doesn't quite make as much sense to us. Because today we're able to serve everything from a browser, from a browser without having to install anything. Every smart phone has that browser in it, and we're able to do what that mobile app does without forcing those people to install something corporate on their private phone. Those people will use it from any device that can work with the web. We go one step further by usually implementing some QR codes. When Covid was going on, there was a renaissance of QR codes, which was a technology that was old, nobody was using it much, and now everybody is working with QR and paying with QR codes. That usage is great, we now have posters and stickers all over companies with QR codes so that people can really just come in, scan it and it will open up the entry form and they don't have to type anything in. It's great if we can personalise those QR codes in the sense that those people have pre-filled in where they are, so it still saves them the effort of not having to fill in what workplace it relates to.
What else can eKaizen do?
Martin Hurych
So today, eKaizen will take the company from collection to full management and either confirmation and implementation or rejection of that proposal, if I understand correctly.
Luděk Cigánek
That's still the first 2 of the 5 or 6 steps we've tried to get to. When an idea is rejected, you have to communicate it well, explain it, and again you have to give the management the tools to do some kind of review of whether it was rejected legitimately. Or do you go down the positive route that the idea is going to be implemented and then you follow that up with some project management where you can define different workflows and behaviours for smaller projects, so what's the path. When that work is done and that implementation happens and that completion happens, we actually have an awful lot of information gathered about that project at that point. Who came up with it, where it was implemented, who worked on it, who approved it, what the expectations were, what budget it was approved with and what the reality is, what it actually saved. We have those project things, typically lessons learned, and we also have those dead ends recorded as to why something was stalled or why something got stuck and had to be changed. So we can continue to work with that. If a project is assessed to have deployment potential, then you're suddenly able to offer it up as a golden platter within that corporation for someone to continue to work with without reinventing the wheel. It doesn't even have to be in a corp, quite often what helps in one workplace can easily be applied to 10 other similar workplaces with minimal effort. You suddenly get a lot more out of the small improvement that Pepa here came up with without it costing you anything. If we go one step further and the customer works with it ideally the way we envision, we don't stop there. We try to somehow automatically identify those projects in the system that might be interesting for other departments, recommend them and help them with the deployment. We know that, for example, a branch here in the Czech Republic has the same production processes somewhere in Mexico, so we are automatically able to recommend things that might be relevant to them. If they look at it, if they are interested, we will help them to dig into the project with some of the things that we or the customer went through during the pilot implementation. That saves a lot of energy and resources and a lot of frustration in going down the same path over and over again. The other thing I'm really passionate about is standardization, and that's something they hear perfectly in those corporations. I understood it when I worked for a multinational company where we were trying to push some of our small solutions from the Czech Republic throughout the corporation. They told us that it was nice, that they would like it, but if we don't push it into the 120 offices they have around the world, it doesn't matter that it will work perfectly in the Czech Republic. For them, it's just another system they'll have to maintain, support, someone will have to know him, and what we've suddenly saved, we'll rebuild somewhere else. That's why we actually have a module or a part within eKaizen focused on standardization. Let's identify those things that have the potential to become best practice, the standard, since we've covered them from the beginning and we know what their life cycle is. We can then record in a guideline how to implement that change, that project, that innovation, and then let's try to implement those things in standardisation everywhere else. Again, there are other things related to that, other information that we collect along the way of each of those projects, and that's photos, that's videos and different presentations. All this multimedia is in one place, where you can look at it with one click.
Summary
Martin Hurych
Let's close today with Luděk's patera, or three sentences about how to start or support innovation in a company. If all we had to remember from this Ignition was the following three sentences and set them in stone, what would they be?
Luděk Cigánek
People come first because without them there is no incentive, without them there is nothing to improve. Treat those people with respect, because then they will give back to you. So if you're giving them, say, a digital tool and you're totally dehumanizing something that they used to deal with face-to-face, then make sure that the information they get from that tool is at least as good or better and more timely than what they had before. But don't resist personal contact, use the tool when dealing with those people, for example. The other thing is, get as many people involved as possible, because what's the point of motivating people, what's the point of having your improvement team working to their full potential, if you're going to be spoiled by others. Really give all those people that you need to make that change happen something so that you're not unnecessarily pushing them to give you the answers that you need, or the synergy as best you can.
Martin Hurych
Most of the listeners or viewers are driving, running, or doing something at the moment, so I'll ask you to materialize the conclusion into a bonus. I'm glad you were here, that we could discuss innovation and very likely we'll see you sometime in the future. Good luck.
Luděk Cigánek
Thank you.
Martin Hurych
You see, you wouldn't think that innovation and how it's blowing up in manufacturing would be such a compelling topic. If at this moment you have a list of things you'd like to do in front of you, or you have it recorded on your phone somewhere, or you carry it around in your head while you run, for example, we've done our job exceedingly well. In that case, share, like, comment right now, as the platform we're currently on together allows. Be sure to download said bonus and check out my website, www.martinhurych.com/zazeh, where not only the bonus, but all the other episodes are already up at this point. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.