Hi, welcome to the Better Batch podcast where batch process manufacturers learn from industry experts. I’m Alex Koves. And I’m Peter Suddard. We’re joined today by John Bergman, ready to share his approach to change management at facilities. John, we’re thrilled to have you. 

John Bergmann (02:00.526) 

Thank you. It’s a pleasure. 

Better Batch (02:02.432) 

John, argue that change management isn’t possible at the facility until, or it’s better done if we go from culture to leadership down to the floor on operations. Why is culture in your mind so critical to start with? 

John Bergmann (02:19.022) 

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about culture is that’s how things are done, right? Like you can have all the SOPs in the world, you can have all the certifications in the world, but if your culture doesn’t support that, it doesn’t happen that way. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have audits that say it does or not. It’s really, it’s the foundational piece for everything that happens in an organization, no matter its size. So really, that’s why. 

Better Batch (02:46.657) 

Sure. So then how does a company go about, what kind of culture do they need to build to make this possible? Is it unique to companies or is there kind of set stuff that companies need to worry about? 

John Bergmann (03:00.31) 

I think principally it is not a unique function. It’s really about every, every company exists to solve someone’s problem, right? Like whether you’re a retailer or a manufacturer or even a service provider, your customer has a problem and you solve it, right? So that gives you the, I would call the, like the core purpose, right? 

your culture that you push downstream from that core purpose is really, it’s rooted in that. that’s, I like to look into organizations and whether or not they have a mission and vision statement and whether or not it actually, if you break it down, if it matches what their core purpose is, right? Because it’s nearly impossible to communicate purpose adequately if you can’t articulate it. Does that make sense? 

Better Batch (03:55.528) 

Right, yeah. And that’s interesting that you mentioned articulating it. I  guess a question I always have about culture is how can it be transferred, right? Like, do you need to hire people who have the right culture to start with? Can you train for culture? Is it absorbed through osmosis somehow? Like, how do you get that consistent culture as you grow? 

John Bergmann (04:18.124) 

I think it’s all of those things. It really has to start at the beginning though. Most organizations have that founder, right? The founder who has the right of whatever business idea or the founding group. And I think what’s missed, especially when you scale and you begin to hire people from outside, especially when you’re adding, right? When you’re in growth mode in a small organization, you’re adding capability, right? Like, you know, this guy has 

forever that person did the shipping and the quality, right? Because they just needed to. And now you bring someone else in, I think what gets missed there is in the frantic nature of some of those developments, there isn’t enough attention taken to, wait, why are we here? And I think what you end up doing is you dilute that original culture. A lot of organizations have that difficulty. 

Better Batch (04:52.416) 

Hmm. 

John Bergmann (05:18.062) 

and the transition from like very small to even small, especially a medium, right? Because I think medium in the US is considered 100 employees or more. But even in that transition from maybe like 25 to 100 is very difficult on culture if you’re not setting time aside to, right, what are our values and how do we communicate these to all these new people we’re bringing in, right? Because I’ve worked in organizations that have grown 30 % in a year. 

Right. And it is, it is work to maintain that culture side. And again, growth can be a very distracting thing or distracting activity from maintaining those things that are important to the organization, especially in more uncontrolled situations. like currently I work in a medical device manufacturer, right? We have a significant, compliance burden. So that kind of. 

That has the effect in some ways of kind of put bumpers on the lane, you could say, to maintain some of those cultural things, because it isn’t just that you want them in culture, it’s that they’re required for you to participate in the marketplace. 

Better Batch (06:27.422) 

Right, right. 

Better Batch (06:33.921) 

There’s a certain required culture based upon the industry vertical, guess. is there? And I guess I want to circle back because we talked about our area of subject today is change management, right? So culture is important, OK? So can we connect the dots from culture to change management and change management for large and small projects as we execute? 

John Bergmann (06:37.942) 

Yes. 

John Bergmann (07:02.734) 

Yeah, I think what I find, the way I find in practice to bridge that gap is to have that culture piece, because what that does, that purpose, that defines, or that can be built in to define value at, in lower portions of the organization, right? Like I talk about cultural leadership operations. On the operations standpoint, what those… 

what the purpose piece is that drives the, that is a component of the culture and drives some of the culture elements is value propositions at the operational level, right? One of my favorite things is treating like your customer’s the next process, right? Like we try to push that at every turn here. that, creating that value point that I’m serving this customer that is the QC for this equipment or 

or the next assembler in the line, right? Like I’m creating this value. So if you can communicate those value points with that group, they’re more interested because they have more ownership over it, right? Like if you have a customer to serve, you have more intrinsic motivation to be interested in serving them. So when someone like myself is a quality engineer, I try to do a week, like a Friday afternoon or a Friday morning walk with a notepad to go sit down with people and say, hey, what was hard this week? 

Like what was difficult? Like what discrepancies did you find? And if they have that ownership piece, it’s easier for them to think, well, know, this particular part of what I’m doing, and I do it a lot, is like I get more errors from the person that gives me this, or they’re coming back and they’re looking for clarification here, right? So from a change management perspective, the purpose, the high-level purpose, getting pushed all the way down. 

providing that ownership to people gives them better motivation to be interested in the change. that make sense? 

Better Batch (09:02.098) 

Yeah, making sure I understand it maybe. Having a sense of both, hey, this is what we’re building to serve this end user. And by the way, my job at shipping or receiving to bring stuff in, one of the end users I need to think about is not just our customer at the end of the day, but the staging team that’s going to find this in the warehouse. And that helps. In both senses, you’ve given a sense of purpose to the business and individual people in there. 

John Bergmann (09:22.446) 

Absolutely. 

Better Batch (09:31.57) 

What other cultural pieces are important to building a strong, healthy culture? 

John Bergmann (09:40.802) 

There’s pieces related to… 

John Bergmann (09:48.072) 

Looking for looking for problems, right? Like that that’s something I really try people are really good It’s a human thing to I’ve done this this way forever. I like to stay that way. So I think there’s a piece of it where You have to actively what whether you’re in a specific leadership role or a name leadership role, excuse me Or not you have to be kind of the agent. I like to say change agent as a term 

Better Batch (10:00.244) 

Right. 

John Bergmann (10:17.632) 

where you’re going down and you’re saying, is that really, can we do that better? Right? 

Better Batch (10:21.705) 

Yeah, Alex is a perfect, you know, when we see ERP implementations, it’s like the people who are logging all the issues in the software. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, and just it’s interesting, it struck me as you were talking, you know, I could name kind of different cultural pillars that I sometimes see at companies and some of them strike me as like. 

John Bergmann (10:32.59) 

Exactly. 

Better Batch (10:45.097) 

Synergistic with organizational change and some are to some degree like anti is just a great like so if I have a company culture that’s like. Bold change big risks right then like maybe that will help accelerate and you know adopting change. 

Conversely, I might have something that is really probably very useful if we’re working in an industry where perhaps such as medical devices where we can damage reputation and hurt people if we make a mistake. Maybe I have a culture of measure twice, cut once. And if my culture is measure twice, cut once, now I need to do an organizational change project, like rolling out new systems or doing whatever, 

And everyone’s saying, but how can we be sure? We have to slow down. And maybe that, I I’m not necessarily saying that that value is bad and it doesn’t fit with organizational change, but it’s more to say like, at least knowing what the culture is allows you to fit how you execute that change with that culture. 

you have to come equipped in that second case with answers to the like, here’s why we’re sure, and here’s how we know it will work, rather than just like, we’re taking the plunge and we’ll figure it out as we go and we don’t mind getting hurt a little on the way, right? So it’s… 

I don’t know, I guess that wasn’t really a question, but the question might be what cultural pillars in particular, like specific ones like I just mentioned, feel like are critical and useful for organizational change in your mind? 

John Bergmann (12:25.432) 

So part of our local quality policy here is focusing on safety, performance, and customer service. So I like to, if we’re going to push on a change, whether it’s a, most of the time with medical devices, a lot of times your process level improvement is your more high value add just because of the regulatory nature of if you want to change equipment. 

Sometimes it’s easier to get some efficiency out of how I build it or how I test it versus here because if I change this, maybe that’s an electrical change and I have my testing burden from an external source and then re-approval gets huge. perhaps I can go down an avenue of a process change to make something better. So I think the value points or excuse me. 

Better Batch (13:13.856) 

Mm-hmm. 

John Bergmann (13:18.7) 

the understanding of the ops level and even the mid-level engineering level of the value proposition of what the device does, what the process adds to that. If you can identify the value point locally, right, one of the things we make has a number of sub-assemblies, right, even within a sub-assembly, if I can say, what is this value point here? And… 

If I’m gonna implement a change, like you mentioned the measure twice cut once, People understand the value of that output. What often has not happened is the question of why am I measuring twice? What was the root cause of me having to measure twice in the first place, right? And I do see from a corrective and preventive structure, oftentimes real root cause analysis is not. 

effective, right? Or it just doesn’t go quite deep enough, right? And often, often that is a that is an indication that it that you have like a leadership issue, right? Like you notice I put the I put the arrow coming back, right? And we might be talking about or I generally talk about the happy day, maybe the more idealistic way of how these interact. But there’s also very negative way. 

that these interact and oftentimes that root cause for why am I measuring twice when I should really just have to measure once, right? And a lot of times that goes right back to that leadership piece, right? It isn’t that culture or mission or vision has an issue. It’s that leadership isn’t necessarily communicating that value and they’re not supporting the operations of all. Does that make sense? 

Better Batch (14:57.898) 

Sure. 

Better Batch (15:10.176) 

Right. Yeah, we’ll get to leadership in just a moment. That’s good. No, no, it’s great. It’s perfect. How can we gauge the culture at a company just before we’ve got a vision for what we want it to be? How can a company gauge how that culture is going? then we’ll go into leadership. 

John Bergmann (15:13.815) 

yes, sorry. I’m not trying to jump ahead. 

John Bergmann (15:32.206) 

I think, so, and I’ve seen this in a few places, is a lot of times they’ll be like, oh, we do a culture survey. And I don’t think that’s right. I actually think, I think process metrics are actually a better way to do that. And my example is, if you have work orders, say between a number of processes, so say a work order completes a build of something, right, and it goes through a number of steps, whether that’s. 

like a couple of assembly steps, maybe a test step, and then maybe a final inspection. When you process that work order, you can metric the various discrepancies that occur. So my example is clerical errors, right? Clerical errors aren’t a huge deal, but occasionally they do cause like the product reject, right? You can metric some of this stuff. Often a simple clerical error can actually be indicative of 

an attention to detail issue, which is often not because the person doesn’t care. Right. I spent time in the military and when we’d have a critique about a problem, you know, the opening thing was like, none of the people involved in this came to work today to screw up. Right. And that is, that is a widely accepted perspective. So I find the data indicating I have. 

this type of clerical error, I have it more commonly in this, you because you collect this data for even a month or two and you’ll start to notice like, hey, like this group has more of this problem than the other one. And then that root cause analysis that I mentioned before, I think is actually a better way to see where does your culture sit in say attention to detail. Attention to detail is a big point in, I would argue, manufacturing, all modern manufacturing, right? 

Lack of that isn’t necessarily because those people aren’t capable of it. It’s because it’s not the culture puts up with it not happening, right? So those clerical errors in the 15 to 20 minutes, whatever person needs to process that next has to go and chase those errors, right? That’s something you live with, right? And that becomes your culture. And I think, I think, so I think the, the data analysis side is a better metric of culture than sending out a survey that 30 % of the people do, 30 % ignore. 

John Bergmann (17:56.83) 

and the remaining percent complain to their manager about it. You know I mean? So does that answer that question? 

Better Batch (18:00.948) 

Yeah. Totally. It does. you know, throughout this, you know, I like to try to fit this into a frame of concrete examples. And, you you just sparked one in my own mind. You know, of course, my experiences with systems deployments and something that we see crop up at a surprising number of companies is you roll out the software and you train the users and you train leadership and everyone knows how to use it. And then you and and 

John Bergmann (18:07.299) 

Yeah. 

Better Batch (18:29.409) 

For our products, a lot of the purpose is to put quality checkpoints in and prevent errors, and with those control points. And so we might have a situation where somebody has three drums of a chemical, all the same chemical, and we’re going to use some of this chemical in our batch. And we scan the first drum to say, here’s what we’re going to use in our batch. And the person gets an error message. And the error message says whatever. It’s like, oh, you know. 

that lot’s not approved yet or maybe something the user doesn’t remember what it means, right? And what’ll happen is they say, well my job is to execute batches as fast as I can and to not have waste. Let me see if the next drum scans and it scans okay. And then they dispense from the first drum that wouldn’t scan into the tank. And now they don’t know what lot they used. The inventory is wrong and the batch is probably, know, like, and it’s just like, you know. 

We went through all this training so that you could understand how it worked, and then at the end of the day, your culture is telling you that speed is the most important thing, and I cannot stop and figure out the problem and solve it. I have to keep going instead. So anyways, that, yeah. 

John Bergmann (19:43.182) 

I see that everywhere too, yes, no, I agree with you. I see that everywhere too. Schedule pressure is, in my opinion, one of the, in fact, you can see on my board over here, it says something about quotas. I hate quotas. Quotas are the dumbest thing in the world, right? Because you can have all the policy and training that you want that says quality, quality, quality. But as soon as there’s a quota, 

Better Batch (19:53.522) 

Mm-hmm. 

Better Batch (20:06.846) 

Right. We have conflicting requirements. Which one am going to do? Do it right or do it fast? 

John Bergmann (20:08.364) 

Right? Yep. Yep. And especially, well, especially if you tied that quota and the, if the quota at all is attached to scheduling or anything like that, as soon as you put that time pressure on people, especially if there’s monetary incentives, right? If there’s bonuses associated with meeting quotas, it’s over, right? Like you’re gonna get, you’re gonna get the quality you want, but it’s gonna be harder, right? Cause you’re gonna have to push them. You’re gonna have to, you know what mean? 

Better Batch (20:26.985) 

Mm-hmm. 

Better Batch (20:30.548) 

Yeah, yeah. 

John Bergmann (20:38.21) 

You’re gonna have to do what I would say are, you’re gonna have to put negative pressure to culture from the leadership level. So I mean, it’s gonna come this way, but ultimately it’s gonna feed back into culture. And I find those trade-offs unacceptable, personally. 

Better Batch (20:56.224) 

In defense of quotas, let me play devil’s advocate on behalf of quotas, it just people are setting dumb quotas? We need 100 units at this quality threshold before we start counting it. Are they poorly set or are they, by their very nature, destructive to a quality-based process? 

John Bergmann (21:03.105) 

do it. 

John Bergmann (21:20.43) 

Most quotas are completely arbitrary, right? Like, well, because here’s the thing, now there’s meeting demand, but that’s not a quota, right? Like you can either meet demand, and so I don’t mind what you might call a quota if it’s demand plus, right? Because it’s not, in the business world, it’s not a bad idea to have maybe 10%, 20%, you know what mean? Depending on your, right? Because you’ve got to make some of these determinations internally, but like you should be meeting demand. 

Better Batch (21:27.584) 

Sure. 

Better Batch (21:31.604) 

Yeah, totally. 

John Bergmann (21:50.434) 

plus a relatively minimal amount, at least what you can tolerate based on your assembly lead times, your supply chain leads, that stuff. So that’s a very complicated system, but to just say, I want this many months. 

Better Batch (21:58.272) 

Mm-hmm. 

Better Batch (22:04.288) 

And I think as well, to the same point, you can set a quota and you’re right. If you put, okay, you have to do this number, but they have to be of X quality, you have to have a very clear definition of what the acceptable and unacceptable result are gonna be to have that be justified. 

Whereas if you don’t have that, you can lean on a culture of quality and the person is going to self-assess, okay, like, it doesn’t look right. And even though it’s not in the list of things that I have to like meet to qualify, I still know I’m going to use my own judgment, 

John Bergmann (22:40.654) 

Well, that’s part of that ownership piece I talked about with the culture, right? Like communicating the mission vision down and providing that piece. Like if I do this to the quality that I understand is required, right? I’m serving that purpose, right? 

Better Batch (22:55.456) 

Great. Okay, so we promised a conversation on culture, mission accomplished. Let’s talk about leadership. We’ve got a culture set up. We think we’re ready to go forward with that. How does leadership fit in now between culture and operations? 

John Bergmann (23:12.088) 

So I like to say, I got my fun little notes here. I like to talk about leadership is the transfer gear, right? Like if culture is the engine of our organization, leadership acts as the facilitator, right? Their job is to make the system function, right? Like they don’t necessarily do it, but their job is to facilitate the communication of mission values, all that. 

culture stuff and also translate that into how the process structure works. Does the process structure give you the outputs you want? mental man isn’t exactly the word, but that’s functionally kind of what it is. It’s you’re facilitating people to succeed to create the outputs the organization exists to create. 

Better Batch (23:56.106) 

Sure. 

John Bergmann (24:08.758) 

In fact, did I? actually, here, I wrote this thing I really like. I said, leadership is the box. You deliver culture to the world. 

Better Batch (24:16.096) 

I was like, you’d said this before, was like your culture is what leadership’s willing to accept. It’s like, yeah, it doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it. It’s like, okay, I guess that’s our culture now. 

John Bergmann (24:21.432) 

What’s that? 

John Bergmann (24:25.57) 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mentioned, what I mentioned before, like, this, this three pronged iteration of it, or just interpretation I have of this, which may or may not be precise. It’s fine. it’s kind of like the worst game of paper rock scissors you can imagine, right? Cause there’s no, there’s no rules, right? And you can, like, if you follow the, like the paper rock scissors, 

Better Batch (24:45.161) 

Okay. 

John Bergmann (24:52.758) 

direction maybe that’s maybe that’s an illustration of it working the way it’s supposed to but in reality there’s no rules right because like poorly communicated culture from leadership screws up operations and what leadership deals with affects culture the opposite way right so i mean there’s a number of there’s a number of interactions and not all of them are desired 

Better Batch (25:11.636) 

Yeah, great. sounds like, I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but leadership is responsible for organizing the warehouse or production or sales. And there’s certain deliverables that are with that. And it sounds like what you’re arguing is with a corporate commitment around a culture, it’s each of those leaders’ responsibility to make sure their group is delivering within those boundaries or the bumpers of the culture that it’s set up to help push stuff forward. 

John Bergmann (25:39.212) 

Yes, yes. They are, and ultimately right there, I’m a big fan of Edward Stemming and his, one of his schticks was always right, like 90 % of your issues are due to the system. So leaders job is to make that system not be stupid, right? So that’s really, that’s why I like the idea of those, of leaders taking a very proactive, a proactive position to 

not only reinforce the culture, but then, you know, get that feedback back up the chain. Like, what can be better about this, right? 

Better Batch (26:16.192) 

I think some of the listeners, operational listeners, will have some thoughts about the intelligence of leadership, and maybe they’re not the best place to root out stupidity. 

John Bergmann (26:26.59) 

fair, fair. some of that though is right. There’s, there’s relatively long standing practices of, hey, Bob has been this tech. He’s a great technician. Bob has been a technician for years. You know what? Let’s make him a manager and they make him a manager, but they, they’re the failure of the leadership when they bring the new leader on board is what kind of leadership tools did they give this person? Did they, did they ask Bob if that’s what he wants? 

Better Batch (26:55.296) 

Totally. 

John Bergmann (26:55.628) 

Like, and sometimes that’s an excuse to just, well, we can’t give him a raise unless he’s promoted. But really, in some cases, you should just pay the guy more, right? Like, pay Bob more because he’s amazing. Don’t put him in a position that he has limited expertise. And I mentioned, sorry to back up too much, but we talked, I talked about, right, like growth can be a, rapid growth can be a difficult position for companies to deal with on a cultural level. 

Better Batch (27:14.196) 

Back it on up. 

John Bergmann (27:24.174) 

Well, that translates into the leadership level, right? Because you, can have organizations that are around for 30, 40 years that maybe they haven’t grown exponentially, but they grow nice and steadily. And that still results in they haven’t taken a moment to be like, we should do leadership development. Right. Because I mean, that is a thing, right? That’s, um, my graduate degree is in management science. Right. And that was all like, um, like 

Better Batch (27:43.839) 

Hmm. 

John Bergmann (27:53.292) 

some psychology stuff, some HR stuff, leading people, just the scientific side of that. It was rather fascinating, actually. But that’s a big piece of what leadership needs to be, is identifying who I can also make a leader. And honestly, in some cases, that’s not even… 

Better Batch (28:11.572) 

Mm-hmm. 

John Bergmann (28:17.166) 

I honestly feel in some cases I have been a more effective leader in an organization when I’m not a manager. In fact, I don’t know if you can see it. You might not be able to see it. One of the things I have written up in the side corner there is if you’re not the boss, lead by example. 

Better Batch (28:36.201) 

Mm. 

You know something yeah, it’s great Yes, something again and bringing it back to the frame of change management I feel like in addition to representing the culture a big part of leadership’s responsibility is this prioritization and resource allocation right like I have this menu of changes menu of projects and selecting which ones we will invest in and ensuring that it’s like 

John Bergmann (28:39.138) 

Does that answer that question? 

John Bergmann (28:55.584) 

Absolutely. Yes. 

Better Batch (29:04.842) 

we don’t have a bottleneck where there’s too much, right? Like a challenge that I’ve sometimes seen with, again, system deployments, because that’s my view on the universe, is an organization says it’s time for a system deployment. But also, it’s time to bring on new customers and increase our production load. And. 

John Bergmann (29:17.45) 

you 

Better Batch (29:26.598) 

and it’s time to also do a quality systems change. And they don’t all fit inside the box of things that we can accomplish by fall. And they don’t even necessarily make sense to do simultaneously because one can be a prerequisite for the other and too much change at once. I guess that’s the other piece for me about leadership. It’s that they’ve got the broad view so that they can ensure those pieces fit in together in the allocation of the resources. 

So that’s the second piece of that resource allocation is, okay, we’ve chosen this project. It’s a lot of effort. It’s gonna require some trade-offs. Yes, we’ll have to stop the production line sometimes. We’ll have to reduce our capacity in this month to execute the project. That’s okay. Everyone rely, yeah. maybe you do have a quota, but here’s what we’re gonna do to ensure that we can be successful with the project and… 

For me, that’s where also leaders can help ensure that these big changes come to success. 

John Bergmann (30:31.246) 

I think a big piece to your point about leadership prioritization, a big piece and something I’ve run into in organizations really kind of touching on your universe of ERP implementations is flowcharts, right? You’re like, hey, how does all this work together? And you get, right, you get big wide eyes and they’re like, well, I think it works this way. A useful tool for leaders in any position, right? Whether they’re… 

Better Batch (30:45.28) 

Mmm. 

John Bergmann (30:59.574) 

leaders because they lead by example or actual, you know, manager is to take the time and, you know, I noticed there’s some problems in this department or I know I need to, you know, I need some change or I need some new initiatives here is to build that flow chart. Like I don’t like to say value stream map because those can be incredibly complicated. And sometimes the time required to make a good one is doesn’t match the outputs. 

Right? But even just a basic flow chart of a single production process sometimes is highly valuable to identify. And then you take that down to the floor and you say, how is this wrong? tell me, you know what I mean? Identify, you you work with, this is that, this is that interface with the ops people, right? Or the frontline people is where you take that, you take that flow chart down and say, Hey, does this make sense? Is this correct? Can you show me how this is correct? And then you can. 

Better Batch (31:37.824) 

Exactly. 

Better Batch (31:43.892) 

Mm-hmm. 

John Bergmann (31:54.284) 

Actually, one of the things I love to do with flow charts is I love to take and make a very simple one. And then at the interfaces, I like to say, are my outputs for this? those, because outputs of one box are almost always, with few exceptions, inputs to the next box. And that is a very, very rapid and pretty simple way to identify problems, bottlenecks, and even places where we don’t even thought of this, right? Or we haven’t thought that we could do this differently. 

Better Batch (32:01.866) 

Right. Sure. 

Better Batch (32:22.752) 

All right. 

John Bergmann (32:23.798) 

So visual management for change activity I think is highly useful and underutilized. 

Better Batch (32:29.599) 

Well, I think that’s great because it ties into that. That you know the next person down the line is my customer, right? So I’m saying yeah, I got you these boxes here and the person’s like it would be great if they were stacked properly so I could get that like you know you don’t even know as as person one what the person with the next person needs. That’s that’s really cool. Absolutely. 

John Bergmann (32:37.26) 

Yeah. 

John Bergmann (32:42.936) 

Mm-hmm. 

John Bergmann (32:47.522) 

Yeah. Or you, like we ran into something where it’s, finished this particular thing and it’s in a box. It’s in a box and it ships to the customer. Well, at the end of the process, you put, you put 10 of these in a big box and then that’s where they go on a cart. And the cart is how we kind of do our lot transfer, like one lot per cart. And then they all kind of stack together and it’s easy to, right. It’s easy to do the stock rotation without a FIFO issue. 

But one of the things, one of the questions we’re asking now is the procedure says I have to put them in that big box, but I ship, I need to use that big box to ship maybe 20 % of the time. So why am I putting in that big box so I can get to, you know what I mean? This is where those flow charts really let you see, wait, like why am I packaging this when I then unpackage it, right? So I’m paying for someone to do something twice that doesn’t even need to happen, right? So I mean, that’s, 

Better Batch (33:30.016) 

Right. 

Better Batch (33:37.215) 

Mm-hmm. 

John Bergmann (33:45.45) 

a good example in recent experience here. 

Better Batch (33:47.898) 

You’re absolutely right in those visual tools can be such a great way to communicate. But it’s also interesting, just that point of seeking and hearing the input from operations and from people on the line gets just totally missed surprisingly frequently. The number of times I’ve heard during end user training, well. 

that’s not gonna work, I could have told you that three months ago, right? It’s like, well, like you have to engage those stakeholders early, especially the bigger the change, it’s like, have to, like, the people who are doing the work have to be involved and share their insights. There’s just no way you’re flying blind otherwise. like, visual is a great way, but like, also don’t skip that. People do skip that, and it’s bad. 

John Bergmann (34:37.708) 

Yes, yes. yeah, we did, we recently moved to this facility and that was a couple year project, but it involved, right. cause the, the, didn’t build it. had to be renovated. So that was a big piece of going to the different stakeholders and, and asking like, what do you need? Like what, you know, you work through with architecture, which is, I don’t know if I would categorize some of the outputs that the various architecture firms give me as. 

Better Batch (34:50.954) 

Mm-hmm. 

Better Batch (34:59.648) 

Mm-hmm. 

John Bergmann (35:07.434) 

useful, but eventually you get to what is useful. It’s it’s interesting. And I realize it’s not necessarily our expertise when you talk to them about, well, this is, you know, production flow and this is what I need to put here. And this is why, and that’s a whole, that’s that’s a separate podcast. but what’s 

Better Batch (35:23.008) 

Sure. Yeah, there not a lot of architects listening to this particular podcast, so you’re safe here. 

John Bergmann (35:28.106) 

No, no, which, but I mean, that’s interesting though. Cause I mean, as a feedback to, I’ve worked with three different architecture firms on multiple facility designs. it, maybe to that point, like there’s some input they could take from the operation side a little bit that would be useful to their. Effectivity we could say. Yep. 

Better Batch (35:49.536) 

Totally. So we got culture. We got leadership. Let’s dive into operations, what people would consider the actual change management part. But with this steady foundation underneath us, how are we rolling out these process changes? What’s your advice for people listening? 

John Bergmann (36:10.222) 

So the… 

This is another thing actually based on your pre-show notes, I thought of something I hadn’t actually postulated before and that was the way you transfer the leadership side down to operations. That’s really, I refer to it as a bridge. And that bridge is built on authentic relationships. We often see, the internet is full of the, man, toxic managers and they just don’t understand and they don’t listen. 

you know, like back in the office, we don’t care if there’s enough chairs, that kind of stuff is just everywhere. And really that’s because they’re not, they’re not taking the time to build relationships that are value add to their personnel, right? And some of that is, like I mentioned before, you have quite a few organizations that have just never had or budgeted the time for leadership development, right? Like understanding that you’re not, right? You can’t. 

Like, yes, you’re the boss. can come and say, do this, right? But if they don’t know who you are, right? If they don’t, if they can’t see the communication of value to them from the culture side, right? It’s not going to happen, right? It’s like, well, I’ve already done this. I’ve done this forever. So, um, we, got to build that bridge. We got to build those relationships. Um, so I mentioned. 

Better Batch (37:31.488) 

Yeah. 

John Bergmann (37:40.706) 

And on the leadership side, right, they’re responsible for those systems. So that’s a great place for on the operations side, from a change management perspective of leveraging that expertise, right? And we talked about visual tools. One of the things I get to do is I get to do supplier surveillance, excuse me. And a few of them that I’ve gone and seen have very simple procedures that are flow charts. I’m like… 

This is amazing, right? Because I mean, you need very little training to understand how boxes and arrows work. Exactly. And some of those are highly effective. I mean, from an example of communicating how the system needs to work very effectively, right? 

Better Batch (38:13.49) 

Yeah, it’s all right here. 

John Bergmann (38:28.238) 

maybe minimal effort isn’t the right word, but with less, with less tedium, right, I think is a good way to say that, is ideal. So if we can have those prophecies in a state from the leadership side, but when they get to the floor, they’re highly refined as far as, as far as what the intent, right, what’s the output of this thing. I like to, I like to try from a quality standpoint, especially in a very regulated environment. 

because I like to shoot for a process structure where that compliance piece is so built in to the system that it is invisible to the user, right? Like I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t say like, I think software is a good example of this, good software. You don’t see the guts of how it works. It just works, right? So I, to, does that answer that question? I told you not to let me ramble too much. 

Better Batch (39:19.178) 

Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Better Batch (39:26.516) 

But it’s a start. a great start. It flows nicely into the next question, which is really around. I’m going to give you a kind of a broad scope, right? It’s around constructing SOPs and other documentation related to a new processor process change and then how to train people and put that change into practice. How do you see that done in like any tactical? 

pieces along the way, like you mentioned, using pictures, Hands-on work, just whatever way you could suggest is most effective to actually roll changes out once they’ve been determined to be the right changes. 

John Bergmann (40:09.462) 

I think the key word you mentioned there is training. Training is an underutilized, or maybe not underutilized is probably not the correct word. Lots and lots of organizations have training or they’ll send you to, they’ll send you to a seminar. I think the, I think the net result is that not enough organizations put in the correct perspectives on, okay, 

Better Batch (40:13.972) 

Mm-hmm. 

John Bergmann (40:39.022) 

I’m going to send this person to auditor training. Like, what does that get me? Right? What is the, you know, when they come back and they have the certificate from this place, I paid, you know, I paid $1,500 for a week or whatever it was. Right? What does that then get me? And I think the same can be true from the internal training. I mentioned, I forget if I mentioned what we were recording or before. 

But we’re working on an overhaul of our onboarding structure, right? Because we realize we have a very large compliance burden and we have a very, right, we have a very complicated structure system. So what I want to do is we want to have the first week that person is with their department, they are foundationally set up to be able to jump right into their, like, on the job training, right? So I think to… 

facilitate people being open to the idea that, I can look at this and say, wait a minute, why do do that? Right? I think if you give them enough of the foundational, like this is the purpose, this is the structure, these are the pathways that you would go and pull the thread of, hey, I think we could do this better. I think if you do that from the get-go and then you reinforce it, right, like pass the onboarding. 

past the first pass, like, you’re trained to do this particular assembly or you’re trained to run this machine. Beyond that is a continuous training loop, right? And one of those things needs to be on the medical side. have one of our critical components of our certification structure is our corrective and preventative action structure. Well, the preventative side of that is actually intended as like an improvement mechanism. And unfortunately, 

to pull the culture thread up just a tiny bit more is very often, Kappa is like a, you you got a Kappa, you’re in trouble, right? And it is sometimes a Herculean effort from the quality side and the leadership side to change that perspective, right? Like, no, no, no, let’s use this as a, maybe, yes, I found a problem and I’m doing a correction, and yet that’s an opportunity for me to, first of all, fix that, but through my root cause analysis, understand. 

John Bergmann (43:05.294) 

understand how to prevent it, right? Or even, it’s not infrequent that root cause analysis on one problem identifies that I potentially have, maybe I don’t have other problems, but I have opportunity for problem, right? And the more familiar the people on the front line, the operations level is with why I have a structure, like why I have this certification structure and why this risk management system or 

or why I have a particular sign off on a form, right? About a thing that I looked at and recorded, the more familiar they are with that from, because you’ve given them training from the, from the get go and then on board and then ongoing, the better they’re going to be at coming either to their manager or identifying problems and change opportunities and even, and even being like the lead on some of those, right? So I, 

Better Batch (44:00.788) 

Yeah, seems like to the, we can’t be punishing people who have reported problems. I was like, I’m reporting problems. Would you like me to be silent about it? What would you prefer? And you can just tell me with your actions. You don’t have to spell it out with your words. This is triggering a thought. One of the places I’ve seen some struggles with 

defining the right processes and I think an area where a lot of organizations can approve their processes is when they are interdepartmental, right? So we’ve got production and we’ve got warehouse and we’ve got quality and we’ve got sales and finance and everyone else and within any one department where there is a leader or a team that can get the feedback and then take a top-down approach and build things, okay, then you have a chance of success but there are certain… 

processes that must involve more than one department and interacting and usually that’s where I see some of the gaps. It’s like, okay, it’s like warehouse and production and the handoff back and forth of materials or it’s… 

quality coming in during material receipts and gathering the samples and the C of A’s and everything and the back and forth of warehouse again before it goes to production. That kind of stuff can get really messy, not because it’s necessarily harder, but just because there’s too many cooks and maybe nobody takes ownership. Do you have any tips or? 

a way in which this framework can help us succeed with that. 

John Bergmann (45:44.938) 

I got to go back to the every, every, every process is your customer piece, right? Like that’s gotta be like, know we’re technically in the operations box, but I mean, that’s, that’s really leadership’s job is to make sure. And I would say, I would argue that as like the high, like the CEO should be the champion of your, your fellow departments or your customers. Right? Like I had a position, I was a quality manager about, boy, how long ago was that now? 

I was a quality manager about 10 years ago. And one of my mandates when I was promoted to that position was at the time, the quality department was not everybody loved the quality department. so we were, we were kind of a, I don’t know if black sheep’s the right, the right term, but we weren’t anyone’s favorite. So one of my mandates was to fix those relationships. And the way I did that was like FaceTime with my personnel. Right. 

Better Batch (46:27.168) 

Sure. 

Better Batch (46:36.649) 

Mm-hmm. 

John Bergmann (46:45.35) 

like we, we started weekly stand-ups where it was like, I want to hear about all the problems you had on the floor. I don’t want you taking that to the people you have, you know, to that manager. I will do that. So my purpose then was to take those things. We’d have that weekly stand-up that that was like a half hour hour. Right after that, I had a scheduled meeting with the production supervisor and we would talk about, and we would work out our plans. And then I would go over and talk to, it was a 

It was a metal menu or they, they, they did hard goods, manufacturers on machine shop stuff, metal finish, metal prep. So after talking to the production manager, I would go to the metal finish guy and I would say, Hey, these are the issues we’ve seen here. Well, we’ll go to the red, I would go to the assembly group and I would talk to them. You know what mean? So from my leadership position, I really pushed out into the other department to say, Hey, like we’re going to trip. We want to help. Right. And we realized that previous leadership wasn’t as. 

useful to you, right? Or tactful, right? They weren’t trying to build a relationship because 90 % of the time they had to come talk to you. was, hey, this is screwed up. Like, why is this screwed up? What are you, you know what mean? And I got completely away from that, right? Because I realized we’re not gonna be able to scale into the three new products we’re working on if these relationships are still dysfunctional, right? Like I mentioned before, I see leadership as the bridge to the op side and that can… 

Better Batch (47:45.44) 

All 

Better Batch (47:54.781) 

Yeah. 

John Bergmann (48:10.956) 

But I mean, that’s even within what the leadership box is, right? Like, leader has to be interested in facilitating good relationships that their people have between the different departments that they interface with, right? Because obviously you can’t monitor and control every single one of those interactions, but you can be the source of the standard for that, right? You can say, we’re not going to, you know, like, if this person’s hostile and we can’t fix it, we’ll look at, like I did. 

I did some shuffling of personnel and shifts, right, because there were a couple people. Sometimes you just have relationships that don’t, that aren’t gonna happen, right? So it’s leadership’s job to make those things function, right, to the maximum extent possible. Does that answer that question? 

Better Batch (48:53.952) 

m 

John Bergmann (49:31.438) 

I find one of the most useful things is just the different leaders need to be seen. When I was that quality manager, I had a number of things. like, I want to do this and I want to do this. I had a lot of things that went well, but there were a few that very much did not. And that was because I talked about it once and then I didn’t follow up and I didn’t ask. So I think the way to tie all these… 

Better Batch (49:54.208) 

Yeah. 

John Bergmann (49:58.83) 

these three elements together that I am very, I’m very interested in, in, I don’t know, preaching the gospel is the right way to say that, but it’s kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, is like, you have to be, you have to be present. You have to be seen asking questions and providing support, right? Like I, like I mentioned, I do, I have my notebook I take around on Fridays and I just go, you know, I’ll go to a, 

Better Batch (50:07.328) 

Testify, John. 

John Bergmann (50:28.438) 

I try to go to a different group, even though I’m a quality engineer in the quality department, I’ll go over the shipping, receiving people and be like, what could be better? In fact, we just did an improvement in their area. I mentioned we designed this facility and laid it out, but we added a table in their workspace, which seems like a silly thing, but it improved their throughput and quality of life by way more than the big table, it’s like $1,000. 

Really we facilitate all these things by our presence in our action, right? Like in that 

Better Batch (51:01.386) 

chapter and verse from the book of John. 

Those are the questions I had. And that was fantastic. Something I like to ask most people who come on the pod is, you have a favorite KPI? Maybe it’s not the most important KPI, but something that you think is particularly valuable and that you gain insight from. 

John Bergmann (51:32.204) 

I don’t think I have a favorite, right? Because the problem is, is I like to ask a variety of questions about different things. then I generally in the moment, I’ll pull that thread about one thing, right? So it’s, I hope you’re not disappointed that I’m not like, I really like the metrics per million. 

Better Batch (51:44.906) 

Yes. 

Better Batch (51:49.726) 

I like that. No, John loves all his children. you know, that’s no problem. I’m up for the challenge. So I’ll give you I’ll reframe the question situationally and I’ll give you option A or option B. So what would be a good KPI around company culture? Right. What would be a way to measure? Is the company culture is as is written? 

And I don’t have an answer to that, I’m putting you on the spot. Or option B would be, what is a KPI around effective organizational change and our ability to process initiatives that we choose to execute? 

John Bergmann (52:34.51) 

I think you look at one of the things I’m working on getting going in this particular location I’ve deployed in other places is an idea submission structure, right? And I think a good indication of people’s interest in change or interest in improvement, whether that’s making their own life better. And a lot of times idea submission structures are good because people are somewhat innately self-serving. So if you can give them an avenue to say, you know, I am really sick of these forms. 

because the form layout is dumb, right? Or I’m confused and we have, every organization has a few forms that everybody hates, right? Because they’re just not intuitive or they’re constantly have errors. So I would say I like to deploy idea systems and then. 

Better Batch (53:26.94) 

and just see how people are interacting with it. 

John Bergmann (53:27.34) 

The analysis I like, yes, the analysis I like to do with that is then which departments put in more ideas, right? Because then you’re gonna get an idea of which leaders are waving the flag, you might say, in a manner that serves the organization. So that’s kind of my take on that. 

Better Batch (53:44.596) 

Very cool. 

Better Batch (53:48.648) 

Awesome. John, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re really lucky to have you. And I certainly learned a lot. Same here, John. Thank you so much. 

John Bergmann (53:53.422) 

Thank you. 

John Bergmann (53:57.294) 

I hope I was on topic well enough. Like I said, I hope so. 

Better Batch (53:59.36) 

You’re fantastic. and John, before we go, how can people find you? Great question. 

John Bergmann (54:06.158) 

I’m on LinkedIn. I work for the Nellow Incorporated. I do some side hustles. One of those is cultural leadership operations consulting. so yeah, find me on LinkedIn. You can find all that stuff. So I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Anyway, thank you both. 

Better Batch (54:17.386) 

Fantastic. 

Perfect. We’ll put a link in the show notes. Yeah. Thanks again, John. Thanks, John.