Episode 20: Lean Thinking In Action: Javier Sánchez on Driving Change at Kerry

In this episode of the Share PLM Podcast, we are joined by Javier Sánchez, Plant Manager at Kerry. 

Javier Sánchez is a seasoned industrial leader with over 30 years of experience driving transformation and operational excellence across global manufacturing environments. From his early engineering roles at General Motors and Delphi to senior management positions at Panrico, Andros, and now Kerry Group, Javier has built a career around lean leadership, innovation, and people-driven performance. With an MBA and a background in Mechanical Engineering, he brings a strategic yet hands-on approach to leading change and promoting continuous improvement.

In this conversation, Javier shares how lean thinking has evolved from a factory-floor methodology into a people-centered leadership philosophy—and why successful PLM and operational transformations depend as much on mindset, engagement, and storytelling as they do on tools and processes.

Here’s what you can look forward to in this insightful episode:

⚉ Lean Management Beyond the Factory Floor
⚉ Applying Lean Principles to Engineering and Design
⚉ The Shift from Tool-Driven to People-Centered Transformation
⚉ The Power of a Strong Change Story
⚉ Soft Introduction as a Strategy for Sustainable Change
⚉ Measuring Engagement to Guide Transformation
⚉ Standardization Without Losing Local Context
⚉ Leadership Experience: Start With People, Always


CONNECT WITH JAVIER: 
⚉ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/javiersanchezjimenez/ 

CONNECT WITH SHARE PLM:
⚉ Website: https://shareplm.com/ 


Join us every month to listen to fascinating interviews, where we cover a wide array of topics, from actionable tips, to personal experiences, to strategies that you can implement into your PLM strategy.

If you have an interesting story to share and want to join the conversation, contact us and let's chat. We can't wait to hear from you!

Transcript

[00:00:11] Beatriz González:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Share PLM podcast. I'm Beatriz Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Share PLM. And as always, I'm here with my co-host Jos. Hi Jos, how are you? And who is with us today?

[00:00:25] Jos Voskuil:
Hi Bea. I'm doing fine. And today we have a very interesting guest, Javier Sánchez, who is a plant manager in Kerry, in Seville. And we come from complete different world. He comes from the world of lean manufacturing and that's why I'm very curious to learn more about him.

But you met him already at a PLM conference, so there must be an overlap. So, Javier, a warm welcome, and we are looking forward to learn a lot from you and our overlap. But please introduce yourself and what are you doing in your professional life?

[00:00:56] Javier Sánchez:
Thank you very much, Jos and Beatriz, happy to be here with you. I will try to share what I have learned in the past, but I want to learn from you as well, from PLM, it's something new for me very well.

I was working in Granada, its a small city in the southeast of Spain, but I have to move to Seville because of in my university we did not have the engineering school. So I have to come to Sevilla. Before finishing during summer, I was working in General Motors in a factory in the south of Spain as well in Kerry identifying inspired parts and learning about any currents in welding quality control.

In this step, I was very interested in lean manufacturing. The first step, I'm talking about year 1991 or something like that. I saw the possibilities of this technique, technology, methodology to learn how to do things with less waste, quicker, and with less resources.

After that, I changed the company. I went into, not the company, the same company, but different role, I was in process engineering and product engineering. It was more related to R and D. And then the last year I was working in General Motors for eight years. The last one I was, is displaced into Germany. I was working in Rüsselsheim, the technical center of Opel and Saab, working directly with customer as a customer service.

Just after this step, I started, I'm talking year 1998, I took the opportunity to become a plant manager in Spain again, in a chemical business factory. And in this moment I started to apply all the learnings from lean by myself. And after that I was working in another companies like mining, three years, textile in Morocco, another three years, and human food between some companies of bread and pastry and now in Kerry does its ingredients. Total of food industry is over 19 years.

The last four years in Kerry, managing two factories, one in Granada and the other one in Seville, they are both in the southeast of Spain and different ingredients and different businesses. That is my quick story.

[00:03:15] Jos Voskuil:
Okay. And I, I think it's a very broad story because I hear all the, the aspects of the, the lifecycle being in R and D, even in manufacturing on the customer side. You bring in a lot of experience.

And you were mentioning also lean manufacturing and lean. Can you explain our audience who is probably not so lean as you are? What do you mean by lean and lean manufacturing?

[00:03:38] Javier Sánchez:
I prefer to call it lean management because it's lean manufacturing is the starting point. It was more oriented to manufacturing. But nowadays, we're seeing lean applied to hospitals, even to taxi and customs. And most of the company are taking more and more tools from the lean.

Lean is oriented to making this produce or the services we have with the minimum resources that we can use and always oriented to the value of what customers pay for. Of course, it's similar, we could say the similar definition for PLM, but in the case of lean it’s more based on process itself, more than product. And that is what is the big difference, but big similarity as well. Yeah.

[00:04:28] Beatriz González:
And what attracted you to lean manufacturing at the first time? Were you in contact with this concept and what attracted you? So you decided to learn it and apply it?

[00:04:39] Javier Sánchez:
Lean started in Toyota production, Toyota versus General Motors is a big difference of size. But Toyota came into a big business fighting with a big, big company, and the only thing was that they were using methodologies of producing with very, very quick service, small waste.

And they started to do this philosophy as it was in the automotive industry. We are talking about 1970 or something like that, but I started to work in General Motors, and they were copying this methodology from Toyota. So a lot of technologies, and maybe you have heard about just in time, 5S, VSM, most of them are coming from the Toyota.

So I have the first access to it in General Motors, and it was changing to Delta later. In this case, all my first filled with this methodology because of the possibility of saving time, saving money, saving resources for producing the same.

[00:05:47] Jos Voskuil:
And how do you look at engineers? Because they don't seem to fit in the process. I remember once a country manager from SAP told me, engineers are resources that don't want to be managed in a process, but we will get them. I have the feeling also with lean, we are also very much talking about an efficient process.

How do you see, I would say design and engineering as a process, can we have the same philosophy for engineering?

[00:06:14] Javier Sánchez:
Sure, sure, sure. For instance, I remember when I was in General Motors, in Delphi, there was a very, very standardized process of, I am talking about R and D. Okay?

[00:06:26] Jos Voskuil:
Mm-hmm.

[00:06:26] Javier Sánchez:
So the process of design, the product, meeting the customer specification, having a full design of each part of the, we were producing shock absorbers. Okay? So it has a deployment, very interesting, and the way of working for getting this final design was really standard. And every step we're including, every year where we're including improvements. So the part list, for instance, was shorter and, uh, sharing parts for one reference, for one SKU for the other. Sharing all the, the information in order to have the minimum part, so that is really lean in the design step. Later of course, in production and manufacturing it was applied quite similar concepts.

[00:07:16] Jos Voskuil:
Having worked with some automotive suppliers also, I see this continuous drive to reduce cost and to be more efficient in, in the process. And I think in the automotive industry, you probably have a volume industry, so it, it makes a lot of sense if you can improve.

Although I also saw in those lean processes that people, especially in the PLM domain, got too much pressure from the lean principles. They didn't have time to analyze. How do you look at that? Have you experienced with that?

[00:07:48] Javier Sánchez:
Yeah, yeah. I fully agree, that is the big difference and I see fully, fully agree with you. That is the big difference that I see in, depending on the company that is applying. As you know, because we have been talking before in with, the difference in now in more maturity programs applied in companies, they are more focused in people. So this is stress that you are telling me that was in the past, applying the tools. Really, really, we need a 5S very quickly. We need to implement a value stream mapping and checking. 

This stress now is much lower because of the maturity. And now, as you maybe know, in Kerry, we have a similar system. It's called One KPS, One Kerry Plant System, where we standardize everything, based on playbook, but the most important thing is that it has three big systems, governance, tools operating and people. And the people one is one of the most important, and it's exactly fighting what you say. We are looking for having soft introduction of the system in the plants, and then the results at the moment.

I am really happy with this system in Kerry, because the introduction in the plans that we have is very smooth and the resources are fantastic. We even measure engagement of people we measure, with an external company. And this ex-engagement, for instance here in Seville, has passed from 25 to 69. We have zero absenteeism. So I can tell you a lot of things related to this philosophy, not only based on lean. But based on people system according to the full production and design area. Yeah.

[00:09:35] Jos Voskuil:
Okay. So you mentioned a lot of things and you started with soft introduction, sounds good, eh, soft introduction. But what do you mean by soft introduction? Is it that you are having a lot of dialogue with the people? Are you designing processes together or how does it work? What is soft?

[00:09:54] Javier Sánchez:
Yeah. Very interesting. The change that we introduce in One KPS, I am going to focus in the last step because I have lived several introduction of program and some of them is with an external consultant, so we have a limited time.

But in the case of One KPS, we had people from Kerry, external, other sites coming into this factory so they know perfectly our business, our people, our difficulties. And the steps are very, very designed. So the most important is the first that is called the change story.

So it was in my site, as a site manager to define, according to the history of the plant, what is the milestone to tell people that we have to change. So thinking in the last 10 years of history of the plan, even before the acquisition from Kerry, we have all the history written in a specific area and explained it, explained to people thousands of time in this change story, everybody understood why, what, how, who have to change things to make things better. So the change story is the foundation. Then we have some, I would say teams, quick winged teams in order to have very good in a short term results.
 
[00:12:07] Jos Voskuil:
Can I ask a question about the change story? Can you give an example of the change story? What is it a really storytelling?

[00:12:15] Javier Sánchez:
Sure.

[00:12:16] Jos Voskuil:
One liner? 

[00:12:17] Javier Sánchez:
No. One liner. No. It was a, a presentation, maybe 10 minutes presentation, starting with the history of how this company was born in a family group, in a family area. Then this started to grow how the big monster of Kerry came to see the competitors and came to acquire this company and why the same people was in a bigger company, the possibilities they have. How is the employability of people is growing up with this program? And a lot of training, a lot of new tools to be used. So this is the big lines of the change story. There is benefits for the people, for the company, and for the sustainability future.

[00:13:03] Beatriz González:
How make you sure that the change story is live and people don't forget it? And when do you explain it? I suppose it's in the onboarding period when they join the company. And then do you have some kind of refreshments?

[00:13:17] Javier Sánchez:
I came into the company three years before starting the One KPS. But once the One KPS started, the story was repeated at the beginning of the launch, maybe I could tell you every week. Now we have two times a year, we call town halls. We have deployment of the results of the company, and all the situation we are, and new projects and so on. And in this day we share the change story as well to remember where we wanted to be and where we are today.

[00:13:49] Jos Voskuil:
And I'm coming back to again the lean philosophy and something you said for our change story, we had external assistance. I think companies like Share PLM do the same supporting companies in their organization. The One KPS project, would you have been able to do it yourself or are you too lean to have those extra work inside the company? 

[00:14:11] Javier Sánchez:
In the case of one KPS, as we have a taking into account that Kerry has 22,000 people all over the world, so we have a specific department that is deploying all the One KPS in all the sites. So they are coming as a, let's say, external help.

In previous companies, I can tell you and recall since I’ve been both or other companies I know for staying Danone, Danone had a help from a external consultancy. The program of Danone is called damaway, it's very, very interesting as well. And they contracted a consultant people. We did as well in Pan Rico.

And they helped a lot because they have a lot of experience, away experience with people managing, with people explaining the changes and so on. This is advantage. They had a wide experience a lot of businesses. The disadvantage is that they have one year, let's say, to implement the program, then they have to go very quickly for all the steps. But usually when the site manager or the CEO contracts this person, this company, they require a lot of things in a very short time. So they are quick in the implementation and it can be difficult, or as you said before, in the lean or maybe in the PLM, a difficult to understand if you are in a very quick system acquisition.

[00:15:34] Jos Voskuil:
But they understand here you have a group of people that understand your business. Because one of the, the challenges in the PLM world is often that the external consultant doesn't know the company, and the company doesn't know what they want. And it's a very wrong iterative process which doesn't fit very much the lean thinking, I would say. You have to own your own change. Right?

[00:15:57] Javier Sánchez:
Of course the responsible is the site manager or is the CEO of the company, or both the help is essential to know something about the business. I cannot implement a lean program in a company that produces if I don't know the business, how it works, because I have to use the same, the same language as the operators, the same language as the financial, and the same language as the maintenance people.

[00:16:25] Jos Voskuil:
Exactly. You speak the right language for the change story. Yeah.

[00:16:29] Javier Sánchez:
In fact, the change story cannot, in our case it was full in Spanish. We could not have the change story in English. No, because the operators speak Spanish only. Of course we were translating even the major of the town hall came to the presentation. And of course, we need everything to be in Spanish. So not only the language, but the specific word as well. We are talking about proteins you have to know some kind of warfare related to proteins or to related to the business we're talking.

[00:17:02] Jos Voskuil:
Exactly. Yeah. I also am aware that language is so important if you want to connect to people. I mean, especially if it's not your first language, it becomes, uh, difficult.

[00:17:12] Beatriz González:
Yes. Yes. But usually on the other hand, Jos also most of the big companies they have different sites across the globe. So you need to balance the local language with the global and official company language. So maybe you cannot afford to have three people in each one of the sites to explain, so specialized in communicating the change story, for example, in this case.
 
[00:17:38] Javier Sánchez:
But in this case, what you have to have is one person on the site translating both concepts to the expert in PLM or in lean to the plan, it is called a change agent. The change agent, of course, speaks English and speaks Spanish as well. So he's the translator of all these responsibility. Yeah.

[00:18:00] Jos Voskuil:
Another point you mentioned before was that you measured the engagement of, of people also in numbers. What is the method? Is it a query every once in a while or how are you doing this?

[00:18:11] Javier Sánchez:
Yes, it's an external company, external to Kerry. Once a year approximately, they support a big survey to survey to all operate or persons in the company, 22,000 survey answered and with the same question. And they have an algorithm where with the questions, they get the employment.

For instance, I know one very typical question regarding the employee, and would you like your brother or your sister to be working in the company with you? Of course, if you say yes, engagement is very high. So there's plenty of question like this, and it's an external company with the, we have a Kerry contract every year.

[00:18:52] Beatriz González:
Is more related, like human resources global survey, generally human resources survey. It's not specific connected to any buyer?

[00:19:03] Javier Sánchez:
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're right. What I wanted to say is that we saw the results of the implementation of the plan, we saw with the engagement of this company. So I saw the result of the human resource, like you said.

[00:19:16] Beatriz González:
That's a good tip to use also the global company service as so useful for your project and for your speech or narrative to the transformation you are leading.

[00:19:29] Jos Voskuil:
Yeah. I don't know if every company has a global survey. I think it's a good idea to have it.

[00:19:34] Beatriz González:
They should, right? I think it's quite normal.

[00:19:39] Jos Voskuil:
But we also heard, and in one of our previous podcasts also, that during the transformation process the team also had a specific survey to measure the user acceptance and the direction. I mean, so it's happening also in detail.

[00:19:54] Beatriz González:
Yes. I think they are complementary.

[00:19:57] Javier Sánchez:
If you have this tool, of course you can use for explaining in the future. For instance, I want to implement now One KPS in my other site. Okay. So of course I use this engagement level, maybe you can use the CapEx as well.

We have increased the CapEx here in Sevillae, not due to the One KPS, but it's maybe a consequence. There is another program coming in Kerry, called the Health and Safety Evolve. It's based in One KPS, so it's the foundation of other programs that can come in the future. So it's something that you can sell as well in other sites. So they are indicators of things that are going implemented.

[00:20:37] Beatriz González:
If we come back to the new introduction of processes and way of working, how lean is working? So it's you define first the process and then the tools, and you then deploy it to the operators? You do it both together? So you train them on the process and on the tasks that they need to do, how, how does it work? So they really learn it progressively, as you were saying before?

[00:21:06] Javier Sánchez:
You mean from the design point of view of their product? Right? Or in general?

[00:21:11] Beatriz González:
In general, when you implement a new way of working.

[00:21:14] Javier Sánchez:
Yeah.

[00:21:16] Beatriz González:
What are the steps so people don't feel overwhelm?

[00:21:19] Javier Sánchez:
In the case of Kerry, we have playbooks for nearly everything. So every everything is standardized. You can see the same boards, for instance, in every plant. Each one is his own language. But you can recognize the KPIs because we have all the same.

When you're implementing a new process in the plant,we have an engineering standard to follow, engineering standard checks, health and safety quality called CapEx, business term, everything. So there is a standard for each process, this standard having created in the beginning of Kerry by people specialize on that. And this standard are starting to be applied when you are into the program of One KPS.

[00:22:04] Beatriz González:
Okay. And have you find resistance from some sections of the plans to adopt the standard processes?

[00:22:11] Javier Sánchez:
A lot. I, I can explain to you, people don't want to change what they are usually doing, but I can tell you that when you have a lean program implemented resistance coming lower and lower because people is understanding that the every new process is an advantage for learning, for giving opportunities to the company.

[00:22:32] Beatriz González:
Mm-hmm. Okay. We are approaching the end of the episode. Jos, do you want to ask your question?

[00:22:41] Jos Voskuil:
Okay. Yeah. Javier, I think also you and I, we have a lot of experience and experience is what you get when you don't get what you expect. And so we are curious, what is your biggest experiences so far?

[00:22:56] Javier Sánchez:
Yeah, a lot of years in the managing teams, it's difficult to learn how to manage team. There is no good manual and team buildings, it is very typical now, but it's very important. And yes, this experience is time in, in working in that is very, is the most important. I agree with you.

[00:23:15] Jos Voskuil:
Okay, so it's the people that you have to work with eh?

[00:23:19] Javier Sánchez:
Yeah.

[00:23:21] Beatriz González:
Okay. Javier, what could be the key takeaway from this episode that you would like the listeners to, to take with them?

[00:23:30] Javier Sánchez:
Well, I will say that any methodology, thinking in PLM, lean, agile, shining all of them, that means a deep enterprise change needs people alignment. It's key. So I will repeat as we did with One KPS, start with people and all the other tools will come along. It's easy to introduce new tools if you have people aligned. So start with people. This is my big experience.

[00:24:01] Beatriz González:
Thank you very much, Javier, for joining us in this episode, and thank you to our listeners for turning in.

[00:24:07] Javier Sánchez:
Thank you very much to you for this opportunity.