IpX True North Podcast
The IpX True North Podcast is a global industry resource for all things people, processes, systems, and technology created to share conversations with our network of thought leaders, innovators, and founders changing the shape of the digital future. Here we share their stories, impact, vision and tools for success in the areas of process optimization, engineering, the model based enterprise, operational excellence, and digital transformation.
IpX True North Podcast
A Story-Driven Dive into Increasing Profit
We explore a story-driven, two-day CM2 workshop that turns change management into measurable profit and shared language across roles. Cindy Price shares how immersive scenarios reveal costs, benefits, and guardrails that convert tension into governance and better decisions.
• CM2 as a profit engine, not overhead
• Simulation across concept to retirement
• Costing change and building business cases
• Role-based tension turned into clear rules
• Change beyond engineering to HR and compliance
• New, revise, and retire decisions tied to margin
• Mentorship across industries and experience levels
• Pathways to CM2 Core and Pro after the why
• Applying single point of truth and closed loops
• Future of CM2 in services, banking, and software
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Welcome to the IPX True North Podcast, where we connect people, processes, and tools.
SPEAKER_02:Hey, welcome back everyone. Brandi Taylor here from IPX, and uh today we're diving into what I want to call a breakthrough training experience that really made its debut uh at our conference last year. So in at October at the LightX conference in Orlando, um, Cindy Price, here with me today, led a two-day workshop called the CM2 Experience. And so imagine stepping into what I call a fully immersive, story-driven kind of a simulation where you're walking through the entire life cycle of a product from initial concept all the way through to retirement. And you see firsthand how CM2 works, how it unlocks efficiency, governance, collaboration at all of the steps. And for me, the differentiator in this workshop is the primary focus of how CM2 really affects the bottom line and the financial bottom line. So many times we find that mature organizations see change in configuration management as just overhead, right? Or just the cost of doing business. They don't really understand what change costs the business. And it impacts such an enormous amount of our resources, human and material. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. So joining me is the creative mind uh behind this dynamic workshop, Miss Cindy Price. Uh, she is, I am proud to say, she is now the chief CM2 architect at IPX. Uh so I'll have her introduce herself in just a second here. Um, but from my perspective, you know, her true passion for helping organizations and individuals reshape how they think about our certification, the training, the long-term success really kind of comes through this interactive course, which is which is super fun. So whether you're new to CM2 or you're a seasoned veteran like a lot of us are, or just looking to kind of renew your edge as a certified professional or share some some of this great content with your organization, I think this two-day session really promises great transformation, clarity, and and kind of connection in that way. So thank you, Cindy, for hanging out with me today.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thank you for that wonderful intro, Brandy. I'm super excited to be part of the IPX crew and be able to bring forward my passion and more importantly, experiences over 30 years as an implementer of not only the business process of CM2, but being able to inspire people at all levels across all functions of what the business benefits are and kind of break down those archaic barriers and perceptions of what it is and how it's currently being used. And also have the um uh fortunate opportunity to implement PLM tools uh post-being able to implement the business process. You gotta get the process first and then to get the tools uh working for you. So I'm super excited to be able to bring forward to uh anyone looking to help manage their bottom line, uh, whether you're struggling or just wanting to do improvements, I'm just you know, happy to help and contribute where I can.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. I love that. And I, you know, so many times people of our CM2 community come to us saying, you know, we just struggle, we know the value of doing this good work, but how do we communicate that to our leaders? And how do our how do we get our leaders to really understand this, right? Um so the financial bottom line is obviously a really great way to do that. So we we just, you know, we don't talk about it enough, I think. And so I I love that we're focusing on it here. So before we just jump into this and get started talking about this workshop, do you mind just giving a little bit of intro to yourself, to the community and your background, your history? Because you bring such a great breadth of information and experience.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sure. Uh so I'm not far sure how far back I'll go, but I'll at least give you the the you know the educational piece. So I've got an electrical engineering degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and then I also have a master's in engineering management from Western, um, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. I started my career actually as a facilities engineer in the gas industry, and ironically, that was a really awesome first job as a you know, fresh college student graduate, because it wasn't a super while it had some technical content, the role I was in was to develop the cost of service. So I immediately had to get understanding some financial terms and IRR and cost of service. So not only was I mapping out and configuring and identifying, designing the system, the overall transportation system, but I also had to put a cost to it. So very early in my career, I got exposed to the business side of managing a business. Um, then I got into automotive. So I moved to West Michigan and started working in uh a variety of manufacturing organizations, primarily automotive. So I'd say the last 30 years of my career, for 30, 35 years of my career, have been primarily automotive. I have done some work in consumer packaging, which has been fun. And I actually bring some of that experience into the the training um content. Uh but most of my career, I've kind of kind of walked through a lot of different roles. So I've done engineering quality, product manufacturing, project management or program management. Uh I've led teams, big groups, whether it be in a manufacturing setting or advanced product development. In my last role, I was working for Yongfeng Automotive Interiors, and I had responsibility for the North American Engineering Services. So working with Yungfeng, I was able to actually create a CM department that was a shared services organizational structure that did end-to-end CM2. And it it was, it's difficult in big organizations with these, you know, uh, I guess, perceptions or assumptions about uh of post practices where CM tends to be like an engineering central or engineering change type of activity, breaking through those uh perceptions and those barriers and breaking through the organizational structures that tend to put up these lanes and say, well, that's not my lane, that's your lane, and being able to show how CM2 actually weaves business structure together. It really is the glue that holds things, hold things together. So I was working at um also at Yungfeng and also had the opportunity to, I spent about 10 years at a small company um that made shifters called GHSP. And also there, I was impl I implemented the CM2 process, also implemented their PLM solution, their tool, and there was part of the ERP committee to help select their ERP solution. So we we were able there to be um we were successful in convincing the C-suite on the benefits of end-to-end a closed loop change process and why it was really important to establish what we called spot, single point of truth. So it was neat because in that organization, we really went very deep into applying the CM model end-to-end. I'd say very deeply. When I went to Yung Fung, it was a little bit more challenging just because of the mere size of the organization and where they were uh organizationally, just not quite ready for a full immersion. But that's okay. It didn't stop us. We just had to pick our battles and pick the things we could do and convince the creators and designated users, get them to get on board with some of those changes. And we did really a grassroots up initiative with uh within Young Fung. It wasn't more of a top-down. So I've got some experience doing top-down where I did that at GHSP, and then a bottom-up approach at Young Fung. And there's not a right or wrong answer, it's just depends on the culture within your organization. So I've had a lot of fun in doing this and certainly have played a lot of different functions and roles so I can appreciate what those different functions do, and and more importantly, you can appreciate the challenges that they have. So I tend to try to help in our workshops and with our training material, try to help the participants, the attendees, understand what their roles are so we can carve out and we can give them very specific support and very specific help on in the context of what their roles so they go back into their in organization, the business. What can they physically do? What are some things they can do, and more importantly, how could they do it? So super excited, and that's kind of um a little bit about me business-wise on the professional or on the personal side. I'm married, happily married, 31 years. I've got two adult um uh sons and a fantastic daughter-in-law, and and hopefully in the near future, I've my son, my youngest son is engaged, so we're gonna have another daughter-in-law in the future. So, and then of course, I can't forget my dog Minnie. Um, she's a mini burner doodle, and she's eight, and she is gives us joy every single day. So that's a little bit about me.
SPEAKER_02:I love it. Thanks, Cindy. There's so many fun things in there that I would love to unpack with you. I think that you know, some of that experience, that's a lot of what our our audience loves to to dive into is what's the secret sauce to doing this within complex organizations and global organizations that have some strong culture? So um I think that there's definitely some some some other discussion topics that we can have on different days. Uh, so thank you for that. Um you know, I guess what I want to do is just kind of jump in a little bit here and just start to explore your brain on this this story-driven workshop. So let's just start at the beginning and tell me a little bit about, you know, I think you you started to to kind of in your intro there, tell us a bit about it, but you know, what inspired the creation of kind of an immersive story-driven walkthrough workshop?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think the the the what inspired me is I wanted to can create an environment where participants learn the key concepts without being lectured to. I didn't want this to be training per se. I wanted this to be a true experience and immersing emerging them into real life scenarios, right? And the approach really is to learn by doing. So if you get people learn by doing in a in an in in this real life and realistic environment, they're going to learn personally the answer to the question why. And I don't mean why do CM because customers expect it or because you have to. I mean really uncovering, uncovering the impact of managing change and what that can do to the health of your business. So, you know, it really starts with why. Why do it? So that the whole inspiration was to get people to their personal answer to why, but do it in a fun and realistic type of activity where they're immersed in something that aligns what they do day to day.
SPEAKER_02:I love it. Okay. So with that, could you just walk us through a little bit of this experience? Like what can people expect and how is it different then from traditional training? A little bit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I can tell you what it's not gonna be. It's not gonna be sitting a button chair with me giving you PowerPoint slides, just teaching you acronyms and and flow charts, and and this is what you need to do. It's not luxury. There's very minimal amount of that content. Really, this is us giving you um a fictional organization. So we're gonna give you assigned roles, we're gonna give you channel business challenges that align with probably things you have experienced in your past, things you could be currently experiencing, and things that you will experience more of a repetitive nature. And those challenges that you're gonna experience in this in these workshops come from external sources, internal sources. And so we're gonna run the business, what I call the CM2 way. And we're gonna have you and your your role making business decisions following this process. And the difference here is that we're not teaching the CM2 way. You're we're actually experiencing it through the creation of these workshops that tap into these concepts, that we're not lecturing you on the concept, we're just giving you the business scenario and saying, go uh, you know, go do X, Y, and Z. And by going through the experience of managing the business, you're you're gonna pick up on these concepts and they're just a whole different perspective. And we're not gonna spend substantial amount of time talking about things like drawings and CAD models and engineering bills and materials. We're not talking about that. What we're gonna be talking about is end-to-end change management, configuration management in a business setting. So, again, much of the focus is gonna answer that. Why? Why change? When you think about the purpose of a business, with the exception of 501cs, the purpose of a business is to make money. Now, that's separate from a mission. Missions could be to exceed customer expectations, it could be the best at what I'm doing, is could deliver people to the moon, right? So this is different from the mission of an organization. I mean, if you really boil it down to brass tacks, the reason companies exist is to create profit, create money. So in this workshop, we're gonna explore how to determine that business case on changes and use business cases for this decision making for why should we adopt the change or changes? And if we do, what would we what we expect to gain? So, you know, really at the at the end of the day, this this course is not about the body of knowledge of seam to right. So anyone can participate. You can be a seam to professional and you're gonna pick up a lot of new stuff. And matter of fact, if you're seam to professional that you might have your CMP, you're still gonna what you're gonna pick up is ah the aha moment of why do this from the perspective of more of the C-suite and managing directors and and operations managers and general managers, because what they those roles really care about is the PL. So it's making that business connection to that PL, which for CMP professionals that are already trying to be are a practitioner, this might help them either get more adoption, broaden their impact, or even go more global if they're uh it's a more of a regional type type of activity. If organizations are on early or not even adopting the methodology, this is a perfect workshop for higher level uh uh, you know, people like managing director level or directors or even operations management, people that are responsible PL to go through this course to understand again the answer to the question of why, why should they adopt it? Why should they even try this out? What is what's the answer to so what? What do I get out of this? So, you know, that's kind of why we've structured it to be an experience, to be relative to something you currently do today, current day-to-day experiences you have, challenges that happen, and and those things then allow you to align with, oh, that's what I can do at work. I can bring this immediately after this workshop. I can actually start trying these things out, or we're or I can start investigating what we are currently doing and looking for the opportunity. So there's a lot of things you can take away and apply, I mean, right after day two.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, I love this. So the session mirrors, you know, like we said, the life cycle of a product. So we're gonna walk through from the beginning, from concept all the way through to retirement. So let's talk a little bit about some of these challenges that participants are gonna encounter along this journey. Right.
SPEAKER_01:And so uh I don't want to give too much away, but we do have scenarios, challenges that cause us to have to evaluate what are we gonna do? How are we gonna react to this new requirement or new requirements? Uh and what happens is participants will learn through these exercises how changes in requirements can drive new product identifiers, which would be a new a brand new product, or they might revise an existing, but even with revising existing, when you do what we call an impact analysis, you might even retire or obsolete an existing product. So without giving too much away, you're gonna experience all three of those conditions in our workshop. You're gonna experience creating new, you're gonna experience revising existing, and you're gonna experience obsoleting an existing product. And and you're gonna understand how those impacts um uh are financially driving, what the costs of those are and and how the benefits are recovered once you pay for those costs. So you're gonna experience again each of those different life cycles.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. And thinking about those life cycles, and you mentioned the aha moments that occur. Talk about, you know, what phase do you expect would spark the biggest aha moments, you know, from attendees?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, usually it's day two, the beginning of day two, because now you're actually doing the practical application running the business. We give you business cases, we give you scenarios, and you're starting to count, you're starting to understand and cost changes. You're also putting the business case together and calculating the financial measures on that change. And that's where the aha moment goes usually happens because now you're connecting what is being asked of the organization to do, the cost of it, and then the benefit. Now, and I know again, I don't want to give away too much, but sometimes changes don't have a positive bottom line impact. And when those changes are raised, what people experience is you got to make a decision. And sometimes the decision is to decline or reject making that change. And I don't mean necessarily reject making the change entirely, but you might reject the methodology or how they're planning on solving it. And this happens every single day in businesses. So if you just broaden your perspective before and start dreaming just for a moment and think about all the kinds of change that happens in an organization on a daily basis, right? Um, you might you go to your your company's business briefing for whatever? So you go to uh the February business briefing and they're talking about January financials. What are they talking about? They're talking about sales, right? Sales going up, going down. Was that sales uh up, up or down relative to their what their strategic plan was, what their operational plan was? You know, are they having headwinds? Things that are helping or you know hurting them, they're causing them difficulty, or there's tailwinds, things that they're getting a benefit from, things even like currency it can have an impact to your financials. So when we talk about change, it's not you know, it's not this myopic view of a product change, you know, an engineering change and change decad. No, change is change. I don't care if if you're changing a business process, a manufacturing process, a product, right? I don't care if the change is regulation. Right? We deal we deal with regulatory tax changes. That changes change. It's understanding how those changes, if adopted, impact your bottom line. And that's the aha moment, is when people start realizing that oh, what if we were to look at change management more broadly and really understood costed and benefited or understood the benefit if it's there, because now if you understand what the benefit is, that answers that, so what? Why should I do it? And maybe you might make different decisions, you may not do something, or you may challenge the organization and how they're trying to achieve the conformance to that requirement. So if you've at third party or external regulatory change, and your your team comes to the table with a solution and you monetize that and you look at the benefit, you're like, ooh, this is gonna this is not gonna move us in the right direction. This is gonna take a, we're gonna take a hit. You might challenge them on how they're gonna do it and say, no, I want you to go back to the drawing board and look for a more economical solution, a solution. But a lot of organizations miss those opportunities because they don't think about change in that context. So that is usually the aha moment, is the beginning of day two when they're having to do the business cases and all their changes.
SPEAKER_02:It makes a lot of sense. And I think you know, our engineering community, uh, and we're engineers, so we can we can talk about these, is they're incentivized to continually improve their product, right? So if there's an improvement to be made, they feel that they should be making that. Well, you know, what are the unseen uh domino effects of that, right? Just because you you might be making an improvement. Well, what if you already have a bunch of work in process? And what if you have a bunch of material that's already purchased or minimum order quantities of something? So these are the uh the things that sometimes get skipped or overlooked, and then there's repercussions for once we push a change through and find these things out later. And so now we have to deal with those repercussions and scrap, etc. So thinking about the true cost of change, I think is really important. I really I agree 100%. So I love the role-based activity here, and just talk to me a little bit, you know, about being role-based and the decision making. How does this elevate the engagement and understanding of CM2 principles?
SPEAKER_01:Um, I think it elevates the engagement because you're putting people in roles where they have to interact with each other, and and when you put them in roles that by nature there is some natural conflict. And so, for an example, without getting into much detail, I might be a product engineer and I might come up with a solution for making an improvement to the product. I'm the what we would call the user, create the the sorry, I'm the creator, I'm creating the content. But the designated user might be a manufacturing engineer or an industrial engineer, they actually have to go produce that product. So there's sometimes that natural tension where in role-based you have an idea or a solution, but you got to get that buy-in from the person who has to do it. Similarly, if I'm a operations manager, I have a controller, and the controller is not going to want to spend money or they're gonna want to make sure there's a good business case. And the the plant manager or operations manager say, I don't have a I don't have a choice. The customer expects us to do this. So there's sometimes some natural tensions, which is purposeful. And so what happens is that engagement enables people to understand oh, this is why we need to have business roles, this is why we need to have um you know guardrails on what we call an acceptable business case or not acceptable business case, because then you take that emotion and that opinion out of it. And and what this highlights, this role-based, it allows people to have the conversation, but more importantly, they're like, oh, now I know why we've been arguing, why these different departments argue with each other, because we haven't established some guardrails, some guidelines, some business rules that allow us to make decisions based on the rules and not based on an opinion.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think so many times in real life it's really challenging. We say we communicate and we want to break down silos, but it's so hard when we're so busy. And so I think sometimes understanding those different perspectives and you know, having experiencing that where you're starting to really understand and reflect those different lenses really helps break down some of those barriers and and and brings that you know that respect to a different perspective than maybe what you typically live on a daily basis.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And at the end of the day, the thing that we all have in common is we want our organizations to make money, again, unless they're a 501c, um, which is more a more philanthropic type of uh mission and goal. But I mean, I can even bring examples and how the same two applies to 501c as well. But you know, at the end of the day, if you are in an organization and you're uh, you know, you're in the business of making money, that's the thing we all have in common. So sometimes we can resolve our differences in that conflict because we can all align around a very common goal. Then we can have a little bit more open dialogue and get and our heads become more open to change when there when we really truly assess the scenario and we say, okay, let's say that product engineer comes up or with a design proposal, uh raise a change request for a design change. The manufacturing engineer may say, that's gonna be really expensive to do. But if you did X, Y, or Z, it would make this kind of impact. So, what it does, it gets people working together because now they have a common goal: making money. How can we achieve a better service, a better product, make our customers happier, satisfy regulatory requirements? Uh, how do we combat or come up with strategies if there is a slowdown in business? How do we come up with strategies and solutions when there's a big pickup in business and we see um uh demand exceed what our forecast was? How do we those that's uh you know a good problem to solve, right? And you see companies are growing, maybe they're growing faster than they plan to, but we can all rally around the one thing we care about is is making money.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Can you think of any, you know, throughout your test runs and experience to date running through this course uh in that these workshops, are there any memorable reactions or transformations that maybe you've seen through the experience so far?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, absolutely. You know what's really interesting that the folks that we have participate in this course had a very wide diverse perspective. So we had uh what I call a mom and pop startup business, and they realized very quickly that they can start implementing a few of these things that were going to help them to understand their current state and enable improvements. And we had a mom and pop like restaurant that was trying to grow, and they didn't really truly understand how they kept changing, um changing their business, and they didn't understand one, how to make that stable, two, the impact, the the cost impact to to their business and making all these changes. They were just go, go, go, go, right. And that's not that's not atypical of a you know a startup environment. But when they went through this course, they were really quickly able to go, oh, if I were to do X, Y, and Z, I can understand my current state and enable improvements. And you know, in my humble opinion, once they implemented these things, it's going to reduce the likelihood of business failures, right? We've also we also have seen CM2 practitioners have a very different aha moment from the per perspective of getting other functions to understand how to modify that messaging to convince their internal company that change is enterprise and not limited to a single department. So, what's interesting is we've had some CM2 professionals that have been practicing for a decade. And what they walked away with was this is an opportunity to help broaden everyone's perspective and get more buy-in that if we were to broaden our reach beyond traditional product, that we could actually see a bottom line impact. And again, back to that earlier question, we can all rally around that one common thing about making the visits more healthy. So, what was really interesting here is that we had such a diverse group, but each of them had a unique experience that they were able to take benefits from it. The benefits for them were just a little bit unique and different.
SPEAKER_02:I want everyone to recognize the example that you used was fantastic because you said they were owners of a restaurant business. And I think that's important to highlight just because we get so stuck in thinking CM2 is about manufacturing and it's about a traditional manufacturing company building product. And it's it doesn't have to be the case, right? Like we we have service companies, you can build a product that's food. There's all sorts of different, we're all selling something, and these principles and talking about it from a bottom line perspective really do affect all businesses. So there's there's something to be gained for everyone.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And that was surprising to me. I wasn't expecting that. So that was that was that was a fun surprise, quite, quite uh frankly.
SPEAKER_02:Very neat. And so thinking about, you know, we're talking a lot about some some aha moments and things like that, but we have a lot of people in our our network that you know are considering maybe a CM2 core, maybe they've started some of the CM2 courseware, or maybe they want to continue into a CM2 Pro and get their professional certification. Talk to me about how this workshop works into that. How does that help serve as a launch pad for that?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think it's because it starts with that common element, right? The common purpose, the why. So, why do CM2 at all? The purpose is to make money. So once you get grounded in the big picture, then your CM2 core and pro enable you to learn how. So the best part of this workshop is we reveal in these workshops how all changes are either profit winners or profit losers. And when you go back to the office, you're going to look at things just from a different perspective. So if you are, so if you want to, you know, want to get on that journey, take this workshop first because that will enable you to go back and rally and keep get your business supporting your continued continued education and getting even more and different functions, getting certified in CM2, whether it be core and or pro, but you get to that pro level, now you really are learning to do it, and you can go do it inside your organization. And when I say go do it, I don't mean just in the context of making a product, but you can do it and you can go broaden that to how you run your business end to end. When there's changes, even think about HR changes, right? We we had a change recently here in Michigan where the state law uh changed with regards to pay time off that you everyone got 10, every full-time employee got 10 days of paid PTO for the purpose of six days, sick days. Well, organizations had to comply to that state regulation. So, how do they do that? They had to change, they had to make changes to job descriptions, they had to make change changes to their tool, their R HRIS, they had to go train employees on how now how they're gonna record that that sick time because that's different than regular vacation time. So changes changed. And so what this brings to the table is that aha moment for everyone to be able to adopt that more broadly, and it gives you that rule, that rule foundation, that how or sorry, that what and why. And then when you go into your CM2 core and then you go into that pro, now you're learning the how-to, but never forget your purpose, never forget why you're doing it.
SPEAKER_02:I love that you said CM2 applies to HR, so that's fantastic, right? There's there's still changes that need to be happening there. People are products, right? They have an onboarding, they have an office, they have a development process. So there's it it applies to everything in one way or another, and it doesn't mean that you're having the same people engaged in the process or the same decisions, those things can vary, but it still applies. So the key principles are still there. Uh, and and you know, we have we have HR expertise on site here at IPX as well. So so these are things that we don't often talk about, right? We get so stuck in our engineering worlds, we also fall into this trap. So it's a great example. Um, thinking about our more seasoned professionals, because we have longtime followers, lovers, people who have taken CM2 back in the 90s, uh cases. And you know, that and I think this I love this course, uh this training because it it does, you know, potentially bring something new to our community um and can reinvigorate that. Talk to me about what you would say to seasoned professionals, those who have been trying to work at embedding CM2 within their organizations for decades, even. You know, should they attend? Tell me what would be helpful for them.
SPEAKER_01:Uh absolutely. Even CM2 professionals that have been practitioners for 20, 30 years. I what you will get out of this course is really the financial piece, the the actual activity of understanding the key concepts like return on sales and gross margin, net margin, those are typical words you hear out of an accountant or a controller or possibly a general manager. But these fundamental concepts need to be understood by everyone. Because when we talk about the common element of profit, well, how do we really talk about that? Do we understand the simple math? So if your current CM2 maturity is stagnant or slow to improve, what this course will teach you is those financial concepts that you could then use and provide that much needed, much needed catalyst to jumpstart a broader CM2 adoption and gain higher level stakeholder engagement. That's key. So if you're if you're doing that grassroots up type of approach and you're stagnant and you've reached a certain level and you just can't break through that ceiling, this is the type of class you want to break, you would use to come back and kind of try to break through that ceiling and then get that adoption at a higher level, that C-suite level. Now, even if you're happy with your current seam to maturity, you are going to still gain that financial knowledge that you may not currently possess, probably don't possess. And lastly, these workshops are easy enough to bring into your own organization. And then you just take everything you've learned, but you put your own data into it. You put all your own information. So you take with you the context, the form, the substance that you can immediately start applying in day two. So I'm pretty excited of what it can do for even seasoned professionals.
SPEAKER_02:So then I could picture, you know, sometimes we think of these these uh you know workshop experiences where we're gonna get in a bunch of newbies and we're gonna train them up, or you know, we're gonna do it as a refresher course. Uh, but we could definitely do a combination of the both, right? So we have a little bit of the seasoned professional into the workshop, and we also have some some newer, less experienced uh entry-level individuals in our organization. And I could imagine that you know, maybe there's some peer-led insights that help shape the experience. Tell me what you've seen if there's a natural mentorship dynamic that starts to fold during these sessions.
SPEAKER_01:Uh well, there industry, that's an interesting question. And it's interesting because when we actually did the did this experience at the um conference, like I said, we had a very diverse team. And what what actually happened was I expected collaboration. That's just a natural activity that happens when you have several workshops, right? So I expected the collaboration. But what's what was surprising was some some of the folks that were more of your seasoned seasoned CM2 professionals, they stepped up and started mentoring what I would call the newbies, right? The example of this mom and pop startup restaurant. We had people from startup, um very new startup organizations that were doing marketing sales for a manufacturing company, and they were making connecting some dots, and it was just neat to see how the seasoned professionals took these other newbies under their arm. And they did start, they didn't get into talking the language, so they didn't, you know, take that, they didn't go into the you know, the oil in the ground, start talking about acronyms because we would have lost them, but they talked about the benefits and helped them understand. So, an example would be the restaurant. Um, the the owner, it happened to be an Indian restaurant, Indian food, and what she discovered, and she was trying to grow and her her business is a lot of demand, and she couldn't keep up with so much demand, right? And so she was, and the cost, she was trying to understand the cost of each meal, just like a product, right? It's just like what's it cost for me to produce this? And this isn't just the cost of materials, but it's the energy, the the labor, right? It is the the cost of packaging when people want to take something home. The to go to to go orders may be different in the cost structure than a eat-in order to really understand that. And when talking with her, uh wasn't me, but one of the other participants, they were mentoring her on, but you keep changing your recipe. She's like, Yeah, because I can't get all the spices I want to get. So I keep, but you keep changing, but you're not writing down the changes you're making to your recipe, so you don't know if your costs are going up or down. And more importantly, is your quality going up or down, or is it staying the same? So you're substituting different ingredients and different seasonings, but are there some are those sub substitutions really equal and equivalent? Right. So it was really cool. So it was really cool to see that happen in that in that started company struggling with their their process. Product and being able to connect that to the seam to methodology. And then more importantly, in our workshop, understanding how that impacts cost and profit. And because she wasn't changing her price, but you were changing your cost unknowingly. So you didn't know if you were winning or losing on the profit until after the close of that month. So, well, that's too late because now you can't recover from it, right? You've already made the change, and now you've you've got a losing change. Now you're going to go through that rework that we talked about of trying to undo what you did. We also had another um situation where we had a CM manager in a large manufacturing company was mentoring um a participant, a participant that had just opened up a new restaurant and was struggling, oh, struggling how to handle the changes of the recipe, which we talked about. But what was interesting is part of the issue was she was bringing on new chefs. So we talked about HR and that onboarding. She was bringing on new talent, turning them to a recipe, and but then she kept changing the recipe. And so her her staff, her resources were out of sync with where she was going, which then caused them to have product quality issues. So when she was running the her shift, product quality was X. And when her other chef was which was trained to use a older, non-revised recipe, was now on, let's say, second shift, producing a different product. And then you get feedback that hey, something changed in the this tasted, this tasted different when I came in for dinner than it did yesterday when I had for lunch. So it was just really neat hearing those conversations happen. And these are bridging different industries. So we had people from an electronics industry, we had company, we had people from a um a um like aerospace type of industry making products, talking to restaurants. And I just thought that was that was super cool. Seeing that mentorship that just was a big surprise to me. It was cool to see.
SPEAKER_02:So during Light X, you know, like you're talking about, this was a public course. So, you know, we had people who didn't know each other, right? They were joining a class and able to collaborate through this and learn from each other as well and make connections. Um, you know, and we can also, like we've talked about doing this as you know, a dedicated course on site at your facility where you have it's a really good team building, you know, breaking open those silos and having those discussions. So uh I think that it's just really a flexible way to do that. And and you know, anything really stand out with regards to that mentorship that happened in the public course. Because I think some people, well, how am I gonna learn by myself? Well, I think there's lots to learn about doing that cross-collab for different industries.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a surprise necessarily of seeing the the certified practitioners engage with the new. It wasn't surprising, but what was cool was the validation. You know, the the when they started working together and the same two practitioners were mentoring and engaging with the new cover, newcomers, they were going across industries. They're going and helping out someone who has no relation to what they do in a day-to-day day-in-day activity, which to me was the validation of this experience and what they were learning that it was universal. The enterprise change process is universal, and it and the newcomers learned from the practitioners that have been doing it forever, how those principles apply. And it doesn't matter if you're a small startup or you're a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company, they all realize what those benefits for were, and so it was just really neat to see the practitioners, the really folks have been doing this for a long time, they were mentoring the newbies, but they were mentoring them on the benefits, not the methodology. To me, that was a cool moment because now those practitioners can go back to their organizations with a new approach. How do I take this back? How do I help my organization look at CM2 and enterprise change in a different from a different perspective? And to me, that was super cool.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, that is super cool. I mean, so much time we spend talking about the methodology because people want to understand how to implement. We want to make sure that they're not missing the result, right? And so that's where I think this this two-day workshop really hits that on the head, is we're really talking about results. So we can talk about efficiency, we can talk about effectiveness, we can talk about data integrity, but again, it's the bottom line that really makes a difference. That's the whole purpose organizations exist. So, what excites you most about maybe the future of CM2, now that we're we're kind of thinking about it in this light and that you're now on board with us at IPX. Tell me a little bit about your thoughts.
SPEAKER_01:So, what what to me is what's exciting is that this course really is not industry dependent. It doesn't matter if you make a product, you make a service, it doesn't matter if you've got 10 employees or 10 million employees. So, what I'm excited about is where we can take this outside and broaden the adoption well beyond the traditional manufacturing, well beyond the industries that by definition require CM2. You know, your DODs, your aerospaces, your automotive, your software organizations, right? A lot of those have standards and quality requirements. Say you have to be certified and have a CM2 methodology. So I'm I'm looking at the future of how bright it is and how much more opportunity to go with things like banking. Banking and financial, they do changes all day long. All right. Software, software as a service, changes all day long. I mean, think of things like just storage, data storage. Data storage is growing. We're seeing it, it's huge. We're getting we're seeing more infrastructure, facility. I think facilities is uh also an untapped area where CM2 can be used to manage. Think about the cost of a facility. And we're not talking the cost of the energy and the rent. I mean, we all do that today, right? That's that's easy. It is the cost of maintenance and what is your actual repair costs, right? Are you doing your preventive maintenance? When you're adding assets, you're doing improvements, when you're evaluating the improvement in that facility, what is the payback on that? Is it a winner or a loser? Right. So I I look at this and say, I'm excited about the future just because of what this course can do in context of exposing what the purpose of it, and that this purpose is so universal to every and all industry.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. I think that's fantastic. And I know we have a lot of ideas and vision of where things are going in the future. So more to come. Um as we close this one out, you know, I I want to just let everyone know hey, if if you guys would love to try uh this workshop, um, it's called the CM2 Experience. It's a two-day workshop. If you mention this podcast when you contact IPX, I'd be happy to offer you guys 10% off uh mention the podcast. So uh if you're ready to experience CM2 like never before, sign up for our public course offered early in February. Uh if you want a personalized on-site experience for your leadership team, uh, you know, we're we're delighted to bring that experience to you uh and and have that be on-site with you guys or even virtual. So uh whether you're starting your journey or looking to sharpen your edge, I really think this immersive session is super fun. Um it's a it's a chance to experience CM2 in a new way and uh challenge and and thinking about the bottom line and and find a way to communicate this to your organization and to your leadership of of the importance of doing some of these things right. So um we've got influential people just like Miss Cindy here. So uh we've got lots of great ways to to help you guys improve and and figure out how to move that needle. So that's a wrap on today's episode. Thank you so much, Cindy, for hanging out and and we'll do it again. Awesome. Thank you, Randy, for having me. Thanks. Take care.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe and review the show. And for more information on IPX, visit ipshq.com.