The Allied Advisors Podcast

The Daily Leadership Routine: How to Make Operational Improvements Actually Stick

• Justin Goethe

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Episode Description

Most manufacturers have experienced the same gut punch: a major improvement project goes beautifully, everyone celebrates, and then six months later you walk back out on the shop floor and it's like it never happened. The problem isn't your people. It isn't your culture. It's the absence of a daily discipline to sustain what you built.

In this first-ever solocast, Justin Goethe goes deep on the Daily Leadership Routine (DLR) — the system he has seen transform some of the world's best manufacturing operations and the one he believes is the single biggest difference between companies that sustain gains and those that don't.

McKinsey research shows only 30% of organizational transformations fully succeed. VA & Company found that 70–80% of improvement projects fail within 24 months — not because the solutions were wrong, but because there was no system to hold the gains. The Daily Leadership Routine is that system.


What You'll Learn

  • Why lean projects, Six Sigma rollouts, and improvement initiatives fail to stick — and the one thing that changes that
  • The 5 pillars of Daily Management and how each one plays a specific role in keeping operations stable
  • How to structure a 15-minute daily meeting that actually drives decisions (not just status updates)
  • The communication cascade model — from shop floor to executive level — and how to scale it for your organization
  • Why process confirmation is a coaching exercise, not an audit (and how to make sure your team feels the difference)
  • The 4 maturity levels of Daily Management and why starting at Level 1 is the right move
  • The 6 most common reasons Daily Management fails — and how to avoid every one of them
  • A practical, step-by-step guide to launching DLR at your facility starting this week


Key Takeaways

Daily management is not a meeting — it's a leadership system. It connects leaders to the reality of operations every single day through a structured routine of monitoring, reacting, and improving.


Allied's Fractional CI Manager Program

Justin's Fractional CI Manager (FCIM) program is a 12-month embedded partnership designed to help mid-market manufacturers build the internal capabilities to run continuous improvement on their own. It's not traditional consulting — it's a teach-to-fish model.

The program includes:

  • Quarterly on-site value stream mapping workshops (System CIP Cycle)
  • Project A3 development and coaching
  • Weekly roadmap review meetings
  • Daily management implementation and coaching
  • Problem-solving skill development at all levels

Clients have achieved up to 80% increases in output with zero capital expenditure — no new equipment, no major investment. Just better management of existing processes.


Resources & Links


Connect with Justin

SPEAKER_00

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Allied Advisors Podcast. The podcast for mid-market manufacturers looking to scale operations and improve that ever important bottom line. I'm your host, Justin Gothi, and today I've got a special treat for you. There's no guest, no interview, it's just me. So I don't know, maybe it's not a treat. You can tell me after the episode. But this is my first solo cast, and honestly, I've been looking forward to this one for a while because the topic we're covering today is something I am deeply passionate about. It's something I've seen work inside some of the world's best manufacturing companies, and it's something I've watched fail over and over again at companies that skip it. We're talking about the daily leadership routine, also known as daily management. So let me start with a question. Have you ever been part of a major improvement initiative, a big lean project, a Six Sigma rollout, a new system implementation, where everything went great during the project, and then six months later you walk back all out onto the shop floor and it was like the project never happened? I know I have, and I bet most of you listening have too. Here's the thing: that's not a people problem. It's not a culture problem. And it's definitely not a laziness problem, it's a system issue. Companies pour enormous energy into improvement projects, and then they walk away without putting in place the daily discipline needed to sustain what they built. And the research, it backs this up. McKinse found that only 30% of organizational transformations fully succeed. Vane and Company found that 70 to 80% of improvement projects fail within 24 months. Not because the solutions were wrong, but because there was no system to hold the games. That system, that system is the daily leadership routine. And that's what we're unpacking today. So, real quick, for those of you who are new to the podcast, my name is Justin Gothy. I'm the founder and president of Allied Group. Before I started Allied, I spent about 15 years in the automotive industry, most of that time at Robert Bosch, one of the world's largest tier one automotive suppliers, where I worked as a logistics engineer, a warehouse manager, and an engineering group leader. And then I did a little stint at Amazon. I found an Allied in 2019 with one core belief that operational excellence is not about the tools. It's not about the combines or the value stream maps or the 5S events. Those things matter, but they're only as good as the daily discipline behind them. That's what this episode is about. Over the next 30 to 45 minutes, I'm going to walk you through what daily leadership routine actually is: the five pillars that make it work, what it looks like when it's done well, what it looks like when it falls apart, and how your organization can start building this system, regardless of where you are on your improvement journey. If you're a senior leader, an operations manager, or a continuous improvement professional, this one's for you. So let's get into it. All right. So what is daily leadership routine? At its core, it's a structured daily discipline that keeps leaders connected to the reality of their operations every single day. Not once a week in a staff meeting, not once a month in a KPI review, every single day. It has three fundamental jobs: monitor, react, and improve. You monitor the status of your key performance indicators, you react quickly and deliberately when something goes wrong, and you improve sustainably by solving root causes, not just symptoms. It sounds simple, and in theory it is, but the execution, the discipline to do this consistently at every level of the organization, day after day, that's where most companies struggle. So let's talk about how you do it, because the daily leadership routine isn't just a morning meeting, it's a system built on five pillars. And over the next several slides, we're going to break down each one, right? So where daily management fits in, how does it fit into your overall continuous improvement system? Uh, you know, we start with without advisors, we have our fractional CI manager program, and that program really utilizes a common cycle. Every 90 days, we're on site with our with our clients and we're doing a system CIP workshop, a value stream mapping event where we are going out to the gimbal, going out on the shop floor. We're mapping the current flow of information and materials, and we're developing this a future state based on the three focus areas. You know, what's the market doing? What are we doing in the business? Are we expanding? Are we contracting? Are we moving into a new facility? Are we taking on another facility? Right? Where is the business directing us? And finally, what's the vision? Are we implementing RFID? Are we going to a paperless shop floor? Do we have a big lean conversion initiative? Where, what's the vision for the business and where are we headed? So we do that every 90 days. When we come out of these workshops, we have a project roadmap that helps us move towards that future state that we've identified. With that project roadmap, there's a list of projects that we're going to work on or we're going to complete over the next 90 days. And each one of those projects has an assigned owner and a project A3, which outlines, you know, back barrel business case, why are we working on it? Uh, current state, how does it work today? Future state, how's it going to work in the, you know, when we're done, uh, which is really important because a lot of times folks, you talk about a project, but then people leave and they have very different concepts of what the deliverables are for that con for that project. So taking the time to define that with a project day three really does wonders for organizational alignment between the folks on the on the ground doing the work as well as the leadership who's directing the initiatives. Um, so each project has a project day three. In addition to, like I said, the background business case, current state, future state, there's also an approach section which outlines step by step what has to be completed to complete this project, along with due dates and responsible owners, and then metrics. How are we gonna, you know, how are we gonna measure that the project was a success? You know, it's it's very important that we understand that going in so that we know, you know, when we're done, was the project success successful or not? It is also very important because after we've implemented the project, and every project really should have a standard that we're either changing or implementing, um, we're gonna do what's called process validation. We're gonna go out there and check every shift, every day, that the process is working per the standard, right? We're gonna select some process KPIs that if they are, if they check out, if they meet our criteria, then we can feel confident that this process is a is a success and it's working the way we designed it. Well, what happens after that? Too often, the engineers and the leadership team walk back in the office, they pat themselves on the back, and they say, Great job, team. You did fantastic. And six months later, that process is now it's not functioning the way the standard intended for it to function. It's not functioning the way that you validated that it was functioning. Things slip. People stop doing following the standard, people kind of regress back to status quo. So that's really where daily management comes in. Daily management is a process for daily monitoring, process confirmation, and reaction to deviations. It's really the engine that sustains improvements between system CIP workshops and ensures projects deliver lasting results. Right. So there's five pillars of daily management. The first one is KPI monitoring. We want to track safety, quality, cost, and delivery metrics every day. We want to set up stability criteria so that when those indicators deviate beyond acceptable limits, we have a quick reaction plan. Hey, if we see a deviation to our delivery, right? Let's say our on-time delivery drops below, I don't know, 90% or whatever that you know lower limit is, we have a quick reaction plan. What do we do? We investigate schedule attainment. We, you know, go out there and and and and check on the route runners if we're if we're timing routes, right? We're going out there and we're doing a standard reaction to hopefully bring that process back into stability. Uh, and then one of the most important pillars, uh, I guess they're all important, but in my mind, one of the most important pillars is daily communication. I'm gonna let that sink in for a second. Daily communication, right? We want to have structured on-site meetings with clear agendas. Notice that other part. On-site, not in a conference room, not at your desk, not at your house, on the shop floor, right? Where the action is actually happening. We want to have daily meetings where we're reviewing those KPIs and we're talking through uh the deviations that we're seeing, our standard reactions, right? And then problem solving, sustainable root cause analysis and PDCA. Now, I want to make clear one thing here. The goal of the daily leadership routine or the daily management meeting is not to problem solve in the meeting. It's to take that those problems away from the meeting, problem solve root cause, you know, deep dive separately, and then bring back the results to the meeting, right? We want to follow up in the meeting, follow up with open points, but we don't want to turn the meetings into problem solving events. And that'll become more transparent as to why later. But but the main reason is it's supposed to be a 15-minute meeting, not an hour meeting, right? And if you start problem solving, it's gonna turn into an hour meeting very quickly. So problem solve outside of the meeting, but bring in the results of that problem solving into the daily leadership routine, communicate to the team what you found and then what you're gonna do about it, right? And then the last thing is the process confirmations. We want leaders to verify standards every shift, every day on the floor as it's happening. That is how we ensure that the process maintain the process is maintained and the standards are followed. You have to do the process confirmation every day, every shift. It's gotta just be inculcated into your daily leader standard work. So moving on. All right, so KPI monitoring and visualization, what to track? So we track safety, quality, cost, and delivery targets. Safety is pretty easy. Near misses, lost time incidents, audit scores, right? I mean, pretty much every manufacturing company has some safety metric that they're monitoring. Days since last uh lost time incident, right? Something that you're that you're tracking. So we want to bring that in because obviously one of our one thing that's important to all of us is that everybody that works with us, works for us, works on our team, I want them, and I'm sure you do too, I want them to go home at the end of that day in the same shape that they showed up to work. I definitely don't want anybody getting hurt, injured. Um, I don't want anybody's quality of life uh diminished because they they came to work that day, right? So safety is one of the core pillars. Uh the next one is cost, right? And and and there's a lot of things that really could roll off into cost. Uh inventory dollars could be cost, um, headcount, right? Uh productivity, right? Units per man hour. Um, you know, that could be cost. You know, there's a there's a whole host of things that could that could wrap up into cost. The most important thing is whatever cost metric you choose, it is what you feel to be the most indicative of your main cost driver for your team, your value stream, right? We want to make sure that whatever KPIs we're monitoring, they are the most important for us. They're the greatest indicators of our team success. So, so like I said, cost is broad. You can really dive into that a lot of ways. And just need you just need to feel confident that whatever you land on, it really does indicate how your team is performing on a cost basis relative to your targets. Right? Next one is delivery. On-time delivery could be something you track. Maybe that's on-time delivery to your customer. Uh, if you're running timed material delivery routes, it could be on-time delivery of those internal routes. Um, it could be stockouts, right? Because obviously, if I'm running out of components on the line, that leads to a whole host of other issues. I have to change up my schedule. I can't run what I was intending to run, which is going to bubble up into potential misshipments. So, you know, we could be looking at stockouts. We could be looking at schedule attainment. And when I say schedule attainment, I mean the production schedule was I was going to run, you know, X number of pieces of product A, Y number of pieces of product B, and Z number of pieces of product C in that order. And then my schedule attainment was did I run it in the correct quantity in the correct sequence? Yes or no? Uh, if I didn't, right, then that goes against my schedule attainment. And then I measure that. And we have some defined criteria that I want to hit maybe 90% schedule attainment attainment, plus or minus some percentage, right? Maybe it's 10%, whatever. And if I go beyond those limits, I want to see why. And really, in that case, really if I drop below 80% is the only time I react. But that could be my delivery metric that I'm reviewing in my daily leadership routine. Uh, the next one is quality, right? So scraph rate, drop parts, you know, whatever quality indicator, maybe it's first pass yield, whatever quality indicator, again, is the most indicative of your team's performance. We want to make sure that we are we're tracking that. Um, one of the great ways to do that is the use of KPI trees. Uh, if you don't know what a KPI tree is, reach out to me. I'll I'll put my contact information in the show notes. But a KPI tree basically just is a visual representation of the hierarchical relationship of KPIs within the business, right? Because at the top we have our key performance results, which maybe is you know output, um, maybe it's OEE, right? Productivity. We have our highest level key performance results for the business. And then we have lower level KPIs that feed into those key performance results. And understanding that relationship is paramount to making sure that we're working on the right things. If you don't understand, if you don't understand the your your KPIs, there's no guarantee that you're working on the right thing. You could be working on a good thing, but it, but it doesn't deliver the biggest value uh to the business, right? So that being said, a couple things for best practices. We want to define intervention limits, right? We want to have those upper and lower control limits so that we react when those limits are are surpassed or broken, right? We want to have a reaction fight uh along with a standard reaction. Hey, when these limits are are deviated, what do we do? Um we want to track status daily. We the trends got to be transparent. We've got to see are we winning or are we losing? Are we getting better or are we getting worse? It's important that that is that that is transparent to everybody on the team. Uh, we already talked about the KPI trees, but yeah, again, super, a super important tool. If you don't have a KPI tree, I would highly encourage you to take the time with your team to develop one. Uh believe me, it pays dividends down the road for for for as long as you maintain it, really. Um, we want to track in short cycles. The shorter the cycle, the better. Because if I can the quicker I can detect a deviation, the faster I can eliminate that deviation and return that process to stability. So if I can track it, track, you know, keep KPIs hourly, that's what I want to do. Um, if I can't do it hourly, can I do it shiftly? If I can't do it shiftly, I at least have to do it daily, right? Because the longer you let that go, you know, the the bigger that time frame is, the more risk you have to your product quality, to your customer, right? So we want to track these things in as quickly or as small of increments of time as humanly possible. Uh, and then again, it needs to be on the shop floor, like we discussed. We need to visualize this on the shop floor. This is not an email. This is not a conference room discussion. This is live data on the shop floor reviewed in real time, right? And then again, the target being real-time data. If we have MES or you know, manufacturing execution systems or IES inter-logistics execution systems, we want to pull that data into this daily leadership routine and we want to use it to drive the discussion and to hopefully drive improvement. All right. So, how do we make those KPIs visible visible? So, for those of you that are listening to this that are not watching the video on YouTube, I will put the link in the show notes so you can watch the video on YouTube. But uh, what I'm looking at on my screen is an example of a safety quality cost delivery board. That in this example, they also have inventory as another daily KPI that they want to monitor and review. That's fine. That's great. Um, but basically what they've got is they've got a defined metric, they've got a target, and then every day they're monitoring did we hit the target or not? Is it red or is it green? Again, real clear indicator of how are we doing. Um, so that's you know, this is one way to do it. I'm not saying this is the way you have to do it. There's a million different formats and templates that you can use for your daily leadership routine. Um, there's no right one, let's say, uh, but this is a one. So you, you know, if this is something that could work for you, uh, I think I found this, you know, do it a quick Google search. So I and I actually think there's a company out there that makes this board, you can buy it and they'll send it to you. Um, so there's a lot of quick templates that right off the shelf, you can get it, bring it in, and get this thing kicked off pretty quickly. You know, the one thing about doing a podcast is I can't stop and ask, does anybody have any questions? Because I'm sure somebody is out there listening to this that does have a question. And that's no problem. If you do have a question, again, I'm gonna put my email address in the show notes. Um, feel free to email me. Uh, you know, if you if you don't have the show notes, it's it's J Gothi, J G-O-E-T-H-E at allied group.io. Shoot me an email, happy to discuss it with you. I love this stuff, as you can hear in my voice. Hopefully, I'm very passionate about it. So I'd love to help you uh implement this at your facility and make it as great as it can be. So moving on. Uh the quick reaction system. So, yeah, I keep mentioning stability criteria, standard, you know, reaction limits, you know, standard reaction. So there's really, let's say, four things that we want to do as part of our daily leadership routine. Number one, we want to be able to quickly detect when there's a deviation, right? So we do that through having upper and lower stability criteria, right? Anything that goes beyond that is a clear deviation. That triggers our escalation. When we see that deviation, when we see that result that go that violates these limits, we want to have a defined immediate action. We want to have a standard reaction to do that. Hopefully, when we take that standard action, it returns the process to stability. Um, if it doesn't, then that's something we escalate to the team as part of the daily leadership routine for a separate offline problem solving, right? Maybe we do an 8D, maybe we do a 5Y uh PDSS. But anyway, we're gonna dive into that deeper offline. Uh, and then that root cause, we want to record it, right? We want to record it for posterity because one of the things I tell my clients all the time manufacturing is whack-a-mole, right? Issues are constantly popping up and we're just whacking them back down. But good manufacturers, world-class manufacturers, try not to whack the same mole twice. We want to fix the problem and then move on because something else is gonna crop up. We know that, but we don't want the same thing cropping up over and over and over again. So it's really important that we we document these root causes and we document our corrective actions to them so that we know if this happens again, hopefully not. But if it does, what did we do last time? And then maybe we can figure out why it didn't work, why it didn't work and what we need to do better in the future so that we could finally put this problem to bed. Right. So, key principle to all of this is every deviation must have a defined owner and a reaction plan. If a measure is not completely finished, it must be tracked as an open point until closure. You can't just skip it and move on. We have to solve problems before we move on to the next. If we don't take the time to solve the problem, guess what? It's coming back. Guaranteed, right? Really, and the way we solve it, again, standard reaction, clear owner, and we want to follow up on it every day until we're comfortable that the problem has been or a corrective action has been put in place and the problem's been solved. Okay, all right, moving on. So regular communication, right? So I talked about this. This is in my mind one of the most important things of a daily leadership routine is that standard daily meeting. That meeting should have a defined agenda with standardized content duration, and here, most importantly, participants people have to show up. This is a value stream meeting, so hopefully, a cross-functional section of the value stream team shows up to this meeting every day and provides feedback and input, right? We want to meet on site at the board, held on the shop floor. I can't emphasize this enough. We make things, we're a manufacturing company, we have to meet where the action is, and the action is on the shop floor. We don't Need to meet in a conference room. We need to meet where the work's being done. And it needs to be data driven, right? We need to have good KPIs that we're tracking and that we're reacting to. And then that these KPIs drive the discussion. You know, it's great that folks have worked here, you know, 25, 30, 35 years. And that experience is invaluable. It really is. But making decisions on gut feel is not an effective way to run a business. We need to make decisions on data. We need to gauge our success on data, not on the way somebody feels about it. That's just not a recipe for being successful over the long term. And again, these meetings need to be action-oriented. They need to detect deviations quickly and then drive actions to eliminate those deviations and to return that process to stability. You know, measures are derived, prioritized, and tracked in these daily meetings. All right. Again, key principle here. Daily meeting is the heartbeat of daily management. It's not a status update, it's a decision-making forum. Right? This is how we're going to drive continuous improvement on the day-to-day level. Okay. All right. So an anatomy of an effective daily meeting. So this is our agenda. This is a sample agenda. All right. Doesn't mean there has to be your agenda, but it is an agenda that you could use, borrow, inculcate into your daily leadership routine. So first two minutes, safety review. Were there any incidents or near misses from previous shift? Yes or no? Next three minutes is the KPI review. So technically we've already reviewed the first KPI safety. But over the next three minutes, we want to review the quality cost and delivery board. Flag any intervention limit breaches, right? Did we do we deviate or is everything good? If we deviated, what happened? What immediate actions were taken? What's the status now? Right? How are we? Um that's the next five minutes. And then the following three minutes is open points follow-up. So we should have some some existing countermeasures that we're that we're following up on. We want to review the status of those. Are they closed or are we still working on them? Right? That should be with a defined owner with a defined due date. If we're not closing them out by those due dates, we need to really understand why and and push that we get these open points closed out again so that we can move on to the next thing. And then the confirmation results. What did yesterday's process confirmations reveal? Were we operating as we thought, or did we see deviations that we need to react to? Again, and and all of this, 15 minutes. Two minutes for the safety review, three minutes for the rest of the KPIs, five minutes for the deviation discussions, three minutes for open points, and then two minutes for the confirmation results. If there's an issue that comes up that we need to discuss longer than what this 15-minute agenda allows, that gets monitored, that gets listed as an open point and it gets followed up in the next day in the open point review after the folks who are responsible for that open point has time to go uh you know do some problem solving offline. All right. So communicate communication cascade. There should be multiple levels of communication throughout the organization. This is what happens at mature organizations. This doesn't happen in every organization, but great organizations cascade information from the shop floor, you know, as in a shift lead, every shift meeting where the, you know, the ship lead along with their associates are reviewing the KPIs for the previous day or the previous shift to give everybody an update on how they're doing or what they're coming into that day. Um, that's the shop floor meeting. Beyond that, uh, there's a value stream meeting where you have the value stream leader and the team leaders, right? That's really what I'm talking about here in this daily leadership routine is this value stream meeting, right? Where every day the value stream leader is meeting with his team and reviewing the previous day's performance, going through the open action items, right? Monitoring how we're doing, right? Keeping his finger on the pull to the value stream. Uh beyond that, there could be a daily level plant meeting. So if you've got multiple value streams in your facility, you might need a plant meeting where the plant manager is meeting with each of the value stream leaders to get an update on how the plant is operating. And then every week, maybe every month, there's an executive meeting. Hopefully it's every week, where the site leader is going through with all the functional heads and figuring out how they're performing at the site, right? At a highest level of the business, right? So again, not every, not every entity needs all these meetings. If you're a small mid-market manufacturer, you got one value stream, maybe, you know, 100 employees, you might not need all these meetings. You might just need the shop floor meeting and the value stream meeting. That might be enough. Um, but if you're bigger and you've got, you know, if you're a 3,000 employee facility, then yeah, you're probably going to need every one of these, right? You should be having every one of these every day or, you know, whatever the cadence is, daily or weekly. All right. And again, if you have any questions about this, please do not hesitate to reach out. Love to talk to you, uh, talk in more detail and see how I might be able to help your understanding and really help you to drive this at your own facility. Oh, one thing I should say the goal of these meetings is to solve the problems at the lowest level, right? So if the shop floor meeting, if they could solve problems at that level with the with the team lead and the shop floor associates, great. If they can't, those problems should get bubbled up to the value stream meeting, right? If the value stream team can't solve the problem, then that problem gets bubbled up to the plant level, right? And so on and so forth. So the goal is to solve the problems at the lowest level possible. If it can't be done, though, this is the tool that we use to escalate those problems up through the organization so that we can bring more or bring additional resources to bear on those problems to get them resolved as quickly as possible. All right. So problem solving. We've talked a lot about, you know, we need to do deep dive problem solving on issues that we're seeing in the daily leadership routine. That sustainable problem solving really takes the form of a PDCA cycle, right? Plan, do, check, act, right? All the time, over and over and over again. And really, if you think about continuous improvement, all we're really doing is taking PDCA cycles from very high level, you know, value stream mapping workshops all the way to the shop floor, right? So we're doing PDCA cycles maybe on an hourly um output tracking board, right? We plan to hit a certain target. Did we hit the certain target? Uh yes or no? If we didn't, how do we react? Right, PDCA. So again, we're taking that same thought, that same methodology, all the way from the system level down to the shop floor level, right? So this is if you have any questions, I'm sure most of you have heard of a PDCA cycle, but it really is foundational to any type of continuous improvement initiatives, right? Uh, the goal is always to close that PDCA loop. Uh, and you do that by giving every problem an assigned owner, structured analysis, and verified resolution. That's where that check comes in. We want to verify that the improvement that we're putting in place is actually having the intended results. And we talked about the A3. When you talk about A3s, people tend to think of A3s in one of two ways. I think of them, when you hear me talk about an A3, it's a project management tool. Some people use A3s as a problem-solving tool. Both of them are fine. Uh, but for me, it's really, I use A3s for for project management because it's a good way to, again, align on the scope of the project and to follow up each week in our roadmap meetings on the status of those projects because the A3 has background. Why are we working on this? Again, we need a KPI tree to really understand and make sure that we're working on the right things. But that that logic should be captured in the background of your project A3. Uh, you know, the background, the business case. What are what's the, you know, what are we going to get out of this? Right? What what what value to the business is this project going to have? Current state, how does it work today? Right? Future state, how is it going to work in the future? Followed by the approach and then the metrics. Everything we need to complete this project all on one 11 by 17 sheet of paper that should be reviewed routinely, hopefully every week, uh, and the status track. Um, our fractional CI manager program, we use project A3s as a standard format for every continuous improvement initiative. And I would encourage you to do the same thing. Uh, it, like I said, it ensures consistent documentation, clear ownership, and most importantly, measurable outcomes, quantifiable outcomes. Okay, process confirmation. I have on this slide, you will see it if you're watching the YouTube video, that process confirmation is not an audit. It's not. It really isn't. It's intended as a coaching exercise where you know leaders go on the shop floor, they observe the process, and then they coach the next level, you know, leadership down in the hierarchy on how to do things better, what are they seeing so that they can learn to see the deviations the same way that the leader sees them. But I will tell you, in practice, this feels like an audit. Um, it's it really does take a very good leader to be able to communicate to his team that look, this isn't intended to be punitive. I'm not trying to get you in trouble here. I'm trying to make us all better. I'm trying to make the organization better. Um, so that really does sit, that that responsibility sits uh with the leader to make sure that when he's doing his process confirmation, it doesn't come across as, hey, I'm trying to, I'm out to get you, right? I'm not out to get you. I want you to be successful. And I want to be able to show you how what success looks like, how to recognize when we're deviating from that path. And then what do you need to do to return us to the successful path, right? That's the point of process confirmation. We want to observe standard work on the shop floor. We want to coach our downstream leaders, and we want to teach them how to see uh through the leadership's eyes, waste, right? Uh deviations, so that we can return the process to the stability and verify that the improvement initiatives that we've implemented are sustained, right? It really is a catalyst for continuous learning. That's the goal of process confirmation. Um, it is not something that you could delegate to somebody else. You can't say, hey, you know, I know I'm the leader, but I don't feel like doing this today. Uh, hey, you go do it, right? Can't do it that way. You can't, again, like we keep saying, it can't be a putative. I'm I'm out here to get you, I'm out here to get you in trouble. It's not that, right? And it's not a one-time event. This is something you got to do every shift, every day, every month, whatever the cadence is, you gotta do it. And it's got to, it's gotta be something you prioritize. You can't let other meetings get in the way of this. So process confirmation at every level. Uh, team leader, supervisor, they should do this multiple times a shift. They should be constantly walking the floor, validating that the process is working the way the standard is written. And they should be coaching their team on if they see deviations, hey, you know, here's how you're supposed to do this. This is why it matters that you do it this way, right? They should be a coach too. The value stream leader, they should be doing this every day, right? There should be spots on the value stream that they're checking every day to make sure that we're within stability. And if they see deviations, again, they should be coaching their team leaders, teaching them to see these deviations as well. And then the plant manager or or director, department director, the leadership team, they should also be doing this, right? Maybe it's once a week, maybe it's once a month. Uh weekly is obviously preferred, but they should be going out there to make sure that the system is working, right? Maybe as we do these process confirmations, they have to sign off that they've done them. The the plant manager or the or the department director, they should be checking that those process confirmations are being filled out correctly and they're not just being pencil wilt. Right? That's that's the responsibility of a leadership team is to make sure that their team is following the standards as they are written. Okay. Right. And then maturity. How do you know if you're doing this well? So, you know, world-class organizations, you know, we define this in four levels, right? So top level is world class. We got real-time MES monitoring, early warning systems, and teams self-correct when they notice deviations. That is a mature organization. And let me tell you, that is a hard place to get. I've never seen anybody really get to it throughout the organization. There might be pockets, but to do this business wide is very, very difficult. So, where do we start? We start off with level one on the essentials. Basically, we've got a daily meeting where safety, quality, cost delivery metrics are tracked. Um, with the the trends are visible and intervention limits are defined, right? So if we have that, then we are we're doing the essentials, let's say. Uh, the next level, right? Standards, KPI trees and short cycle tracking. Failure codes and Pareto analysis, standardized meeting agendas. So the next level up is we've got a KPI tree. We understand why we're tracking these KPIs and the impact that they have on the high-level results. We're doing this again on short cycles, hourly, hourly if possible, shiftly at the very least. Um, failure codes and Pareto analysis. As we see deviations, we're Paretoing these out so we can see what's our biggest problem so that we know when we go to do that system CIP cycle uh 90 days from now, what to work on, right? We're we're we know what where to focus our efforts, right? What are the focus topics? Uh and then level three, systematic. So improvement priorities are clear, data available at the push of a button, right? So we shouldn't have to go out here and gather data for an hour. It should be right there, especially in 2026 when you've got AI and all of these digital tools, data should be readily available to the team. Yeah, and we really started setting up this learning organizational framework where every level of the organization is coaching the level beneath it, teaching them to see opportunities, teaching them to see deviations, teaching them to teaching them to see waste, and most importantly, teaching them how to react to it. And again, the next level, like we discussed, world class, team self-correct. There's early warning systems, we got MES data uh available. So levels to this. Focus on level one. If you're not doing anything, let's focus on getting to a solid level one, get the essentials down. And then we can really focus on how do we grow, how do we get better at it over the course of time. All right, so why does daily management fail? Right? There's there's some pretty common reasons, and I'm sure if you if I give you five minutes, you would think of them on your own. Um, one of the most common is this becomes leadership lip service, right? So leaders attend the meeting, but they don't go to the floor without process confirmation, standards of the road. Leaders just disengaged, they're not there pushing their teams, asking the right questions, driving that process confirmation day in and day out, right? If it's not important to the leader, it is not important to anybody else in the organization. That is a fact. That is a fact everywhere all the time. It has to be important to the leader if it's going to be important to anybody else. Um, next thing, data without action. So we've got we're tracking our KPIs, but the deviations don't trigger a response. We just say, oh, well, you know, that was because Jimmy didn't show up to work, so we missed our productivity target. Yeah, we'll catch it today. No, no. We've got to do some deeper problem solving than that. We've got to dig into it when we see these deviations. Uh, you know, if you don't, the board just becomes wallpaper. It's just something nice to see. It's something we show on tours, but we don't live it, right? Uh, no ownership. So open points have no responsible owner or deadline. Problems recycle without closure. You know, groundhog day. We just put out the same fires every day. We need to, you know, to avoid that, we have to have defined owners, and then we have to push those people, the owners of the problems, to really solve them, right? To really eliminate that root cause. Uh final, not finally, next, we've got meeting fatigue. Uh, meetings are too long, they're unfocused or redundant. Uh, like I said, that's why it's so important to keep this to a 15-minute agenda. We need to stay on task. If you let this thing divol, you know, devolve into an hour-long discussion, you're you're cooked. This isn't gonna work. People are gonna quit showing up. We gotta stay on task. We gotta stay on target, we gotta stay within the agenda. Uh, skill gaps, teams lack problem solving skills. Without training, root cause analysis stays superficial. Guys, I see this, especially in the mid-market space. I see this all the time. I bet, I bet 60% of my clients lack basic problem solving skills within their teams. And that's not a knock on them. I'm not critical, I'm not, I don't mean that critical, but what happens, especially in the mid-market space, is you have people on the team and their sole focus for their entire career has just been to get parts on the door. Nobody's ever asked them to solve problems at a root cause level. Now you're gonna come in there and you're gonna ask them to do that. If you don't give them the training, if you don't teach them how to do these things, if you don't spend the time, you know, developing this skill set, you're just not gonna get the results, right? And it's not their fault. You know, you know, I there's a lot of things I can't do because I've never received the training on how to do it. There's a lot of things that anybody out there listening, you can't do either because you've never been trained. Problem solving is no different. If we want people to be problem solvers, we have to teach them the skills they need to be effective problem solvers, right? Because again, if you don't, problems never get solved, they just get recycled, and eventually people get burned out with that and they start figuring out that this meeting is a waste of time and I'm just not gonna show up. Uh, and then change fatigue, leadership turnover or initiative overload wipes out momentum before the system matures. Guys, you gotta stay focused, right? We've gotta figure out a few initiatives that we're gonna work on every 90 days, and we've got to stay committed to those things. We can't go chasing every shiny object that that runs across the screen. We've got to really understand what are our key performance drivers, and then we've got to stay focused, laser focused, on making them the best they can be. All right. Yeah, so how do we get started? Um, you know, I would suggest you start with one value stream. Pick your most critical value stream. Maybe it's the one that generates the most revenue, maybe it's the one that generates the most profit, or maybe it's the one that's generating the biggest loss right now, and we've got to focus on it. But pick one value stream to start with. Uh define your safety, quality, cost, and delivery indicators with targets and intervention limits, and get the board up on the floor, right? That's the first step. Next, we want to set up that daily meeting. Figure out who needs to attend, send the invite and track attendance. I can't stress it enough. Track attendance because then you have data that you can go back to and say, hey, I noticed you haven't been there. It's really important that you that you come. So please, by all means, track the attendance. Try to keep that meeting to 15 minutes. Stand at the board. Again, no sitting in conference rooms on the floor. Uh build quick reaction discipline. Early deviation, every deviation, I'm sorry, needs an owner and immediate action and tracking until closure. No open points without a deadline. Gotta have a deadline. Gotta be driving these things. Uh, like we talked about, we want to train problem solving skills, five Y Pareto. We want to close the PDCA loop on every issue. Document solutions so others can learn too, right? It's really important. Document, document, document. Because we, you know, we have changeover, you know, we have turnover within the organization. If you don't document, you're constantly going to be relying on that tribal knowledge. And tribal knowledge is constantly going to be walking out the door, right? So it's really important that we document our solutions so that others can learn when they come on board. Uh, and then most importantly, leaders go to the shop floor, implement process confirmation at every level of the organization. Managers coach their direct reports. This is where culture change happens, right? When you get leaders out of the office onto the shop floor, coaching their team, this is when you start developing a culture. Simple as that. All right. So key things to remember if there's a, you know, if there's anything you take from this, from this podcast, from this YouTube video, depending on where you're watching it, these are it. Daily management is not a meeting, it's a leadership system that connects leaders to the reality of operations every single day. The five pillars work together. KPIs reveal problems, quick reaction contains them, communication escalates them, problem solving eliminates them, and process confirmation prevents them. Right? Again, I want to find out there's a problem before my customer does. Always. Okay, maturity takes time. We got to remember, maturity takes time. You're not gonna get to world class in three months. You're probably not gonna get there in a year. Start with the essentials and build systematically. The goal is to create a self correcting organization, right? We want to teach people to problem solve so that they do it naturally. Uh, the biggest failure mode is leadership disengagement. If leaders aren't on the floor, The system will collapse. I have seen this time and time again. I can tell you within the first month which of my clients are going to be successful and which are going to fail. And it all boils down to leadership involvement. If the leadership team is engaged, if they're in the daily leadership routine meetings, if they're in the roadmap meetings, if they're in the system CIP workshops, this they will be successful. If not, they won't. And it's just that simple. And then finally, you don't have to do this alone. Allied Fractional CI Manager Program provides the structure, coaching, and accountability to make daily management stick. If you feel like you need somebody from an outside perspective to come in, coach your team, and really kind of serve as that accountability partner, that's where we come in. Please don't hesitate. Give us a call. We would love to come on site, meet your team, and walk through, you know, what this looks like, right? Because we know that it works. We've seen through our fractional CI manager program that companies have been able to increase output by as much as 80% with zero CAFEX. Zero. Right? They didn't have to spend a dime. They just had to manage the processes better, right? And that's where we come in. That's how we help coach show you how to do that, give you the tools that you need to run your business more effectively. Our fractional CI manager program, it's a 12-month program. It differs from traditional consulting because, you know, I'm not just going to give you a fish. I'm going to teach you to fish, right? I'm going to teach you these tools that you need to drive continuous improvement. You know, we're more than just an external advisor. We're an embedded team partner that helps you to build internal capabilities by having your employees own the projects, right? You're going to own the projects. We're going to coach you through weekly roadmap reviews and project day three uh coaching sessions. Because training, we believe that training is a core pillar of this engagement, right? And that's why we try to do this over 12 months because it takes time to build these skills. Somebody's got to be there every step of the way with you to really grow that so that you can become independent and then learn to do this on your own. The goal of the Fractional CI Manager program is to teach you to do this on your own so that it is a sustainable process that really becomes part of your culture and just part of who you are and how you operate. All right. So we talked about this uh the FCIM program four times a year. We're coming on site, we're doing those value stream mapping workshops. Uh, we have the weekly roadmap review meetings where we're reviewing each of the project day threes, coaching you through that process validation and the daily management piece, right? How do we val how do we how do we manage our day-to-day so that we can ensure that we are staying within stability and we can ensure most importantly that our organization is going to be successful. Um, if you guys have enjoyed the podcast, I do encourage you, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend. It really is, I can't tell you how much it helps us. Um, if you'd like to talk to me directly, uh, my contact information is on the screen, so it's on the YouTube video. I'll also put it in the show notes. I gave you my email address a little bit earlier, but don't hesitate, reach out. We want to be a resource. We want to help you guys get to that next level, cutting out waste and making sure your business is successful so that it can be here for the next five, 10, 20, 100 years, right? We really want to be that that resource and that partner for you. Um, if you've enjoyed today's meeting or today's podcast, uh really appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. We're passionate about it, and we hope you are too. And until next time, see you later.