Why Automation Is NOT the Goal with Stephen T. Hopper of Inviscid Consulting

Aaron Sheehan: Welcome to the B2B Commerce UnCut podcast sponsored by OroCommerce. I am your sometimes host, Aaron Sheehan, and with me today is Steve Hopper. He is the principal and founder of Inviscid Consulting. And I think the first question on my mind when I met Steve was: what is an Inviscid, how do you say it, and why did you name your business that?

Steve Hopper: Yeah, it’s a good question. When I was founding my company, which was 20 years ago this year, I looked at a name for the business. And a lot of people, when they hang out a shingle like I was doing back then to go into independent consulting, they name it after themselves.

And I thought, you know, maybe someday I might want to sell the business or something. And if my name is the name, that might not be desirable. So then I started looking for a word that was a dictionary word, not some made-up word, that had something to do with the characteristics of a supply chain operation.

Many, many moons ago when I was at Georgia Tech, which is pretty obvious probably from back here, I first started at Georgia Tech studying aerospace engineering before I saw the light and changed to industrial engineering, which was a decision I never regretted. But anyway, in aerospace, when I studied fluid dynamics, we talked about the concept of viscosity, which is how fluids flow.

And something that is highly viscous is sticky, like maple syrup would be highly viscous. The opposite end of that spectrum is something that is inviscid, which means it flows without any friction at all. And so I started thinking, you know, you could apply that to a supply chain. You know, when you think about creating a supply chain network or a facility, you want your stuff to flow without friction, without waste, without delays. And so that’s where I came up with the name.

So inviscid is an actual word. It’s a word people sometimes don’t know how to pronounce looking at it, but that’s where the history of the name came from.

Aaron Sheehan: Got it. See, I didn’t know because I went to a smaller state school in Tennessee, and we didn’t learn larger words like that. That’s the benefit of that Georgia Tech education right there. Good school. That’s cool. Thank you for the explanation.

So in your answer for all of our listeners here, I guess it’s pretty obvious that Steve is in the supply chain business. If you’ve been listening to the B2B Uncut podcast for the last few months, you’ve heard me interview quite a few people in the supply chain business because it’s just so gosh darn fascinating and so connected to everyone we talk to at OroCommerce on a daily basis in the manufacturing and distribution side of business.

I know everybody who’s selling sort of business to business, and they’re dealing with a lot of these challenges. And Steve, of course, is a consultant with a lot of valuable experience. When we were talking, I guess it was a few months ago, you were explaining to me how, at a 10,000-foot view, you divided the supply chain into a couple of different buckets or a couple of different spheres. And I wondered if you could walk me through a little bit, how do you think, what are those two buckets of supply chain?

Steve Hopper: Yeah, that’s a good question. And full disclosure, this is the Steve Hopper view of the world. I don’t mean to imply that this is like some that everybody in the industry would see it this way, but just based on my almost 40 years of experience in supply chain… I mean, everybody knows generally speaking what supply chain is.

You’re transporting and storing and moving and processing products of different types between the point of really prior to manufacturing with raw materials and all that kind of thing. You’re sourcing them, you’re bringing them through, you’re producing the product, you’re distributing the products, you’re transporting the product, selling the product, returning the product, reverse logistics, all that kind of stuff.

But when I think when supply chain practitioners look at the supply chain, they tend to fall into one of two major categories. They either tend to think in terms of the bigger picture stuff, the stuff that people in the back office tend to think about, such as demand forecasting and sourcing.

You know, where are we going to source the products that we need, whether it’s raw materials or in finished good type product? How are we going to view the world when it comes to that? How are we going to forecast our demand and how much are we going to produce, or how much are we going to need to sell? That’s what I refer to as the supply chain planning bucket, which is one of the two buckets.

And by the way, we have to be careful siloing because that’s a bad thing when you really over-silo things. I tell clients that all the time. But the other kind of side is what I refer to as supply chain execution.

That’s really, once your high-level plans are made, you’ve decided how much you’re going to produce or buy or whatever. You’ve decided who your customers are with how much at least in projections forecast, how much you’re going to want to sell, where you’re going to want to sell that in your supply chain. Now somebody has to come along and make that happen. So that’s where the rubber hits the road, so to speak.

So, supply chain execution is really, you’re kind of down in the trenches at this point. You’re blocking and tackling, you’re physically handling, storing, transporting, processing that product. And so there’s a lot of labor involved. There’s a lot of facilities and equipment and fuel and all these different things that are the costs of the business to operate. And that’s what I refer to as again the the supply chain execution piece.

So those are the two main buckets. I tend, in my work, to focus on the execution side, which is really again, once the businesses have decided what they’re going to do, now they actually have to do it and do it efficiently.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah, makes complete sense. And I’ve had several other sort of leaders in the space on the podcast, and it’s interesting on the execution side. One of the very consistent through lines for top of mind on supply chain execution is automation, which is really changing the way that those pallets are packed, how the trucks are loaded, how bills of lading get generated, how customer service interacts with your dock, like all of those pieces are…

With a lot of the change to the workforce that we’ve had over the last few years, especially accelerated in the last few years, the amount of investments going into automation… And I’ve talked to a few of our customers here at OroCommerce around when you’re doing strategic planning, right? We’re doing a QBR together, and we’re like, “OK, what are you looking for, what are you doing?” And I’ll say, “What are your goals, right? What are you guys wanting to achieve as a business?”

And one of the goals in every single one of those conversations has been automation. And a lot of times they’re talking, they’re talking about, they mean it pretty broadly. But when you get down into what you’re talking about with the blocking and tackling, they’re saying, “My goal is to automate X percentage of my orders or X percentage of my revenue or particular channels” or something like that to reduce costs.

Let’s be real, that’s: reduce costs, reduce errors, right? All of those things. What are your thoughts maybe at a high level around automation as a goal for a business in the supply chain realm?

Steve Hopper: I’ll apologize in advance because I’m going to, I’m going to wax philosophically a little bit here. That’s what this is for. The way I look at it, automation is not a goal with respect to people that… Clients, a lot of times when I begin working with them, we’ll ask them, usually, “What are your top three goals for your supply chain operation?” And very often one of the goals they will mention is, “Oh, automation is a goal.”

And, you know, with all due respect, I don’t think automation is a goal because automation really is a tool. It’s a tool that can be used to achieve a goal, but it’s not the goal itself. I used to hear years ago that people don’t want drills, like power drills. People don’t want drills. They want holes. They’re not buying a drill to buy a drill. They’re buying a drill because at some point along the line they want some holes, and that’s what drills do.

So automation, I think it’s the same way. It’s very effective at what it does, but at the end of the day what those businesses, and I try to get them thinking this way, what they’re really trying to do is realize the benefits that automation would provide, which typically is going to be things like reduced labor costs, increased productivity. It’s going to be things like increased accuracy, depending on which type of automation you’re talking about, increased speed for certain functions, achieving fulfillment of an order faster within a certain amount of time. That’s the goal because ultimately that’s what they’re trying to do.

So, in my role, to some degree, I’m challenging that thought of automation because if you think about it, if your goal is to reduce labor costs, and one way you could do it is with automation, what if hypothetically speaking, there was another way you could do it that didn’t involve automation, less expensive, and it would do the same thing, produce the same end result. Wouldn’t you want to consider that? Or, is automation itself what you’re really trying to implement?

So I have to be careful because I certainly don’t want to be perceived as someone who’s anti-automation. I love automation. I’ve been involved with a lot of projects that involve various types of automated physical automation as well as software and these kind of things that automate processes. Nothing wrong with automation.

But really the engineering method is: you start with the problem, and then you look at “How do we solve that problem?” And you look at all the realistic, reasonable alternatives that can help solve the problem. And you look from an economic business case, which one makes the most sense, and that’s what you go with. And a lot of times that’s automation for certain problems that are to be solved, but other times it might be something else. And so that’s why I look at automation the way I do, as a tool rather than a goal. I think that’s the right way to think about it.

Aaron Sheehan: It’s always interesting having those conversations with business leaders because they often are, I think, getting the two of them conflated. It’s also the case that you talked about the sort of like the two spheres that workflow automation in various like parts of the business. There’s the sort of the back-office part, and then there’s the practical bit where the actual stuff gets loaded onto trucks and sent to people.

At OroCommerce, we, earlier this year, we commissioned a study of over 100 business leaders in manufacturing and distribution, a lot of mostly C-level folks sizing between about 100 million to over 10 billion in revenue. You know, real, like sizable companies with real budget and resources to put at this automation thing.

And we asked people to rank: How effective is your automation in your workflow automation around parts of your business? So we look, we asked questions about like customer relationship management and onboarding customers and inventory forecasting and all kinds of other things. I think there were about 10, 10 or so criteria that we asked.

The data was really interesting because… I’ll put the report in the show notes. But do you know what the least automated process among manufacturers and distributors was? And it was not even close. I’m just super curious if you had to guess.

Steve Hopper: I would hesitate to guess, but I see so much that’s not automated, it could be any number of things.

Aaron Sheehan: But it was shipping and fulfillment, like by leaps and bounds. In fact, it was the mirror image. So, like all of the back office stuff, like customer onboarding and relationship management and financial, right? Even inventory management and forecasting, pretty automated, right?

Once you get to the practical pieces though of… “Yeah, that’s great, I built an Excel macro that did a thing,” but that’s… Or have an ERP that does a thing. I’ve got some software that goes out and gets me shipping quotes. That’s fine. But like, shipping and fulfillment is actually like really not automated. And it jumps out at me, and one of the questions I’m trying to get an answer to is: Why?

Steve Hopper: Yeah, because again, I have been in this industry for about 38 years. I’ve never done anything else. And, add on top of that, this is what I studied in school. So this is all I’ve ever known in terms of my professional life.

Aaron Sheehan: I’m asking the right person then, which is great. Good.

Steve Hopper: But I think it’s this human nature. We, as human beings, tend to get excited about things that are, lack of a better word, sexy. We get excited about things that are cool. And if you think about, even if you just look at supply chains, and you think about all the things that happen in supply chains, the warehousing fulfillment distribution function is the least sexy part of the supply chain.

It’s… Yeah. I always refer to it as the Cinderella of the supply chain. In the boardroom, in the highest executive offices, they’re thinking about the things of that business because they may be a retailer, they may be manufacturing some product, that could be doing any number of good things.

But they tend, their brains tend to go to those elements that are the cool and the sexy and the “Oh, wow” stuff. When they think about their warehouse and they think about their fulfillment center, that’s boring. That’s just stuff sitting on a shelf. How hard is that?

And so when it comes to the business trying to find ways to make it more efficient, it’s the second-class child. It doesn’t get the attention. They’re focused on those other cool parts of the business. And it’s a shame, really, because when those businesses look at how much money they’re spending in the warehousing, fulfillment, distribution part of their business, and when they look at how directly it touches their customers because those are the parts of the business that provide their products to their customers, it’s a shame that they’re so focused on these other things at the expense of warehousing and fulfillment because they’re just basically wasting money, and they’re basically losing customers that they otherwise might not have lost if they had focused on that.

And and the automation piece is a part of that. If you’re going to automate, you have to decide, “We need to make our warehousing fulfillment function more efficient, more…” Things we talked about earlier, “…more speedy, more labor, more productive,” those kinds of things. You have to intentionally do that and decide you’re going to fix those things or improve those things. But I think a lot of businesses, just out of sight, out of mind. They’re just not going to bother with that.

Aaron Sheehan: That makes total sense. And it just needs to be prioritized is what you’re saying. With the work that gets done is the work that gets prioritized. And how we prioritize isn’t necessarily based on ROI. It’s based on perception of ROI, and those aren’t always aligned, is what you’re saying?

Steve Hopper: You know, the old expression: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” I mean, I love having these conversations with clients, particularly new clients who we’re just getting started with. And I’ll ask the question, “Hey, what’s your cost per unit out the door?” I get a dumb look. Nobody knows the answer to that question.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah, they’re not tracking those KPIs.

Steve Hopper: Well, how can you run a business that hires thousands of people to do all this labor and has all these millions of square feet of space, and you can’t tell me what your cost per unit shipped is? You can’t tell me what your inventory turns. I don’t mean dollars. A lot of times they think across the company our inventory turns is this. But in terms of units, how fast is your inventory turning?

They don’t think about these kinds of benchmarks and KPIs and statistics that… They could be bleeding money and not knowing it. And so, “OK, if you could reduce your labor costs by 20%, would you want to know, or do you just want to blindly ignore that and focus on these other more sexy parts of it?”

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah. Yeah, it doesn’t get tracked that way, right? And I think, you know, everybody knows their COGS. They know for pricing purposes what the margin is on a particular item as it’s being manufactured, let’s say. But parts and labor going into that versus what they’re getting for it. But yeah, all the other costs of like actually getting the revenue, those… Like the shipping, the fulfillment, the customer service utilities even sometimes, all of that is like a weird black box for somebody.

Steve Hopper: I’m glad you asked that question, and I… I think there’s a Bill Gates quote that comes to mind. He said, “The first rule of any technology in business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second rule is that automation applied to inefficient operations magnifies the inefficiency.”

Aaron Sheehan: We, also in programming, we call this garbage in, garbage out. To some degree, it’s the same concept, right?

Steve Hopper: Well, and we have… Some of my business friends and I through the years have had this expression: You don’t pave the cow path, okay? The implication there is paving is automation. It gets cows out in the field meandering around. You don’t pave the cow path. You take the time to think, “What is the best path from here to there?” And then you establish that path first, then you pave that. So to your point, it’s exactly the same thing.

You don’t start with automation because then you’re doing dumb things faster. You hold off on the automation, and you say, “How can we get the best out of the resources we already have?” We already have these facilities that we already own them or paying for them. We have these resources in terms of people. We have this equipment we already own, right? “How can we get the best out of all that? How can we improve the processes that we have and squeeze out the waste and be more efficient than we have? And then once we’ve got that running like a well-oiled machine, then let’s bring in the automation and automate the functions that make sense to automate. But just throwing automation at things, it’s really shortsighted.

Aaron Sheehan: You sort of anticipated my next question, which was going to be: How does a firm set itself up for success? And I think specifically in adopting technologies or adopting automation and processes. How do they make sure that they are not paving the cow path and they’re actually paving the high-traffic road that’s going to bring trucks full of money into their business? And I think knowledge, I guess, about your own business is a really good place to start.

Steve Hopper: I go way back to the mid-’80s when I was in school at Georgia Tech and studying for my Industrial Engineering degree. One of my professors, who was at the time, John White… There’s another John White that’s well known in industry. It’s actually, who’s actually his son now. But, but the John White Senior, the professor… He taught his students, he drilled this into our heads, and I carry it with me to this day, and he said this: Be requirements-driven, not solutions-driven.

So what any of the examples… Basically is that you don’t start with looking at solutions and figure out how to apply those solutions in your business. You start by looking at your business and the business problems or the business goals that you have, and then you turn around and look at the solutions that will help you do that.

So, when it comes to automation, you may be familiar with some of the big industry shows like ProMat and MODEX, and these kinds of big shows where all the automation companies… You know, they’re strutting around with their latest and greatest, and for people like me, I’m a kid in a candy store when I go in there because it’s… “Yo, wow factor” I was mentioning earlier. But for the untrained, that’s dangerous because they’re going to go in there and get enamored. Those guys who sell the automation, no disrespect, they’re super people. I have a lot of friends in that business.

You know, they’re gonna try to get the hook in that that first map, and when it’s… “OK, stop. Before you start looking at all this stuff, let’s do an analysis of your SKUs. Let’s do an analysis of your order profile. Let’s do an analysis of your customers and basically figure out what is your cost per unit, how many units per hour…” Another metric. “…How many units per hour are you processing?” All these factors. And then you get a good picture of what that is and and what’s out of whack. Where are we a laggard versus a leader? What statistics should be improved? Where do we have the biggest opportunity for improvement?

And then once you know all of that, you’ve defined your problem at that point. Now you can turn around and say, “Do we need some form of automation? Do we need something that’s…” What I call mechanized, which is not really fully automated, but you’re using the assistance of machinery and so forth. “…Or do we need something manual that may be something…” Maybe the thing that has the highest ROI is something manual. But you’re not starting with that as your goal, like we said earlier. You’re starting with the problem, and then you’re figuring out which one makes the best sense.

I mean, I’ll give you a really… Maybe this is an extreme example, but there was a business that we worked with that sold packaging materials, wholesale packaging material, and we looked at 22 different methods of order picking. We looked at the… Once we had done all of the… Clear picture of their data, their SKUs, and all those things I mentioned, SKUs and orders and all that. We looked at literally 22 different ways that they could pick and pack orders, and we did the economic analysis of each one, and we settled on one that makes the most sense for the business.

Now, I will tell you it wasn’t the most automated. It also wasn’t the most manual. It was, if you did the spectrum, it was in the middle. But doing that was a really sensible way to determine, “This is the right way to solve that problem, and it, it’s going to pay the biggest dividend to the business,” rather than starting with the solution and saying, “Oh, God, I got to have that. I saw that at the show. We need that.” Wrong road.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah. To mangle a well-known analogy and tie it back to your drill: when everything you have, when what you have is a drill, everything looks like it needs a hole. I guess the old “It… When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Steve Hopper: Yeah. “If I’ve got a fancy system…” Yeah. It makes sense. And it’s also about where you, as a business, go to learn the truth about your own business. And it’s not sitting in your office pondering it. It’s about talking to the people who are actually doing the work about what will probably what… Where do they need the help? Where do they need the assist? You don’t conceptualize that in the fishbowl looking down, or right in the next office over, in the next county even, like thinking about, “What… I went to this show, and I’m coming, I’m going to make everybody use this new thing that I got, this new system.”

But that’s one of the biggest mistakes that I see businesses make, what you just described. A very rare exception. The best people to come up with ways to improve the processes and to improve receiving, put away, picking, packing, shipping, value-added services, you know, returns, all these different things that go on in typical distribution centers… The very best people to come up with the ways to do that, the ideas for improving that, are not the people in the ivory tower. They’re the people who do that job 40 hours a week. And a lot of businesses, frankly, don’t give them the respect they deserve.

And if they would take the time, perhaps in some kind of a workshop, we do these Kaizen, you know, process re-engineering workshop, pulling them into the room, into a conference room and talking through, “Why do you do things that way?” And then sometimes it’s because they’ve always done it that way, or whatever. Trying to pull things out of their brain. Have you ever thought there might be a better tool to use for this job? Or eliminating a step from the process that’s really unnecessary or combining two steps that could be done at the same time to save time? They are usually the ones that have the very best ideas. And, you know, you run a business, and you pull that from those people, and you reward those people who come up with the ideas, you know, right?

Aaron Sheehan: No, I was gonna say: You you’re you’re talking about workforce management at some level as a as a science. I remember when we were talking back several months ago when we were getting to know each other, you told this story that stuck with me about a two-by-twelve board. And I think what I, I would love for you to tell it. It’s memorable, right? It stuck out to me, and I thought it was such a great example of what you are describing with…

Steve Hopper: It’s a little parable. It’s a little parable that I think most people who… In executive management, when they hear this story, they get a little bit of an “Aha” experience. If you can envision a two-inch-thick by 12-inch-wide plank, typical plank like you might buy at a Home Depot or Lowe’s, and it’s 20 feet long. I can take that plank and lay it on the floor, like in a hallway of your office, and I can stand at the, the far end of that plank, and I can say to you, “Plank’s on the floor.” And I can hold up a bag of M&M’s, a little bag of M&M’s, and I can say, “Hey, Aaron, if you can walk from that end of the plank to this end of the plank where I am and give me a high five,” like that. “If you can do that within 10 seconds…” OK. “…I have a stopwatch. If you can do that within 10 seconds, I’m gonna give you a bag of M&M’s,” okay?

Aaron Sheehan: I love M&M’s too. I’d be…

Steve Hopper: But anyway, obviously, unless you have some kind of serious disability, any relatively normal, normally physically capable person is gonna be able to walk down that plank without stepping on the floor. It’s 12 inches wide, right? And get the M&M’s within 10 seconds. You got 10 seconds to do it. But you could take that exact same plank, the same two-inch thick, 12 inches wide, 20-foot-long plank, and you could set one end of the plank on top of a 10-story building, and then the other end of that plank on an adjacent 10-story building with a… With nothing but 10 stories of open space in between.

And you could put a gun to someone’s head and say, “You better walk down that plank to the other side and not fall off, or I’m gonna shoot you.” Okay? Almost nobody can do that. People are gonna… Even if they’re alive to depend on it, like that, they’re probably not gonna do it because the environment is so totally different.

Now, as industrial engineers measure work, we’re often measuring work. When you measure the work in those two scenarios, it’s identical. The, the work is to, to move 10 feet down the plank without stepping off of it, okay? What’s different is the environment where the work is done that affects the ability of people to be able to do that work.

When you’re managing people in a warehouse distribution center type operation, you know, you have to look at your culture. “Do we have a culture that’s more like on the floor with the M&M’s? Or, do we have a culture that’s more like the top of the building kind of thing?” And if you can change that culture to have more of a culture of appreciation and reward and those kinds of things for the same work, the exact same work, you’re much more likely to get higher performance out of your people.

And by the way, I have to add, this is especially true with younger generations these days. I’m at the tail end of the baby boom generation, and as the generations went on, some of the younger generations are a little more, maybe thin-skinned when it comes to people beating on them as a boss, and they need that encouragement, and they need that thing. And so it’s all the more important today as it ever was in my business.

Aaron Sheehan: I know, it’s a great story. And one of the, one of the things I love about it and how it ties back to what we were talking about is: If you, as a leader, want an accurate picture of how your business functions beyond what a spreadsheet will tell you, you have to have an engaged workforce who you can talk to, who you regularly engage with. The people who are doing the tasks under duress are a lot less likely to raise their hands and say, “Hey, boss, I’ve got a better idea for how you could get this done faster. I’ve got a better idea for how this could be… You could save time and money.” The people who are terrified for their lives and their jobs are simply not going to rock the boat, or the plank, I guess, in this case.

Steve Hopper: Well, you know, if you think about it, it used to be this thing that you’d see on TV shows or whatever, this the suggestion box. The business had the suggestion box hanging on the wall, and maybe before my time, maybe businesses actually did that and people would put ideas in there. But, come on, how realistic is it that your general worker is going to suggest ideas?

That’s why in other countries, particularly countries like Japan back in the ’60s and so forth, they went out of their way to not only ask employees for their ideas but to make it part of their evaluation that they were expected to present on a monthly basis some minimum number of suggestions of how to improve the work that they were doing.

And those ideas came in, you know, and you pull them in like that, and now some of them are, you know, you’re going to say, “That’s probably not very realistic.” But, other ones that are practical, if you implement them and and realize that it’s saving the company money, then whoever came up with that idea should get some nice little recognition, a gift card or a day off or whatever it is.

I have a slide that I use in some of my PowerPoint decks that came from an actual client. It’s a picture of this guy. He came up with a way to save… He works in packing. He packs out orders in an eComm facility, and he came up with a way to shave 11 seconds off the time that it takes him to pack orders. And when we realized that’s what he did and they deployed it across the whole packing operation and… The estimates were it’s $100-and-something thousand a year are saved by those 11 seconds per package. Now, 11 seconds doesn’t sound like much, but in a bigger operation like that, it does.

Now, if you were his boss and owned or, or managed that facility where that guy works and he, he came up with that, wouldn’t you want to give him a nice little reward of some type, whatever would be the most meaningful to him? It may not be money. It may be something else. But something that says to him, “Hey, we appreciate you coming up with this idea, and here’s a little something to show our appreciation.”

Aaron Sheehan: So, you’re bringing to mind a conversation I was having with one of our customers at Oro. He was the head of IT, and we’re talking about AI, which has been a hot topic, right? So, in my role, I have a lot of AI conversations with all kinds of folks in the industry. And this one stood out to me. It was really unique, and I might have even told this on this podcast before, but it’s so relevant to what you just said because they implement, they bought basically an AI license for their entire facility. So they’re a big distributor. And they made it available to all the employees, like a private instance, basically, that they’re paying for, and built a… He showed it to me… Built a web-based suggestion box, basically, for, “Hey, how could we better use AI?” Write a description, put your suggestion in the virtual suggestion box.

You all have access to the tool too. So it’s not just hypothetical. You can go ask it questions, you can build little models, you can do whatever you want to. And everybody on the floor up had access to it on their phone or computer or something like that. And they’re busy implementing like AI automations and solutions to things in the business. But it’s a bottom-up innovation strategy, and they’re rewarding people who come up with really good ideas. Obviously, you can’t do everything, and some of them are probably not feasible or, or the ROI isn’t worth it. But, some of the things are actually stuff that management would have never thought of on their own.

You’re listening to this, you’re a client of ours, and you’re listening to this and you want to talk to that company, by the way, let me know. Reach out to me on LinkedIn or through my email. I’ll get you connected because I think that is the right way, as a business, to approach change, effective change inside of your organization. Is you start with the people who are doing the work, and you say, “How can I help you?” Not, “How can I go buy something at a trade show and then take credit for spending a bunch of money on it,” but, “How can I actually help the people who are doing the real work?”

Steve Hopper: Well, I think part of the problem there is when people… I mean, again, going back to human nature, when people understand that they were part of the solution, they helped come up with the improvement, there’s ownership there. They’re more likely to adopt what they come up with because they came up with it. If you ram something down their throat, the wall’s going to go up, they’re going to resist, they’re going to do those kinds of things. And I think too, some of these things we’re talking about… There are exceptions to this, as there are with almost everything.

But, most of the businesses that I see being the most successful in, again, supply chain operations, their improvement has come generally from the small changes that over time, many small changes resulted in a dramatically improved business. Generally, it wasn’t from some massive technology or whatever that radically changed the business. It was almost always because of this cultural thing. The sum of a bunch of little improvements makes a really big improvement. And the other part of it, going back to the automation question, is a lot of these kinds of improvement have very little risk, very little cost.

Aaron Sheehan: Yep, they’re low-hanging fruit that can be implemented very quickly.

Steve Hopper: Unlike things like automation.

Aaron Sheehan: You know, just having that culture of, you know, “Hey, why don’t we ask the people doing this job? They have some ideas of how to do it easier, better, faster. And then, if they have those ideas, let’s show appreciation for them sharing them. I love it. All right, this has been really great. I know we are getting close to the end of our time together, Steve, so I have…

Steve Hopper: You’re going to ask me… You’re going to ask me what shampoo I use.

Aaron Sheehan: How did you know?

Steve Hopper: I’m thinking maybe we use the same brand, possibly, because I started using it when my hair fell out. No.

Aaron Sheehan: I ask everybody: Name a book, a TV show, a… I’d say a CD, but now I’m aging myself, because nobody listens to CDs anymore. What’s one piece of media or art that you have seen or heard or watched or listened to in the last few months that you really enjoyed, that you’d recommend to somebody? Some people give a very professional answer. They, they’re like, “I, I read a Peter Drucker book,” or something like that. And some people are like, “I watched this great TV drama.” You can say whatever you want.

Steve Hopper: You know, this might not have been in the last two months, but I think it’s something that… It checks a lot of boxes because not only is it powerful, but it’s very entertaining. And, it’s got a few years on it at this point. But, a wonderful movie called Tucker.

Aaron Sheehan: Isn’t that… Bridges? Jeff Bridges.

Steve Hopper: Jeff Bridges. That’s right. When he was younger.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah.

Steve Hopper: But I mean, it’s… I believe everyone who operates anything that involves production, manufacturing, distribution, whatever, ought to watch that movie and be thinking about: What were the unique things Tucker was doing that the rest of the world wasn’t doing? Cause it’s a lot of these things we’ve been talking about here, and they ought to apply some of that mentality or philosophy to their business because I think if every business was doing that, we’d see some radical improvements. And, there’s also… A very good movie too. It’s something that, that everybody should see. But I’ve actually suggested that the Industrial Engineering curriculum at Georgia Tech, that they make that required viewing for the students.

Aaron Sheehan: Yeah, that’s interesting because it’s… If I recall right, it doesn’t… Maybe spoiler. The movie’s pretty old, so maybe spoilers if you don’t want to… If you’re thinking about it, maybe stop listening at this point. But, I don’t think it ends well for Tucker, as I recall. And it doesn’t end well largely as a consequence of… It was investor politics, or something like that, behind the scenes. So there’s a lot of good lessons probably in, in that movie, and I think that’s the point: the lessons, not only the lessons that Tucker learned as a result of this, or that we can learn from Tucker himself, but there are lessons to be learned in the bigger picture and what some of the corporate entities were doing as a result of all of that, that lessons could be learned there as well. So, there, there are not only production-oriented lessons, but there are ethical lessons and these kind of things as well. Just a really super movie. I always thought…

Aaron Sheehan: Sounds like an amazing movie. Thank you for the recommendation. It makes me want to go back and rewatch it. It’s been many years since I’ve seen it. But that’s a great pick. Steve, I really appreciate your time. This was a good conversation. I hope you… I know we’re recording this like later on a Friday, so I think we’re all… We’re… I don’t know about you. I’m very ready for the weekend. This is a good way to send it out for me. So, I appreciate your time, and I think maybe we’ll talk again.

Steve Hopper: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Aaron Sheehan: That’s right. Thank you. Have a good one.

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