In this episode, I speak to Gregory Ayers, the Director of Operational Excellence at Innovative Hearth Products, a manufacturer of indoor and outdoor fireplaces headquartered in Nashville.

We speak about the importance of senior management in getting continuous improvement to stick and really impact the company in a meaningful way.  We also talk about how CI has been turned into a farce and how it’s being undermined when leadership only provides lip service instead of an all out cultural transformation that includes quality and CI. In addition to this, we cover the following topics:

• How Greg was inundated with data at his job and regretted not finishing college to be able to work with and interpret the data
• The criticality of getting senior management involved and specific goals being crucial to the implementation of continuous improvement
• Why Greg having worked in operations, quality management and maintenance across a variety of sectors gave him a distinct advantage when he stepped into a continuous improvement role
• How to know if your CI processes are truly helping
• How management can turn CI into a fad
• How to start wrapping your head around environmental and green objectives
• How important it is to examine the real driving force behind the way we do something/ our processes