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Russ: Madi, you came up with a Manufacturing and supply management thing that I don't know. About candy in the wrong season.

Madi: Not candy. So first, let me give some context, but you're close. Candy and Halloween are intimately related. So a lot of people love finding cool stuff and decorating for the holidays at Home Goods. Lot of tik toks on it. Home Goods finds. Over the summer, Home Goods was flooded with Halloween decor items that were unavailable in fall of 2021. So like little ceramic Christmas trees with Halloween colors and different pumpkins and skulls. And they were buying these things and starting to decorate their houses for Halloween because they're excited about the things.

And it's related to like, Like spring back of supply chain and consumer demand and that like boat that got caught in the Suez canal, all like impacting when we had access to goods and also the culture of people and their decor habits. 

Russ: I think at that size they're referred to as ships in the Biz. 

Madi: It's a small tug boat containing millions and billions of goods.

Russ: Welcome to another episode of Boat talk. 

Madi: New segment every week. Always keep a listener guessing.

Russ: Um, yeah. So that, that makes sense. And that's a vivid reminder that a supply chain exists. And that things don't come from nowhere. And that things have to get made and shipped and designed.

And ordered, and we live in that space all the time. We're always thinking about that stuff. Any, we look around anywhere. You see this is a made thing, all manufactured items in our, in our entire environment. the people that work in Manufacturing and even adjacent to Manufacturing. Just thinking about where stuff comes from.

Madi: and how to order enough of it. And make sure that it gets to the right peopleat the right times.

Russ: Lead times and ship times and all that. 

Madi: I feel like the Halloween topic and there's other goods, right? Like supply chain and what we want. Like there's a huge sale at Target on Dysons. Yeah, because they just suddenly had a bunch of Dysons.

I think it's an introduction of these like pretty complex, maybe niche industry terms to the general consciousness. 

Russ: I've never had so many regular non-manufacturing friends suddenly care about supply chain as over the last two to three years. And these are subjects that are, I mean, you can't swing a dead cat at Halloween time without hitting a Manufacturing, you know, supply chain conversation.

Like everyone is thinking in terms of logistics and supply chain in the background, even if it's not necessarily in, in the foreground of their thought. You know, if I'm, if I'm a welder, I may not be thinking about supply chain all the time, but I also, I am part of it and it's, it's innate and having that come to, let's call them civilian friends and family, and having those conversations, it's been nice. It's, it makes me feel slightly more, you know, connected with my average person. It makes me feel like the industry where I spend all my time is actually relatable to, to the average person as opposed to the average Manufacturing person.

Madi: Are you starting to just feel cool at dinner parties?

Russ: No. 

Madi: not cool at dinner parties? 

Russ: No. No, not because of that. Um, I, I used to talk about, I had one friend who had introduced me as working with lasers and robots, which I actually found to be two really tedious pieces of industrial equipment. But they sell super well at, at dinner parties.

So he would give the intro and I would say very little to follow up on that. but it's, it's better now because people, people wanna know about these, not esoteric, but their industry specific terms. You, you sent me the air tag article about basically, you know, normal consumer grade traceability, which with tulip's life science and some of the discrete side of things, we have lots of traceability conversations.

And that's kind of obvious what it is once you hear what it is. But people don't really think about it. So tell me about the air tag story. 

Madi: Yes. There are so many things to love about this story cuz it highlights like complexity and also like fear.

Russ: always fear. It always comes back to fear. 

Madi: There's underlying fear everywhere.

Russ: Fear of dead cats. 

Madi: the biggest fear. So, Airplanes, airports, uh, they're always navigating really complex processes and like supply scheduling, demand forecasting, and with the changes in travel and changes in their workforce, there's been just like, horror inflicted on people who wanted to travel following like an easier period of the pandemic.

And so massive waits, lots of people missing flights, lots of canceled flights. Add that to like astronomical fuel charges at the beginning of the summer. Pure chaos. 

People wanna know what's going on with their luggage, Cuz luggage was getting lost and there's just like warehouses of luggage and they didn't trust or have confidence in the airlines on their process.

So they started putting air tags in their bags so that they can see how they were going through the whole, you know, bag check and delivery process.

Russ: and air tags are just a small device, uh, made by Apple that allows you to track where an item is. The same way you'd use Find my phone, but it's find my thing that has the tag in it

Madi: which I think is a really great consumer parallel to traceability conversations in Manufacturing. It's a complex process, you wanna know where things are going wrong. Maybe this is like a bigger company to a supplier or someone who's making an order. They wanna know what's going on. They're good and like when to expect it, how to find it, et cetera.

Response from airlines was to ban the air tags.

Russ: how dare you give visibility into our fumbling systems. Seems like an appropriate corporate response.

Madi: And I think that that like, fear and just like banishment of the tags is also a good connection to some discomfort people have with production visibility.

There's this like underlying concern of like blame associated with truth and visibility.

Russ: Oh, it's frontline blame culture. and Manufacturing blame culture. And you messed up culture. And the, so the, the feeling that something is wrong, and if I can just identify the person who's done it wrong and we can chew them out hard enough, then it won't get done wrong and they'll perform better because I yell at them enough, then, then all these problems will go away and everything will be fixed.

And it's, it's delusional thinking. I mean, it's, it's a cultural thing, but the healthier Manufacturing and healthier, you know, baggage and, and airline operations as well, if you have visibility into this was the thing that was wrong, and you share that information across all the people who have a stake in fixing the thing that's wrong, that's the kinder, gentler way forward.

But it also gets you to better outcomes faster because you spend less time saying, Madi screwed up, and you spend more time saying, This is screwed up. And then you can use human ingenuity and teamwork and collaboration and all these things, and figure out how to fix the thing that's broken because you've, you've quantified the problem as opposed to spending half the energy on figuring out where the problem is in the first place.

Madi: So a focus on the system versus like personal culpability? 

Russ: Yeah, I mean, I think the blame game is a shortcut to, if someone else is responsible, then I am not responsible myself, and I'm not really trying to wave the banner of personal responsibility here. I'm more saying that it's human nature to not wanna be blamed for stuff.

So if you're busy defending yourself because you're being blamed for something, you're not in the best place to be problem solving. Whereas if you are identifying a problem and you are kind of enthused about and encouraged about, and motivated about solving that problem, you'll hunker down, figure out a fix, feel better about yourself in the whole situation, and be less likely to, you know, throw blame at somebody else either.

Madi: I think that's a great conclusion for that. 

Russ: This is a good segue. The other thing that keeps coming up is shortages. So it's, I was thinking about this first in terms of shortage of things, right? So I can't get an Xbox or PlayStation five still if I just want one, but, It's not just about item shortages, which is kind of back to like a supply chain conversation.

Uh, but then the, the shortages of, of workers, this is kind of like a never ending Manufacturing conversation about skilled workforce shortage, and that's now coming very vividly home to, you know, trucker shortage, bus driver shortage, childcare shortage. You can see where my mind is at with the whole kids related people shortages.

But it's the same thing across a whole bunch of jobs where there's, there's not enough people to do the thing that needs to get done, which is a situation that Manufacturing has been in for a very long time. And so that creates immediate dinner party conversation to be able to. Oh, they didn't have enough librarians.

Did you hear about the, you know, how you couldn't return your books? I don't even know. I'm making this up. I have no idea what's true. 

Madi: One of the, the biggest like worker shortage stories that I've been following is that New York City is no longer the city that never sleeps because they cannot get people to work late into the night.

For like a variety of reasons. And so a lot of people moved in the pandemic, like there's like general safety concerns with the train, like whatever. And so it's now the, the city that closes at 10:00 PM.

Russ: And they put that on t-shirts too? 

Madi: I think that that's gonna be the new slogan. It really attracts the young people.

Russ: The well rested city. 

Madi: Yes. So I, I think that that's like another example of you need to figure out how to do more with less, but also figure out ways to adapt to shortages, both consumer good shortages, but also workforce shortages. 

Russ: Yeah. So apply the tech in a place that it encourages positive, healthy culture and use the tech as an augmentation, not a replacement.

I mean, we don't have robotic controlled self-driving garbage trucks yet. But what's the best possible environment you can be working in as a driver? You know, is the UPS model where we remove all of the left turns using AI to map out your route, is that being applied in a way that's empowering the driver to be the best UPS driver they can be?

Or is it applied in a way that's paternalistic and intrusive and at best, cramping style and at worst, like just degrading as a tool, being applied. 

Madi: I think that that's a good place to kind of wrap the topic is that workers and people are just going to naturally go towards roles that are more pleasant and finding ways to like reduce the unpleasantness of work and the more valuable and interesting parts are one way to make roles more appealing in a competitive sense, but also you'll just be able to do more by reducing those friction areas. 

Russ: Do you feel like people are fundamentally interested in doing a good job? 

Madi: I don't know. That's, I, I am. So, I think it's hard to like, empathize with people having really strongly different views than you.

I think you just need to align the thing that you're interested in doing, doing a good job on with what you are doing for money. 

Russ: That's the dream. 

Madi: The dream, the goal. The American dream. Maybe the global human dream.

Russ: The dream of the human experience. Well, that's gonna wrap philosophy talk.

Madi: It's already our third segment, new segment, this episode.

We'll see if a fourth comes up. Maybe, uh, cybersecurity talk. 

Russ: You wanna do it this time or you wanna, You wanna do that next time? 

Madi: Let's stay tuned in. In a future episode, we'll go over a cybersecurity talk.

Russ: See us next time for Cybersecurity Talk. 

Madi: See you next time. 

Outro: Behind the Ops is brought to you by Tulip. Connect the people, machines, devices, and systems used in your production and logistics processes with our frontline operations platform. Visit Tulip.co to learn more. 

This show is produced by Jasmine Chan and edited by Thom Obarski. If you enjoyed listening, support the show by leaving us a quick rating or review. It really helps. If you have feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at behindtheops@tulip.Co.