 Well, I'd like to welcome you all to tonight's Mar-Guess Lecture. We're very fortunate to have Charlene Keneffy with us. I heard her speak on this topic last fall at a local ARMA meeting. And I was so interested in the topic that I asked her right away if she would mind giving it to all of you so that we can have the recording to use for class since she graciously agreed to do that. So this is our first opportunity. To get it together. So Charlene is an associate director at Sanofi Information and Records Management. And I am going to click on to the first page of her presentation and allow her to say a little bit about herself and then get right into the presentation. So Charlene, it's all yours. Thank you all for inviting me. This is a great privilege. I'm very excited to speak to a school of information science and spend a long time since I was at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. And I did remember at preparing for this that one of my favorite classes at Simmons was a systems analysis class. And I guess that has stayed with me quite a number of years because as the whole world turns around I've come back to doing a whole lot more systems analysis. And that is a lot of the continuation of what I'm working on now in addition to my usual records management work which involves everything from setting up a governance structure with the records attention schedules and standard operating procedures and directives and many other things that we work on day to day in a highly regulated industry. I also get to work cross-functionally and conduct lean events which allow the records management group to improve their own processes and work between groups for example between records and information management and IT or between records and information management IT and legal. And so a bit of what you'll see as we go through is some of the efforts that we've made at Sanofi to improve the cross-functional processes that affect all of us in a large organization. And I appreciate the introduction and the fact that I am going to try to keep concentrating on my topic so appreciate if you'll wait till the end and we'll try to leave plenty of room to answer questions and continue forward. So let me just move on unless I miss something Pat that you can tell me I need to cover. I am going to give you a list here of the kinds of activities that we use in our records and information management program that have responded to lean improvement methods. One of the motivations of moving towards the lean program at Sanofi was the fact that we had so many mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and other comings and goings of organizations that functions in different ways. They had different finance systems, different procurement systems, different records and information management systems, different IT systems. And as the companies came together and tried to figure out how we were going to all work together and standardize, we worked on training people like myself in every department on lean improvement methods. And so as you can see from this list, the thing that we started with was the harmonization of our program. When Sanofi bought out the company that I was with which was called GenZine, we knew we were going to have to work very hard to get together and do things the same way and make some efficiencies. Be able to operate the same way and cross-train. So we concentrated on the harmonization of programs. We decided one of the first things we worked on is the contrast we had between a centralized records process and a decentralized one. And we wanted to make sure that as we onboarded and offboarded people of these companies, we did it the same way with a section of information in mind. And certainly in a large pharmaceutical organization like Armstel, legal was a big part of our thinking. We have a lot of lawsuits, as you might expect. Anything that involves drugs is a highly litigious world. And any corporate world is a highly litigious world. We have disgruntled employees like everyone else. We have, you know, slip and fall cases. We have all the things in a large corporation that have, plus we have the added complexity of a very controlled environment in this regulatory world. So here are just some examples. And you'll see the slide again toward the end. And we'll talk a little bit more about how we were able to do some of this. But I just wanted to give you a picture of the types of activities that we concentrated on in our business analysis to decide what were the functions that needed this approach more than others. So I want to give everybody a quick history of lean. I imagine most of you aren't. Six Sigma Black Belts or MBAs who might have been exposed to a lot of this. So if you are, I apologize. It may be a little elementary if that's the case. But I know I had a pretty good education and a lot of working life before I came to this. And there were a lot of these concepts that I have not yet been able to explore. So I'm hoping that you will be patient with me as I walk through a few of these. So we're going to go through a quick history of the lean movement and what it is. Why we worry about value and waste, what methods we use for process improvement. And then finally, how do you actually do this in our own records and information management program? So this may be a six small, but it is a chart of the development of continuous improvement. And then how it evolved into lean, which is a substrate of continuous improvement programs. And most of you are very young, I'm sure, but might remember that there was back in the darkness of technology in the industrial revolution. And then here in America, Ford started doing assembly line work. And when you start thinking about assembly line work, you start thinking how can that go faster? How can we make fewer steps? How do we clean up this process so that we can make more cars in less time for more profits? So that was the beginning of all of this. It's basically the way Ford decided to do assembly plans. And over the years, this worked through heavy industry and heavy equipment into other areas like my own, which is a pharmaceutical industry, health care. And we went to the 50s where Edward Denning had the Plan Do Check Act. Theory of how to follow your steps and make things work a little better as you go through your own, your own burden of the assembly line, I guess, is how we want to think of it. And then the penultimate goal that Toyota reached before lean was the Toyota production system. Toyota really put this into print. There were books written about how successful Toyota was. So that was Kichiro Toyota and Taichi Ono. And they were looking at the Ford mass production system in order to create this Toyota production system. And many of you may know the concept of just in time, which is pretty much everywhere. Almost now with technology, with the internet, with the ability to tell communications, we're able to move things very quickly as they're needed to other locations or something. Overnight delivery via Amazon, send it via a helicopter, send it via a drone very quickly just as you need something. And that was unheard of back in the 50s, but someone decided why do we have huge warehouses full of things where we can just order parts just as we need it and get it just in time to reduce the inventory and improve the flexibility of this, which would enable high labor efficiency while you maintain the product quality. So somewhere in the 90s, I forget what year, there was a book called The Machine that Changed the World. And that was when more Americans caught on to this concept and really spent a lot of time thinking about the Glean Principles. How do we reduce this continuous improvement process to a set of principles that are easy to follow, don't require huge manuals to do this, and it begins to spread across other manufacturing industries, certainly anything that was a lot of pieces like Boeing in aerospace, and then eventually it worked into things like healthcare where people who were in the services industry started figuring out ways we can produce services that mirror how manufacturing was done and improve quality control while eliminating steps and getting things to people faster. So around 2000s, we started seeing Glean Principles in non-manufacturing environments. So Sanity, my company, was not the first to adopt it. There are many others like Merck and Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson who were doing this, not only in their manufacturing and supply chain parts, but also just in their regular business ventures, you know, finance or accounting or procurement, all of this is related to manufacturing, and when you see the way the principles work for manufacturing, brains take that leap and say, we can do that. We can figure the same way of approaching things to improve our processes in non-manufacturing environments, such as information management or shared services of various types. My group is Recreation Information Management, or Information Recreation Management. We are a subset of something called Facilities and Recreation Management, which is a subset of something called Sanity Business Services. That's basically a shared service environment where all the services that make a business run that are not responsible for profit margins are put, and we're supporting all of the businesses, and we find that many other corporations, and the people that have come into our continuous recruitment program from other corporations have come from shared services environment, trying to apply a lean mindset to the business analysis, business process improvements here. So, this is part of project management. Some of you may have taken a project management course. I know I've taken many, in fact we'll probably add PMP to my initial set next year, because it is yet another related way of looking at the world, project management. So, we're looking at business process improvements through all of this manufacturing, non-manufacturing, and it's now spread through just about everything that we can imagine in the world, even though they may not call it lean. A lot of these principles now are very similar. We have six sigma, and green belts, and black belts, and ISO, 9000, all related ideas. So, at Sanofi, we look at the lean mindset as a way to achieve more and more with less and less. And believe me, in every group, we're required to achieve more and more with less and less. That is just the corporate norm. This is supposed to give us our delighted customers, another concept that comes from the MBA world. We try very hard to make sure that what we do improves the lives of our fellow employees, as well as any external or internal customers that we service. So, we have a way to make things better, faster, and more profitable. Those are the three parts that we're looking for to improve. And if we move our delivery of our products or services to our customers that way, they're happier, we're happier. It could be less wasteful. It definitely would save money, and maybe it'll make us more money, because we're getting things to our customers faster. We also really want the better part. In a company like mine, which manufactures pharmaceuticals, the customer focus is huge, our patient focus is huge. And we produce everything from gold-bond powder, which people don't necessarily rely on to save their lives, but we do have drugs that save people's lives. We have oncology drugs, the Gen 9 part produces rare disease drugs. All of these require that everybody pays really, really close attention to what we produce, how we produce it, how we reach our customers, how they are interacting with our products, very important to all of us. The lean focus is on processes that customers will be able to add value. In any industry, people will only pay you for what it is worth to them. You couldn't produce any kind of a widget. You can have bells and whistles all over it. But if the customer doesn't want to pay for those bells and whistles, then you're just adding cost to a product that a customer is not willing to pay for. So one of the exercises that we use when we go through a lean event, such as the Kaiser, and this we'll talk about shortly, is that we focus very closely on value-added activities, which are processes that change the product of service so that it meets the needs of the customers. And we want to increase those. That's what people will pay for, is the value-added activity. So if they won't pay for a pink pail, and we're spending money making a pink pail, probably we don't need to worry about that, because that's not value-added to our customer. A business required that non-value-added activity might be a process that customers may not associate with added value, but are required by a regulation, or a law, or business rules. For instance, FDA regulations, or SOCs-compliant transparency requirements are really, really important in my industry. And maybe the customer doesn't care. But those agencies and regulatory bodies can keep us from doing business, and keep us from making a profit, can make us look bad in the world if we don't do things according to those rules. So there are times we need to concentrate on business-required non-value-added. Customer doesn't care if it's a pink pail, but the FDA may require that our pail become pink to distinguish it from something else. And that would be business-required non-value-added. They don't, customers don't want to pay for it if the FDA really might require it. So we can't necessarily eliminate those activities, so business-required non-value-added, but we can try to minimize the impact if we can simplify them and reduce the number of steps to them, or just combine a couple of steps, and they comply with the regulatory requirements. And that's the best way to think of that. So they try to simplify those. And then in terms of non-value-added, that's what we call waste. Anything that's in a process that is non-value-added, a process that requires time, money, and effort, but which the customers are willing to pay is non-value-added. So maybe I might like my pail to be pink, but if the FDA doesn't require it, and the client is more paid for it, and it costs extra money or adds extra steps, I'm going to eliminate those. It's very important in the process that we take a step back, take a look at what is in there as a step, and decide is that really a value-added step, is that business-required, or is that a step or a process that's non-value-added that we need to take out of there right now and eliminate. That is why we sit down and try to think about all of that. So we try to minimize that impact while remaining compliant, and that is a very, very important part of our work. So we're trying to generate value and eliminating the things that are non-affirmative, and there are a number of ways we can measure that. So in our shared business services, we use these value creation metrics to ensure that we're continually improving the quality, speed, and cost of our processes. So we don't want to reduce our quality ever. We want to speed things up as we can, and we want to avoid any cost that we can avoid. So for the more profitable dimension of customer value, we've got cost avoidance, for instance, cost reduction, and revenue growth. Those are pretty important in terms of business survivability. We want to be competitive against our competitors. We want to provide the best value we can for our customers. So we need to concentrate on that cost avoidance, the cost reduction, the revenue growth. And when we do these exercises in our corporate environment, we also know that there are people watching us and looking at our metrics to determine that we actually have produced this type of value, the cost avoidance, cost reduction, revenue growth value. So we have that piece. We also have a better dimension of customer value, and that's the customer and employee satisfaction part, and the compliance part. That is something that we consider a better piece of this value creation. And then for faster, we look into effort and turn on time. And that's where the steps that are involved that we will analyze in our process. So what it means is that we as a company can measure the success on different levels, and that anyone working with the imprints in our organization can play a key role in driving success, which is what we're trying to do. We're trying to give everybody the ability to look within our company and offer improvements to any process, but we're not there intimately involved in it. We are supposed to be open to all of these suggestions that come to improve the process. So we pay attention to these seven metrics, the cost avoidance, cost reduction, revenue growth, employee and customer satisfaction, compliance, effort, and turn on time, and we're measured on those as a result of any of our efforts. So waste is a very important part of our leading activities. We want to identify any waste. We consider any non-value added activity as waste. So we've identified eight of these, these activities. Sometimes they're a little difficult to identify. If we do it all the time, that's routine, we tend to accept that waste is a normal component of a process because we're not really analyzing it very closely every day. However, waste is present in all processes, and if we keep looking at it, maybe more than once, the first step in eliminating waste is to learn to see it in the work we do every day. So really leaders are trained to take a look at a process with our groups involved and try to look for these eight components of waste. And we use this acronym, PIMPWOOD, because it allows us to remember all eight of them. I don't like the seven rules or anything else. You never remember all eight at the same time. So what we have here is the PIMP is the P, transport, which is down in the bottom left. And transport is the movement of work between areas or offices that does not add to the value of the product of services. So we are thinking that it's unnecessary movement. And this is very assembly line if you think about it. If you're moving things around that don't need to be moved around, if you've had to shift things from one side of a manufacturer to another, or if you're in the recordable world, we keep having to move boxes because people are waiting for deliveries. And we have to stick to the one file room, move them to another file room so someone doesn't pick them up. That's a waste of transport, a waste of time, energy, space, and many other things. But sometimes it just happens and you have to deal with that. But we try to eliminate that anytime we see it. The I in the PIMP word is inventory, which is having more material or information on hand than is currently required. And again, that's a just-in-time thing. If you have more on hand than you need, you have to manage it. And managing takes time. It takes resources. The M part is motion. So is the unnecessary overly complex or repetitive motion of workers? Is that something that we should be seeing? If you're walking to multiple locations to get what's done, that's not efficient. So we're trying to make sure that motion of people, which is independent of the transportation of objects, the motion of people is really a little bit, it uses up your resources. It may strain people and maybe an ergonomic incorrectness. It may just take more time than it should if someone has to walk back and forth to carry one box of time back and forth. So we look for ways to improve the motion of people in the process or the goods. Now the people part, we don't like to think of people as waste. And that is a very sensitive thing when we run our events. It can make sure people don't think that the reason we're running a convenience improvement event is to eliminate the people in the organization because everyone is overly sensitive about lots of jobs. And that isn't why we're exploring these particular actions. We're already under-resourced in almost every area. We tend to run convenience improvement events in order to make better use of resources because there are so few. So with the people, it's really the waste of unused human talent. If you've got somebody that has good ideas and suggestions or can be part of participative management and so far they've either been silent or no one's listening to them, that's a waste. And we try to make sure we bring that out in a group when we involve people in a Tizen event. So the W is the waiting part. We're just waiting around for the next step of the process. And that is very wasteful. As you can imagine, some of us are not very good at scanning on Twitter and your phones and some people are really good at it. They just plug their phones and keep busy. But if you have somebody sitting there looking at their phone instead of doing the next action in the process, that's a waste of resources, the waiting part. Over-processing is making more than is required or earlier than is required by customers. So we do not want to over-produce or produce too soon. And defects, I mean it should be over-processing is putting too much value to a product or service and what they want or pay for. And we talked about that earlier when we talked about value added, it's really, really important that over-processing is adding value, over-production is adding more than is required or earlier than is required. And a lot of organizations are guilty of over-production or over-processing. The big one for most of us in my industry is certainly this defect. And defects can be products or services that don't conform to customer needs and that may result in rework. And as almost everybody knows, rework is a terrible thing. It's doing it over because something got forgotten, something was done wrong. We know it won't have defects at all. And in our industry and manufacturing, it is incredibly expensive to have defects. It is, there are many examples of how companies have gone out of business or had huge losses to their stock value or had even been bought out like, I can go into details but I won't at this point. But companies have lost their ability to stand alone because of defects in their manufacturing and allow for takeover pressures to occur. So in general, we think about 5% of activities are actually adding value or adding activities that customers are going to pay for. And so the challenge for any employee is to really pay attention to what is truly value added in their work and to focus on reducing or eliminating all the other ancillary activities that go along with that. And that's a tough one because most of us have invested a lot in our roles and our job duties. And it's very hard for us to give up something that we thought we did well or that we imagined somebody cared about. It's very hard to find out that somebody may not care about something as much as you do or you won't have to spend any time on it. I know it's tough when that happens to me and it happens to me fairly often. So how do we improve our processes? There is a framework that's used in the, which is a process, one of the processes called DEMEA and that stands for Define Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. And so when we run an event that analyzes a process, we go through these steps. We start with Define and we're going to measure Analyze, Improve, and Control, in which each phase is a step in the thought process of eliminating waste and solving the problem of how to make it better. So if we use this structured methodology, DEMEA ensures that problems are solved consistently so that from one analysis to another, we're using the same criteria. We're using the same tools to analyze that process to make sure that we have created this common language and dialogue for improvement. And we feel that way we can deliver maximum business impact through minimal effort across the organization. And so let's take a look at DEMEA because that's one of my favorite parts of what I do in a session is going into the Define phase. And Define phase improves setting the goal. So most of you have done project management whether it was defined as such or not. And you know that there's almost no point in doing anything unless you want to stay in advance in what you're doing it for. You need to define that purpose and the scope of that and get all the background you might need before you analyze this process or the customer. So we do our best to understand the customer requirements and what other processes might affect the outcome of our efforts. So if you come out of the Define phase, you should have a clear statement of the current problem. All your improvement goals should be able to be there and how you're going to measure it. Metrics are a really important part of the DEMEA. This came out of manufacturing and follows that mind-set. Let's measure it. There's no point in doing it if we can't measure it properly because we have to be able to prove at the end of it that it's worth all this effort. So we start with a high-level map of the process. We actually take a huge piece of paper on a wall and we start writing out the processes step by step. And that helps us provide that context of the process for the business. And we also bring in what we call the voice of the customer. It's really important for us to talk to the customers, to find out what it is they want to pay for and how they see this as a use and measure of success. So the Define phase tools include this project charter. And this is just an example of what we use in-house, which shows the various parts that include the people involved, the elements of this. We have our resources listed. We have our goal statements. Primary metrics of success. So, you know, are we eliminating 20 staff? Are we doing this 10% faster? What are our metrics here? What are the business goals for this? What can we say is the business impact of it? And then because we usually use this charter as we-this statement, we usually show this as part of our outcome of our work. And this aligns everybody right up front, what our goal is, who's going to be responsible, who's our executive sponsor, who is the process owner, who are the team members and what are their roles. And this charter helps us figure that out. So it's what the proven is to achieve, the scope of the activities involved and what resources are available to you in one place. And we consider this a really important communication alignment and reference tool. That the lean leader uses to work with the process owner and the executive sponsor as well as the people who are actually doing the work as we go forward and can check against as progress is being made. So it's a good problem statement of business case. So we move on to the measure phase to collect more detailed data on how to validate the problem and improve or actually improve the charter. Because we find the charter is a starting point. It may not be the exact same charter that we end up with. We may find during the course of the event that we've kind of realigned where our goal is off. We've changed the scope slightly. We may find out we have the wrong business sponsor and have to change those. But that doesn't happen as often as just shifting the goal slightly. So now we're in the measure phase. And so you've got the clarity on the scope and the goal from the defined phase. And then you've focused on gathering information on the current situation. So you want to develop a current state map. And that is my huge piece of rolling white paper across a wall that shows me what the process looks like now. The people in the room that we've gathered together can each tell us what they do as part of that process and we can draw it out using colors and markers and charts and stringing and everything else to visually identify every step of the process, who's responsible, what is involved, and start taking a look at that. So we're not trying to fix it yet. We're just trying to set on what steps are right now being used. So we collect the process baseline data. We try to understand how the current process operates. And we then try to focus on identifying pain points, pain points, waste, and customer value. We talked about waste already. We haven't talked about pain points, but everybody knows what they are. There wouldn't be a continuous improvement effort if there weren't pain points that everybody already knows exist. But we try to make sure we identify all of them. And then we try to identify the value of that process and the improvements we're making to it. So this is a Visio online software program to map up. We put this in Visio. It doesn't look this neat when it's up on the wall, but we use a lot of these same colors and emblems to identify things as we show our process problem. So in this one, we're looking here just to the green, which generally starts things off. So green boxes are processing steps. Green is actually value. Green is something that's being done. And it helps to visualize when you look across there to see, okay, how much green is involved here? How many times is an action taken that's actually an action you ought to have? And you'll see there's a little vaguely made red heart, especially red heart, but whoever drew this, not me, I hope, didn't do it such a great job of a heart. But the heart shows that it's customer value added. And that's almost always a processing step. Something that's in there is really important. And that's what the customer is paying for. So you start by identifying all these process steps, whether or not they're value added, and then you color code them so you can visually look at this and take a quick look at things. Where's the value? Where's the waste? So the purple boxes, and there are a few of those here, probably because that's one in my world, inspection. Infection steps are not really the steps you want to spend a whole lot of time doing, but they're required in industries like mine, you know, pharmaceuticals or banking. You need to have somebody constantly doing quality checks. And we try to reduce or combine those types of purple inspection steps along the way. But you have to show at a current state map how many there are. There's a lot of inspection. And a lot of times that's what we can eliminate is a number of inspection steps along the way. So the yellow boxes are transporting steps. Not too many here, but there's always transporting steps where something is handed off between one group and another, or one person and another. And or is just literally in the case of risk management, maybe it's a records box that has to get from point A to point B before somebody can take a look at it. Blue boxes are storage. So when you see blue, that means it's waiting for something to happen, you know, waiting for an email to be returned. You're waiting for the box to be delivered. You're waiting for something to happen. And that is wasted time. So every blue box is pretty much wasted time. So you're trying to identify defects in associated rework by connecting these process steps where the errors are. And you want to make sure that you notice those red lines. So that's when something is reworked. So in these, there's too much rework. You try to eliminate the number of times that something has to go back and be done again. And this is an inefficient process with this many red lines going back and forth and saying, next step, next step, oh, oh, I've got to go back and do it again. So this is just a visual. I wish we could all be together and just put hands on because it's so much easier. I understand when you get a chance to do this. But you try to then take a look at this and figure out how long it takes for the cycle time for each step so that you can identify bottlenecks in the process or steps for the, you have delays where maybe the inventory isn't there and it delays the flow of goods and services or you're waiting for someone on vacation to make a decision and you're waiting and waiting and waiting. So that can all be written out in this current state. You can, usually we put little numbers on the top of every box to indicate how long it takes, day, two hours, a week, and then at the end, we can add up the amount of time it takes for that entire process to go and we can use the metric to say, we're reducing this time. It was 15 hours to set from step one to the step 30 and now it's only 12 hours so we save ourselves three hours and that's a metric we could use. So we're going to go into the analyze phase and this is always a fun one in a group. We're going to try to identify the root causes of the problem. So we've identified some problems in our process and then we try to confirm those data. We try to go back to the process owner or we look for a subject matter expert to say, what is the root cause? Why are we having a problem here? Why can't we move this thing along? And we end up with our cause and effect analysis and a five-wise approach helps us to do that. So again, sorry for the eye chart here but many times we just see the symptoms of the problems but we want to prevent the recurrence of the problems so we drill down. We just keep going down to identify the root cause of the problem or the waste might be. So we use this tool called the five-wise and there's a lot of pool examples of this but this is just one that was used from the chart. So if you want to ask the question why, about five times, you'll get an answer for a root cause. So here's one that starts that I didn't make my flight and you say why because I overslept and you say why because my alarm didn't go off. Why? Because the battery died and why? Because I lost my charger and then the last why is, you know, because I'm just not very good at this, I'm careless, I just lose things regularly and you know what the root cause is and you also know what the action can be which is that you carry a spare charger and many of these, if you read through them you can identify yourself and your own weaknesses and I've done these for myself, for my significant others, for my children, for things that go wrong on vacation. It's amazing how many times you can use the three diagram of the five-wise to realize how often you can screw up and how to fix it in the future. But I wouldn't get too critical of your significant others because that doesn't go anywhere except trouble. Improved phase and the improved phase is the goal here is very clear. You want to identify, prioritize and implement these solutions to address the root causes. You know that you don't have, you should carry a spare charger so then you need to implement that solution. That's a really easy one, you know, why a charger? But in the case of a complicated process, you might have to work a little harder at this. So the improved phase is where you take your team and you develop this future state vision of the process and the solutions to address the root causes of the key problems and waste, don't forget the waste, that we talked about a few slides earlier in the analyzed phase. So many of you have done this whole brainstorming solution thing, I'm sure, in many parts of your lives or your working life or student life. And everyone always uses that phrase, think outside the box or generate a whole wide variety of potential options. That brainstorming thing can be very valuable, especially if you have a room full of people who don't always work together, don't always have the same kind of job and might see things a little differently when expressed by another person. So we try to do these brainstorming or benchmarking or experimentation techniques with a group of people from just for backgrounds. So there may be more solutions that they come up with in a room of 15 people than you have resources to do or even a mandate to do. So you want to use a benefit effort matrix potentially to, as a tool to prioritize your work. I think most of you have seen this, the quick wins in Kaizen, we're looking for quick wins, things that we can start to continue. We love to find out in the upper right quadrant a lot of strategic initiatives. That's great, but no one's paying us to get in this room and do this, do this effort because it's costly, it takes a long time. And our charge is to do this quickly. Generally, in the Kaizen, it's 30, 60, 90 days, so let's get this done. Nice to have are what we can implement after the quick wins are done. And deferred are activities that we really, really want to just stop because there's no value add to those. So we don't want to pay a lot of attention to the lower right hand part of the quadrant because it's high effort and low benefit. So we want to make sure that our solutions are deployed. We want to document, train a new method. We want to implement, we want to use a control plan and we just change the user plan. So we spent days in the room working on a solution and we're coming up with an implementation plan, which has very clearly people, the task, the person to do it, the date that's expected to be done. So we come out of every one of these efforts of an implementation plan where it's very clear who's in charge of which piece. And as a lean leader, what I generally do is I hold after a three or five-day QI-ZEN session where everybody works well at least, then I call everybody at the meeting a week later, find out where we stand, see if there's any needs to quit tweaking and then say, okay, what's going to be done in 30 days? What's going to be done in 60 days? What's going to be done in 90 days? And then we have 30, 60, and 90-day meetings at the end of 90 days. We should be done with what we said we would do. If it wasn't a 90-day solution, it needed to go into the strategic initiative and not in the print business. So this is just a small example of a very small QI-ZEN, which was on centralization of box stores between two groups that I work with. And it was very easy, you know, take things out of two separate systems, put everything to your point, have these very straightforward goals and do dates and keep track of the status. So we use those as one of the tools. So we want to make sure we have that change management plan in place because, as you know, the hardest thing to do is get everyone to accept a goal and to actually make the changes. It's great in a room with 15 people. You come up with a great plan. You think you're going to make it work. You're sure you're going to make it work. And then you realize that everyone is back to their desk and they're backed up emails and things should be done and other priorities. So we generally don't leave the room until we also have a change management plan so that we can make sure that we have a plan to deal with employee resistance and the ineffective management of people side of change. So we think that it can be just improving in lean life that applies to everyone. There are a few big problems that we can fix, project support and process mapping, project management, implementation control planning. And we deal with scorecard and dashboard development to make sure that we take care of those big problems. The medium-sized problems are these Kaizen events. So if we come out of a meeting and we've identified all of these big plans, we've got more trouble than 30, 60, 90 days to let us deal with it. The medium-sized problems, we use a Kaizen event to this 4-day workshop that's facilitated by a senior leader and so we identify and implement effects from 30 to 90 days. And then for small problems, one of the good things now is that we're at the point where when I see a problem in a process, I just can gather three people in a room and say, okay, what are we going to do about this little issue? Let's just fix it now and we can do this. It's very, very nice to be able to make a quick change and not have to have a big to do with 15 people in the room from four different groups. You just pull together as small as this. Where am I here? And so I usually run Kaizen events. And Kaizen is an interesting, it's a lean workshop, usually three to five days. It's a potential vehicle for executing that Jamaica methodology that's typically applied to these medium-sized problems. And the medium-sized problems in my organization are usually cross functional. They're not using one function. They usually require cooperation between more than one function to improve. And that's a do now solution. We are given authority to do this now, make a difference, make it happen. So we put seven to 15 people in a room. We bring everyone together and we work on transversal processes to cross these multiple functions, businesses, and countries even. Afterwards, and I really enjoy doing these because I get to meet new people. I hear what they do for a living. I get to see what their part of the process is. And one of the things I enjoy, especially as an extra, is pulling people in that don't always get listened to or have a very small role in a process but an essential one and that's why they're in the room. And other people need to understand what that person does and what the obstacles can be. And so we have actually put here some of the testimonials of people who participated because I like for folks like you to understand that people really get excited about these. This is not just a combined moment. People really enjoy learning more about how everyone else used their roles and what roles they have and what pieces they provide for some of these processes. And that's usually about three days that it takes a team to gel. First day is kind of like the high school dance with the boys on one side and the girls on the other. By the second or third day, you know, everything gets mixed up. A lean leader will make sure that people don't just get to sit next to the person they knew before and who's their buddy. They have to integrate across the organization so that they know what we're doing. So we work pretty hard at keeping the groups small, understanding those pain points between them, having people in different groups be able to tell each other, well, the challenge is you think it goes like this but what really happens is that. And just to see each other understand what happens to the other person. And it just opens their eyes and makes them a lot more interested in making it work across the organization. So we use that, we use the voice of the customer quite an awful lot ahead of time and during it. We use the current state value stream mapping to make those big charts on the wall. We list our pain points and we go back at the end and we try to make sure that we reduce the pain points. We look at a benefit effort matrix and that's often led us to other events or other things that we could do in the department. I did one kind of one time on the life cycle management of computers for onboarded employees and it ended up generating I think five other events because all of the problems we identified and the other processes that were affected. We try to make sure that we concentrate on those quick wins. We want to have an immediate effect, bring your own booster. It leads to efficiencies right away, we don't have to wait for that. It simplifies things and maybe we haven't solved the big problem or we solved a lot of smaller ones. We've reduced the magnitude of the big problem that has to be solved eventually through a project or an application of larger resources. And then we create the future state values stream map which shows everyone what our ideal state is, at least at this stage. Reality is maybe there's not enough money or enough people do it, the perfect way. But we find a good enough way that's improved from the place before. And then we make sure to have an implementation and control plan in place to keep things moving forward. So here's just one example of a charter that we used for centralizing the off-site storage operations. And, you know, there are a number of people involved. We were able to make better use of resources. We were able to reduce this for our organization. And I have to say that three years later it's still going really well and we had a follow-up event about a year ago to make it another improvement in the process because everyone had been so well-crossed trained between our sites that we could make the next step. And it was good to reach that stage. And other, let's see what other things I threw in here. This is a small version of a, what we call it, a site talk chart, suppliers input process output customers to show where we're getting our input and who we're doing this for, for the customers. And we try to build these little maps at the beginning to understand the, an overview of the process. Because it's a, it's been used in total quality management programs with the late 80s and it's still used in Six Sigma and we manufacturing. So we try to use these as part of pre-work. And lately we do fewer and fewer three or five day events and more and more half day events or broken up events because we can't afford to constantly have 15 people travel between sites to spend three days in classrooms to get this done. But it is really nice to see that understanding this developed by members of the team and how they let go of their own profile viewpoints and see things through other eyes and, and offer some. So this is an example of one of my three-day ties and agendas. So we start with the kickoff, so it goes to the customer value stream. Next day we do root cause and brainstorm, prioritize, design the future state, implement improvements on the third day, create change management plans, implementation control plans. Then we do a little report out. Because usually we show people what we've done, you know, that the leaders and executive sponsors. So that's, that's a destruction process value stream map, which I use now. We actually donate GenZine historical records to Harvard Business School for an archive and I implemented this in order to not let our normal destruction process destroy boxes of materials that were historical interest. So it's a pretty simple process, but it, it takes our destruction process and puts an overlay on it. And that was reached by bringing some people into the room. Because we get into our daily tasks and we don't see all the minutia that, that affects it. And I think there's some, yeah, back again, some of the things that we spend time improving is our relationship with other groups like, like litigation or facilities management. We do a lot of move closure, renovation, you know, we close down big sites, manufacturing sites, there's a lot to do. We have to work between teams. We work with our global counterparts on things like residential schedule updating. We have a reconstruction process that's very important to our program. And we have things we still have to do, like work harder to improve our role in mergers and acquisitions and integrate our Canadian and American and U.S. programs. And we do more off-site storage costs because right now they're getting higher and higher with less and less resources to be able to apply to them. So I know that was fast and furious and I want to make sure somebody can have a chance to speak besides me. So. If you have a question, you can raise your hand or type your question in the chat area if you don't have a mic. What does harmonization mean in this context? Rebecca wants to know. No problem. Well, we have a worldwide program in 80 countries. And one of the problems that Sanofi has as a large organization is that we don't have a fundamental records management program that is consistent across all of our sites in countries. The U.S. has a mature program, but most countries do not. So what we're doing right now is we harmonize between our program and the global program in terms of policy, emphasis on what we're going to get done, things like our records retention schedule, the way we approach destruction, many other pieces of a program. Harmonization can also mean that within the United States we have one part of the company that existed for 50 years. And then a new part of a company is acquired like our animal health group. And they did things very differently. They have different suppliers. They handle off-site storage differently. They handle electronic records differently. And we are constantly trying to make sure that all of the records managers across these different parts of the country and the different sites do these things the same way. So we are able to justify and defend the way we approach records in our company. I hope that answers the question. Thank you. Are there any other questions? Anybody else have anything I'd like to ask? How many of you have heard of the Lean-Kaizan approach before? Any of you? I'm seeing a Nika. Can you tell us in what context? And I see Charlene has put her email in the chat area. It's easier for you to grab that way if it's like. Yes, I realize we don't have a lot of time left for everybody. And I just want to make sure you had a way to reach out and get me. I probably should have even used my other one, but I just wanted to use the one that I know everybody can get to rather than my work one. Great. But there I am for my other one as well. You're the one. I did put it on the slide. I thought I hadn't for some unknown reason. And yes, I think Lean is logical. It's just, yeah, it's interesting. Lean is, it's definitely a science. It's very funny that people come into it are not me. I am not necessarily linear. But boy, I really like Lean. It makes logical sense. And I enjoyed the part that brings everybody of these different talents and viewpoints together in a room and draws out the best in everybody to solve a problem.