Manufacturing eCommerce Success – with John Buglino

John Buglino  00:00

A wedding song.

Curt Anderson  00:00

Just over the border.

Nicole Donnelly  00:02

Nice. That’s a good one.

Curt Anderson  00:08

What’s a good one to call?

Nicole Donnelly  00:11

Rocky song apparently was John’s wedding song on our wedding night great one.

John Buglino  00:18

For the first time it was playing

Curt Anderson  00:20

happy once everybody let you know what let’s just we’re walking right into a conversation we’re talking about John’s wedding song January my god new question to call Hey, what was your wedding song? So John, what was your wedding song?

John Buglino  00:34

So the actual wedding song for the first dance was Nickelback never going to be alone. And I remember my wife and I practice like crazy, just to not look foolish. But when we were first introduced as husband and wife, you know, you walk in it was it was the rocky song. It was the right

Nicole Donnelly  00:53

man, you guys are fierce couples. One

John Buglino  00:55

You know, I didn’t get a lot in the wedding besides my wife, but you know, and I got an ice cream cake. But I got the song.

Nicole Donnelly  01:03

You had ice cream cake at your wedding? Oh, that’s cool. Ice Cream Cake.

Curt Anderson  01:08

Or any of it? Or were you guys play to each other?

John Buglino  01:11

And they couldn’t cut it because I left it in the freezer too long. But eventually some ended up on my nose is not like that. But yeah. Awesome. Oh, man.

Nicole Donnelly  01:18

All right. Well,

Curt Anderson  01:20

hey, let’s dig in. So this is a special program. We usually don’t lie Wednesdays but man for this fine young man. We are definitely going to go on Wednesday. So Happy Wednesday, everybody. And just what an honor thrilled to introduce our dear friend John Buglino from Optessa. How’s that? Nicole and I were in Chicago last week. And we were with we were doing some lives with manufacturers. And it’s so much better. Right, Nicole? And what was the feedback? They’re like, yeah, Curt, you got to do something with your background. So I just sit here today. I’m gonna stand over here so we can go here. So. Alright, guys, welcome to the program. Nicole, how are you today? Anything exciting in your world today?

Nicole Donnelly  02:06

What’s exciting in my world? Well, you know, something crazy happened this morning, a bird flew in my house this morning. And I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you. But it was utterly terrifying. I opened my garage and a bird had gotten trapped in my garage and I opened the door to go out to my car and all of a sudden this bird just flies in the house. And so that was you know, it was like the birds. You know, that old movie the birds. I felt like I was being overtaken by the birds. I don’t know if Yeah, here it is right there. Yes. And so you know not to digress too much. But it was just fascinating. Because this poor bird, it found a windowsill and it kept on trying to go out the window. So it kept on hitting itself over and over again on this window. Meanwhile, right underneath the window was a door wide open where it could just fly free. And I just kept looking at and I’m like, this is like a corollary for life. You know, we just hit our heads against the window, not knowing that the path forward is just right below. So anyway, that was a it was interesting. It took us 25 minutes to get the bird out. But finally, finally we did it. It only took me my husband and my eight year old daughter to finagle that bird out of the house.

Curt Anderson  03:13

Well, it’s a family effort, a family affair, a team effort, so to speak on a team effort. Hey, we’ve got the team here today, Val. Happy Wednesday. Thank you, my friend. Hey, we’ve got Whitney Houston in the house. So wonderful to be here together. Hey, we’ve got Kevin, we just had Kevin we pay man. Week. So Kevin. And I know like the great team at Gen alpha is just partnered with Tessa. So further ado, John, let’s dig in in a couple of things. You know, you and I became fast friends and just the big thing that I love and admire is like you’re just a fierce networker, you rate you get the hashtag rate, they’re hunting relationships, and I love you, you we talk a lot about hey, how do we out teach the competition? So let’s go here. Like just share some insight on like your networking style, your networking strategy, how are you the hunter of relationships? And let’s let’s go there first.

John Buglino  04:08

Yeah, so the hunt relationships actually was coined on this show, and I didn’t even know I mean, I think when I first said it, I think you and you Kurt and Damon were just like completely awestruck pens, were dropping mics turned off. It was it was insane. Right. And it really does really go to the point of people want to connect with people at the end of the day. And as soon as you understand that there’s someone behind the keys or somewhere behind a brand or someone that’s could be struggling that might need some help, like you have to meet them where they are. And you have to look to connect with them at a deeper level. Right like I’m a sales and marketing leader at a at attesa Yep, I’m not gonna get a lot if I continue, just preach, preach, preach and just shoved down your throat that I want to sell you something but I have to understand what Your needs are I have to understand who you are as a person, I have to understand what’s going on in your world. Because at the end day, it’s not about me, it’s about you. And the more I learned about you, the better I can be as your provider, vendor and the relationship can move forward. So really, what LinkedIn as a prime example, I looked at as many conversations as I can I look, I’m not the pitch lap people. But the viable conversations, like if you come on my profile, I’m gonna ask you, if there’s something I could do for you, like you didn’t happen to just stumble upon the profile, something caught your eye. So I want to understand what that is. And if it’s just your passing through totally fine. I just want to know, I’m just a curious person. Or it could be something like someone actually needs something. And I reach out to them like, oh, they actually, you know, he’s actually acknowledging me, and I really attributed to one of the guys in our community, Dave Chrysler, I said to him, I said, think of your LinkedIn profile as your digital storefront. If someone walks into a store and you’re greeted, do you immediately turn around and walk out? No, you’re going to continue on into the store to continue what you need it right, you needed that shirt or pair of shorts, or that bread or whatever you needed. If someone greets you, when they come onto your profile. You’re not gonna go oh, they saw me? No, there’s a reason. Tell me tell me what the reason is. I’ve done that to you, Kurt. Jokingly, I’ve done that to you and Nicole, and it was just Oh, I was just looking for something. You know, Kurt, you do your fear set, you know, researching and different things. So that was it. You’re like, oh, no, no, brother. I’m just passing through just looking, just doing some research ahead of our show. No problem. But at least I know, there’s something else that wasn’t, you know, going on? I do, what 95% Of the people that happen to come on the profile?

Nicole Donnelly  06:45

Yeah. Interesting. One of the things I really love about you, John, as a networker is just you’re always really looking out for the people around you. And you’ve done that for me too. Like, you’ll, you’re really great at connecting other people. So you’ve connected me with many other people and said, Hey, Nicole, or you’ve made introductions of people that I just met with a wonderful gentleman yesterday, Jim Mayer, who you introduced me to, and you’ve done that so many times. And so I really appreciate that you really show the way in terms of really trying to build those connections with other people in your network so that they can grow to and if you see somebody that might be a good connection, you, you’re really good about thinking about other people, that might be a good connection for them. And I really thought that go giver side of you. And

John Buglino  07:30

sometimes they’re not always the right connections. Like sometimes it’s like, I grasp at straws, and you know, just like, is this gonna work? But I always put it out there and just say, Does this make sense? Right, I give you my convoluted thought process. And if it makes sense, great. You know, I did it with you mentioned it earlier, like Kevin and Chris Harrison Gen Alpha. I’m, like, just throwing out here. Here’s my idea. And now we’re in a partnership, right, like so my half brain shower thought became actually something that’s going to drive and help businesses as we mature. They’re

Nicole Donnelly  08:03

very nice.

Curt Anderson  08:05

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, we have a tagline. We do our workshops and webinars, you know, like closed mouths, don’t get fed, closed mouth, we’ll get that. And so you know, we’re, you know, our show manufacturing ecommerce success. We’re all very passionate about helping manufacturers speaking of a dying buyer, we were just talking. So, Dan, if you missed it, John’s wedding song, his intro wedding song was the rocky song right in your backyard in Philadelphia. So, and again, guys, drop a note in the chat box, let us know that you’re there. If you haven’t connected already, you must. Please connect with John bug lino, you will be you’ll thank us later. He’s an amazing networker. John, when you came on the program before we talked about, like your leadership, where it comes from, and we’re going to dig, we’re going to take a deep dive into master production scheduling. Before we go there. I just wanted a couple of things that you just said that were just so potent, so powerful. With your networking. It’s like, you know, hey, I’m not looking to do the sales pitch. And we’re, I think, Brittany,

John Buglino  09:02

we got it, we got it. Say no to the

Curt Anderson  09:05

pitch labs, right? So that’s, that’s fantastic. But you know, you should another thing you jot tons of value volumes on the first time you came on the program, you shared that somebody doesn’t need to earn your trust, you get that trust, they have to break it to an earn it, but they don’t need to earn it. Can you just let’s go there for a minute and apply that how you networking, your coworkers, your leadership, let’s go there from it.

John Buglino  09:33

Yeah, it’s something that I’ve learned over my career of leading different teams with different personalities. I don’t like to micromanage. I like to just give you a task and I trust that it’s gonna get done if I bring you on. My team is a culture on the team. Like we’re all marching towards the same goal. And it’s really hard not to say it’s not really hard to break the trust, but I give you that trust, right. I have to trust my team. I have to trust people. around me. And everyone just has to do what they need to do. And I don’t need to be over top of you, for you to get things done. Right. So, the other piece is like breaking that trust is if I expect something or view and you don’t do it, or you lie, like, that’s when it’s kind of like, we, I become ice, right? I’m your friend and tell him not kind of thing. But that’s the same way in business, right? Like, just think about it that way. Like, if you’re going to use a provider, you’re trusting that they’re going to come up on their word, and that they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do. And you’re going to just leap of faith, throw it out there, and then you’ll wait and see how things kind of shake out. So I give that to you. I even have new new girl on my team, new intern for the summer. And I said the exact same thing. She’s like, I don’t really and I’m like, Yeah, I was like, here’s what we’re gonna do. Here’s the five things, here’s the expectations. That’s that’s really it. I’m here for questions and other items. But you know, she she shows up on time we work on projects together, we update together, she attends meetings. That’s that’s really it. There’s really no reason for you not to trust someone. So I rather trust before. You know, I guess that’s just how I go about the started off. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  11:13

I love that. So Alright, so let’s slide in here. We’re here to geek out and just really jam out about master production scheduling. And I in like, how does this all tie together? It’s teaching, it’s educating it’s networking. It’s understanding what the what the challenges, you know, we’re not really selling anything is like how do we dedicate ourselves to helping other people achieve their goals, get the ball in the endzone, all the above? And what are we all selling? John just said, we’re all selling one word and one word only. We are selling trust. We’re selling trust, you know, and it doesn’t matter. If you’re selling widgets, you’re selling products, you’re selling retail, you’re selling ice cream at the local ice cream shop. Hopefully, everybody go get ice cream over Fourth of July weekend. By the way, that’s a good thing to do. Nicole, let’s start let’s let’s go into some questions here on master production scheduling with our dear friend John.

Nicole Donnelly  12:04

I love this mantra. It’s been I’ve been thinking about this a little while. And it’s it’s the whole teach, don’t preach, right? Teach don’t preach. You know, I love it. I just love it. So let’s talk about production planning and scheduling. So if I’m a manufacturer, and you know, I’ve got to figure out, you know, how I’m going to make sure I get all these widgets made? There’s so many things that go into that planning process. So maybe, John, let’s just start with what is a master production schedule? And what are the steps to creating one? What are you know, what are those steps look like? If I’m, you know, if I’m the ops manager at a plant, what do I need to be thinking about? What are the, you know, the steps that would, would need I need to tackle to get that schedule created.

John Buglino  12:50

Right now perfect. And so a master production scheduling my there’s an acronym we were talking about this pre show M P S, M is a Mary P as in Peter S, as in Sam MPLS, for the sake of this conversation, so it’s any manufacturer is looking to make their product and understand when they can make it and in the quantities needs a master production schedule. Yeah, plain and simple. What goes into those steps? There’s a lot, there’s a lot that goes into it. And it’s a one thing I’ll say it’s it’s a fluid situation, right? Because you take things for example, the first thing, your demand. Now demand when I say demand to manufacture, demand changes, daily demand changes, weekly demand changes monthly, depending on who you are, and what you’re doing. Think about seasonality. If you’re making lawn mowers, you are highly skewed to seasonality, because you know, when people are going to want your product versus not. Right. So demand and the fluctuations in demand, there’s pretty much the first couple of steps is to understand those pieces of it. And how

Nicole Donnelly  13:57

would a man this is great. How would a manufacturer go about identifying demand? Like I assume one of the things would be to look at your sales data historically, maybe, as you mentioned, seasonality, look, you know, looking at market trends, number of orders, but what are some things like what are some, I guess, data points that manufacturers can be looking for to really get a good pulse on what their demand is for the product?

John Buglino  14:21

Yeah, you can look at your current or previous demands over a certain amount of time. The other piece if you’re just starting out, you have to look at and do some research, look at your competition, look at others in the space, okay, and do do the research to understand seasonality that might be impacting their right if you’re starting a business or a new manufacturer or starting or manufacturing thinking about a different product line. You have to do your research to understand what’s my addressable market? What’s my possible margins, what can I expect to happen to my my own operations as a result? What is the impacts positive and negative of doing that so it needs to stop Are your research and also needs to be part of your data analysis? Right? You have to understand expectations, set goals, understand what you’re going to measure how you’re going to measure it, when you’re going to measure it through a report back to yourself and also your business.

Nicole Donnelly  15:15

Wow. Yeah. And I’m sure sales and marketing is involved in that heavily, because they’re going to be able to help you identify what’s coming down the pipeline. Yeah, right.

John Buglino  15:23

There’s also trial and error, right? You’re also going to take that leap and say, Well, I’m going to try and sell these in this, this quantities, and I’m going to just try it out and see what happens. Am I going to be left with too much supply leftover? Am I going to be completely depleted and scrambling? I don’t know to try?

Curt Anderson  15:42

Well, that’s a great point, John. And the thing is for like small manufacturers, especially like, we’re constantly talking about the entrepreneur, the business owner that’s thrown on multiple hats all day, they’re their own marketing, they’re their own sales, finance. But when you do have a little bit of a bigger company, you know, John, you’re gonna like sales, like, I want the inventory on the shelf, because like, I’m commission based, this is how I feed my family, I my product in the, you know, accounting is saying, like, wait a minute, we’ve got, he’s got to pay for the raw material and the goods and like, we’ve got accounts payable, and we’re choking on inventory. You know, Damon, is always talking about cash flow, you know, in his post, and what have you. So I mean, there’s a fine balance, and that’s like, and that’s again, like, data, and information is so as power, right? And that’s where you come in and save the day of bring. So let’s go there a little bit deeper, if you could bring in that sales accounting. How do we marry that balance?

John Buglino  16:37

Yeah, the next the next piece after you run this thing, your demands, and seasonality and fluctuations is aligning your inventory and your internal capacities. Right, you have to understand, okay, I said, I want to have 1000 widgets on the shelf, when can I move those 1000 widgets? Or when can I add those widgets to the other widgets to make the bigger widget? Right? When is the right time to do those types of things. So you have to understand your inventory levels understand what you have not only in operation in stock, but also what’s incoming, right, that’s the other piece of it as well. Like I said, it’s a fluid situation. If your accounting team or your procurement team is ordering ahead, and you forget, you’re gonna have a truck at your door and go, wait, what’s on this truck? What Wait, what happened? What did I do? Yeah, so you have to really understand your demand then ties into your inventory, then your capacities understand what you’re going to do what the goods you have on hand or that are coming towards to you. The one caveat, I would say that threw a lot of manufacturers in flux was shortages, right? I don’t have to dive into the different shortages that we’ve all experienced. But a lot of companies over bought inventory. And now we’re left with inventory that they don’t know don’t know what to do with. Right, they’re just sitting there and it’s eating up valuable warehouse space, it’s eating up valuable real estate, it’s a pain point, because it’s already spent. It’s not helping bring money in some of these items could have expiration dates that then become waste. So it’s completely it’s, again, a fluid situation here. But it’s all goes into that that master production schedule, understanding what’s going on and operation from end to end. Right. And we’re just we’re just scratching the surface.

Nicole Donnelly  18:19

Oh, yeah. So that first step I hear is you got to know your demand forecasts. And then you got to put together an inventory plan, you know, you’ve got to really understand what your forecasts are, what your desired stock levels are your safety stock requirements, you know, like, what’s the minimum that you want to get to you before you need to make any adjustments, right? And what your storage capacity is, so that inventory plan? What about like production constraints? Let’s talk about that a little bit. Like that seems like it’d be a big part of production planning, of putting together a MBS a master production schedule. So talk a little bit about constraints. What are some examples of some common constraints? And what can manufacturers be thinking about to plan for those constraints as they’re building out their? Their schedule?

John Buglino  19:04

Yeah, absolutely. And constraints. Again, we’re going to define right? So a constraint for me can mean a couple of things, but there’s so the definition so constraint could be a business rule, or business KPI. Right? So you’re constrained by you have to do X by y to satisfy a customer delivery date, right? Another constraint could be, I only have eight hours in a day to run my machines, or I only have 10 hours in a day throughout my my capacity or my constraint is I have a finite amount of time to do something, whether that be because of machine, whether it be for a person, or you can be constrained by your inventory. You only have 1000 buckets. Yeah, you can’t ask for or create a schedule that requires 1001 you physically and literally don’t have 1001 You only have 1000. So constraints can mean a number of things. From a master production schedule standpoint that constraints are The ladder, right? It’s the constraints on your production environment, you have three lines, you can’t schedule four lines. If you only have five people on staff, you can’t plan for a sixth person, right? You are constrained by what you have aspiration wise, you can look at it. But again, that’s a totally different conversation. So the constraint is your parameters, right? I’m a manufacturer with five lines, team of 10, and inventory of 1000 units cycling every month. Those are your constraints from that you then look at what you’re able to produce your goods and get everything out.

Nicole Donnelly  20:36

Yeah, I mean, constraints. I mean, just generally can apply to any business or every business has constraints. And so I think that’s so important. You know, once you’ve got, you know, your demand forecasts, and you understand your inventory is like, what are the kind of the barriers or what is the kind of like, constraints that I have to work within in order to put together the schedule? Awesome. Okay. What about okay, we talked about stock levels, too. So once you have your inventory plan, you understand and have identified what your production constraints are. And you said that very clearly, like, how long is the machine going to be running? How many machines do you have any people are going to be working on the line? You know, What materials do you have available to you and lead times to I imagine it would be another big constraint for manufacturers? Right, man, there’s just like, as, as we’re talking about this, John, there’s so many variables that go into this, this production schedule, like, so much of it is so fluid, as you mentioned, that, you know, I can see how this would be really overwhelming to really have like a, you know, really, very clear, well organized, well oiled machine. What happens, what are some other things that that needs to happen next, in order to create that master production schedule? Once you’ve identified these forecasts, production constraints, inventory plan, stock levels,

John Buglino  21:54

what else? The next piece is your time? Right? You have to understand your timing, like, how long is everything going to be running? Or what is your time horizon for your production? Right, everything I laid out, are we looking at it, this is a week to week, some manufacturers are running daily, some are running week to week, some plan out further, month to month, quarter, quarter, year to year kind of thing, just look at it at that larger view, and then they come down. So you have to define your timing, right? Because then everything before it is impacted, right? If you if you’re looking at over a year, your inventory numbers going to be well, here’s the inventory, I’m gonna get in all of the calendar year 2023, right? Or if your calendar year just reset. Now it’s like, okay, over the next from June to June 24, here’s what my inventory numbers are going to be. But then you have to look and say, Okay, that’s the year look, let’s go down by a quarter. Let’s go down by a month. And in each one depends on the fluctuations, the changes, the orders, the reorders The Explorations related to your inventory, right. So again, it’s a fluid situation, it depends on what you want to measure and how you want to measure it at that point. And once you get that timing down, now it’s time to see feasibility. Everything before it. So we have identified five, so maybe seven steps right? Now everything you have to now say, Okay, I’m going to generate my NPS, my master production schedule. Yeah. Now you got to check if it’s feasible. Right? And you can’t, you wrote, I recommend not doing it in live states live, because you don’t want to impact like what’s happening live on your production floor. So you want to like plan ahead and kind of look at and say, Okay, here’s what I think’s going to happen. And you kind of lay it out and see how it’s going to flow before you publish it to your broader team. Right?

Nicole Donnelly  23:45

So you kind of pilot it, you do your test your

John Buglino  23:48

while at it and see like feasibility like can I produce? If I’m producing 1000 products a month? Can I produce four? Can I support 4000 products in a quarter? Yeah, maybe if and then you have to lay out the apps right. So now you have to increase capacities and things like that and, and other items. So now you start running into okay, my demand saying one thing, my inventory levels are saying and another my capacities are saying another. Now my timing now can I actually is this actually feasible, right. And then if something goes wrong, you have to start back. So if the customer demand, they say and they need 4000, and your capacity only puts you at 3500? Well, now you have to figure something out.

Nicole Donnelly  24:31

So now you have to go back and manually go back and adjust this like a schedule,

John Buglino  24:36

you have to manually go back and adjust it, you have to figure out what needs to change, you have to align the team, right. So if you have to order more, you have to get more people involved. You probably have to get an approval because you’re now contradicting your inventory over a certain time period. And that’s also an added cost. So now you’re looking at okay, the demand is a for an extra 500 units. What does that mean to my bottom line? It means x dollar. Okay, but to produce that 500, it’s going to cost me Why is the y greater than the X? That doesn’t make sense. But if the x is greater than the Y, what’s my margin? Right? So you have to think about all these different items. And then as that’s all happening, your production still running. Right? Yeah, these plans are made, I don’t want to say in a silo, but they’re sometimes made off to the side or intended with actual live production, right? So you might have to if a new order comes through, or new demand fluctuation hits, now you have to pull team members in and say you need to help me understand what’s going on here. So something happened. So often we didn’t account for has gone on. And those disruptions are just that.

Nicole Donnelly  25:44

That’s a lot. So when you’re working with companies that are trying to manage these production schedules, like how much resource do they usually need to have just purely to create and manage the schedule, let alone communicated with all the different departments like, this seems like it’s a huge investment of labor to just keep it, keep it up and running properly?

John Buglino  26:07

Truth be told you, I’m usually speaking to one really stressed out person. That’s trying to just keep all the plates spinning. Yeah. But other times, you have full teams of people like 345, sometimes 10 or more, that are just dedicated to making sure all the steps are running, and are working in tandem and working in unison. And even with all that power behind it, the shrub options, throw everyone off. You can’t plan for it. You can’t. And again, that’s the really stressed that one person or the team now has to figure out everything, all the different facets, right. And that’s another piece of it. So to answer your question, yeah, it’s usually one person is the owner of the NPS, the master production schedule, but sometimes it could be a team responsible that then filters it up to the business to kind of execute from

Nicole Donnelly  27:05

man, we’re getting to lots of comments. Over

Curt Anderson  27:10

all right, how about you know what Dave Chrysler’s in the house? He says, How many Mike you know what the I like I just served my migraine

Nicole Donnelly  27:21

is automatic.

Curt Anderson  27:24

Thank you. And I got to backtrack for a minute. So keep the fire going here. But how about you know, we get back to Rocky and so Diane says, Hey, I’ve got to run the stairs. Whitney says, hey, it’s better than drinking.

John Buglino  27:38

So funny thing about the the art stairs, Diane, I actually did that. I didn’t realize or maybe didn’t care. I didn’t realize was I actually interfere with a wedding that was taking photos at the top of the stairs. And then you have me just like doing a full sprint. And I’m just like, Oops. So I got a picture

Curt Anderson  28:02

of a dino photobomb. That’s all right.

Nicole Donnelly  28:05

No, I wouldn’t expect anything different from you, John. You know, that’s the whole time.

John Buglino  28:08

I was like, Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall because everyone watches you as you do it too.

Nicole Donnelly  28:13

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Well,

Curt Anderson  28:16

from Diane and we’ve got some other comments here. We’re talking about constraints. I like this one here from Diane, Diane’s an efficiency expert herself. Time constraints, employee constraints and material constraints. I don’t know. I mean, like we could, you know, like, I don’t know, there’s like this little thing that COVID came about, you know, you can have like acts of God, you can, you know, Nash tragedies we’ve talked about on the show here, like, you know, going viral, you know, we had a guest on and I just showed her clip last week where like, she she met the woman that founded Spanx. What’s her? Blakely? Thank you, Sara Blakely. And when she went on Oprah man, like, you know, like, you know, so that’s an extreme example, but like, you just gotta be, how do you prepare for all these things? John? I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s so intense, right?

Nicole Donnelly  29:03

Yeah. I mean, Dave Chrysler mentioned here that the usually the person who’s managing or the team are often an Excel super user. So that’s an A question I have is like, how do you manage a production schedule? What platform are you using? Typically? And how do you communicate all of those changes and ingest all of the information because there’s so many just departments and parts of the business that are involved in this planning, you know, the schedule that need to be you need to there needs to be a two way communication happening. And how do you manage that? Is that I mean, I just excel like, how does that work?

John Buglino  29:39

Exactly It Dave, Dave nailed it. And you and you said it, it is it’s Excel, it’s oh man, and that’s sometimes the more sophisticated right is usually you get pen and paper whiteboards, bulletin boards, notepad, whatever it is, you know, channeling my my kidney McDermott here with the notepads and notebooks but that’s Really what it is it’s really manual. And it’s tedious. And as far as how do you share it? That’s also a problem because you get version control. And I’m sure you’ve seen Excel spreadsheets where it’s like, final version three, final version V four, it’s like, wait, but it’s the version control becomes a serious issue.

Nicole Donnelly  30:23

Yeah, especially if you’re, if you’re working from a different version than someone else. And then what if you’re ordering way too much inventory or not enough? I mean, I can just see the that that could just completely catapult the number of disruptions that are happening. And I think that’s the, the acts of God. Yeah,

John Buglino  30:42

I think that’s the, that’s the other piece of it is if you have a team, the team might be siloed, to where they’re focused. They say like, they’re focusing on inventory, right. And there’s a disruption with inventory, right, someone’s not gonna be able to supply the stock, they thought they were until like, two weeks, it’s going to be delayed. They don’t tell you, the owner of the MPs, or anyone else on the team, but they run and go tell procurement or purchasing or someone else on the team. But then they fail to update that master document, that document that everyone looks at are supposed to be looking at. So then everyone’s working and the operations running, and you get to the line. And now the lines like what, wait, where’s no more raw material? What happened? And then all of a sudden, the team ever says, oh, yeah, it’s not coming for another two weeks, we can’t run the run, we can’t complete it. So now it’s like, well, well, now what do we do? And now the whole operation comes to a halt. Right? So that version control that shareability. And that accountability goes completely out the window, when you have I think they’ve said that big board, or that random Excel sheet sitting on someone’s desktop somewhere, it really becomes an issue where that communication those gaps in communication can really just cripple a manufacturer.

Nicole Donnelly  32:02

Yeah. Oh my gosh, that I mean, that’s a huge pitfall is the communication gap dropped the mic. The communication gaps that happen with the master production schedule, that can impact everything down the line, as David Chrysler mentioned is a huge pitfall. What are some other pitfalls with with, you know, creating an MPLS, that manufacturer should be thinking about what are some other issues that can arise? Any stories or examples you have for me.

John Buglino  32:29

So the other piece is, if you’re on a team, or if you’re a sole person trying to generate these, this schedule, you try to maybe to almost like cut corners, but you try to do as much as much as you can, in the quickest amount of time as you can, you might leave some things out. So you might forget about one constraint, or you might forget about one little piece of information, like we’re not running overtime anymore, or we don’t have that line, because that line is not going to be operational, it’s going for maintenance. So there are so many different things that are happening. You know, a couple of common examples that I’ve come across. And they might sound silly, but they’re examples, people scheduling workers on a line that are on vacation, individuals that leave early on a line and don’t tell anybody or they just happen to leave, like the last hour or two on the ship, something happens, right work life happens. Other things, like I said earlier, inventory levels aren’t where they’re supposed to be, someone forgot to update the inventory, or someone fat fingered an inventory number 1000 became 10,000. teams looking for the pallets, and it’s not there. So there’s so many different things that can go wrong. So the complexity of it, you have to make sure that you really dive into every facet of the business. And if you don’t know you have to ask questions, right? You have to double check, you have to triple check. It’s the same thing. Like if you’re working, you know, measure measure twice, measure twice, cut once, right? You have to do that. You have to do that. When you’re when your organization’s like, can we run this? Can we commit to this customer? Yes, well, let’s double check if we can commit to the customer. Well, it’s everyone just do it. Just do a sanity check. Make sure things are where they’re supposed to be everyone’s where they’re supposed to be. Everything’s working. Another example, like I said, was in an overtime issue, another one, machine maintenance and downtime. So that’s another piece of it, where one manufacturer mistakenly ran their machine for two times as long as it could actually run. They take any cooling downtime. So the machine was only supposed to run at 10 hours, then they ran it for 14, but it only ran for 10 then broke for two hours to cool and then went back online for two. So what came off the machine was not what was expected. So to run the numbers so I have stories for days, but it’s all But it’s all a matter of understanding that there’s so many things from disruptions. One of the jokes that I do have is, you know, the guarantees in life that in taxes, the other one is that this is going to be a disruption in supply chain.

Nicole Donnelly  35:16

We’ve learned drop the mic, you just have to, but that’s

John Buglino  35:19

what it is, you have to you have to plan for a disruption, like, and you got to think the most obscure thing, right. And that’s exactly what’s gonna go wrong in the operation. I’ve heard those stories.

Nicole Donnelly  35:30

Yeah. And I, as I think about, you know, I keep thinking as you’re sharing all these examples, is how much time it takes to manage the schedule. And think of all the people and all the time that you have to spend updating it and changing it and communicating with this department and that department, and making sure that this gets updated. I mean, I imagine people are in this thing all day long. You know, you know, and depending how big your plan is, you’ve got many people who are involved. And, to me, I’m just thinking like, the clock is ticking. And there’s all this time going by, and we know in manufacturing, like Time is money that time spent on that is time, taken away from your bottom line from your profitability as an organization. And just like efficiency. So you know, that’s, that’s what keeps running up is like the dollar signs of all that time being spent managing that production.

John Buglino  36:17

And to and to that point of managing that schedule, it could take days to generate one, like these data inputs. And this data is not easy to calculate the data is not easy to obtain in certain organizations. So if you’re taking a couple of days to generate a schedule, are you looking back and double checking if your numbers that you got yesterday are still accurate? Right? And that’s and we’ve come across that as well is, if it takes you 72 hours or three days to generate a schedule? And then you publish the schedule on Wednesday? Did you look back at what happened on Monday and Tuesday to make sure everything’s still accurate? And you know what? It’s not? I gotta tell you, that goes back and bite you.

Nicole Donnelly  37:01

It’s almost like you need somebody to QC your schedule for you. I’m sure that’s part of the process is he’s gonna double check to make this make sure this is accurate, because you need like a second hand.

John Buglino  37:12

Any changes, right? You go to publish, and then your team goes away? Hold on. Yeah, go back even more, because something, right. So say your team flags it right, that team member do an inventory is like, wait, we wait. We’re not getting the inventory for another two weeks. Hold on. Now you have to go back and still redo the schedule, because it was built upon those inventory numbers. So you’ve caught the disruption. Now you still have to re reschedule because your operation still has to run.

Nicole Donnelly  37:41

Right? I gotta say like this master production schedule, it doesn’t really seem that like it doesn’t seem to make life that much easier.

John Buglino  37:48

When you have one. Right, when you have one it is. In principle. Yeah, no, it is. Well,

Nicole Donnelly  37:57

let’s talk about like, what, you know, how can manufacturers address some of these pitfalls? What would be kind of like, the next step for them, if they’re running into a lot of they’re spending so much time managing this production schedule? is, you know, what, what’s a good solution for them? Tell us about it. Tell us about what you’d recommend?

John Buglino  38:18

Yeah, I think if you’re experiencing the pain, you have to address it head on, right? The organization and your bottom line is going to suffer if you keep kicking the can and not addressing what’s happening, right. If you’re one person generating the schedule, and you can’t get it done, you can’t get it done efficiently, and you can’t get something that’s scalable for the business, you need to get some help. If you’re managing a team, you have to make sure that the team has communication has shareability accountability, to make sure things are all working in unison and that there’s no gaps or you know, like our friend Dave, there’s process like identify the process on the team. Yeah, to make sure they know exactly what to do if something or what if something were to happen, what are my five things I need to take care of types of types of items.

Nicole Donnelly  39:09

Love that? When would advanced planning and scheduling software be a good fit for a manufacturer who’s been managing their NPS, their master production schedule? Like Help me Help me understand who this makes sense? For what level of maturity? Are they there? They in terms of their business, maturity, and all of that, what would you say there?

John Buglino  39:30

So the steps that we’ve identified using advanced planning, scheduling software can really cut out a lot of the steps because once the data and once the systems are connected, it’s really just updating fields, right? You’re not manually going back and asking someone for an inventory number, the inventory numbers in your systems of record are ready, right? You’re not just pulling from a random Excel spreadsheet that someone happened to update last Tuesday or this Tuesday or when you needed it. So you really have to look at? And to answer your question. Any company is looking to mature their operation, right? Anyone that’s looking to get on that digital transformation journey, right? If you’re tired of managing an Excel spreadsheet that goes out to three consonants and two vowels, to get your schedule or get your production done, it’s time to have a conversation, right? It’s not scalable for your business, if you just can’t get ahead of your operation, and things keep on starting and stopping and stalling, and you feel like you just can’t get above your head above water, it’s time to have a conversation with a provider that can help you with this massive production schedule. So you can scale and grow and alleviate some of the disruptions and headaches to get these get this schedule published for your operation?

Nicole Donnelly  40:48

I have so many questions. Okay. So from a technology perspective, you know, I imagine a lot of these organizations have different levels of tech tech stack, if you will, some of them may be working with an ERP, some of them may not have an ERP, right, that pulls in this information do you recommend and Dave Chrysler has had I love planning people process technology, right? Technology always comes last. So let’s just say you’re a manufacturing facility, and your planning is in place, your people, your processes all lined up, and you’re trying to get your tech stack all set up? Where does an APS software advanced planning schedule software fall in that tech stack? Do you need to have other Tech’s products SAS products established first, before you use you decide to invest in APs? Or help me understand like, where does that fall in the process? Once you’ve got the people the process and the planning all in place?

John Buglino  41:47

Yeah, the short answer is no, you don’t have to have any amount of technology in your operation to kind of make this make events planning scheduling software work. The right tools can take tribal knowledge or stuff that’s on that big board or on those in those notebooks and ingest it and take it as an input. Once you let us know. And once you let the provider know what this data means to the provider or to the to the software itself. So if you say I have my inventories on this sheet, and my inventory is on in this Word document and right inventory is over here, it could be an ERP, whatever the tech stack is, the right provider should be able to work with the input no matter where it is, whether it be tribal knowledge, coming from an Excel spreadsheet, any documentation CRM, ERP, it doesn’t matter, the maturity on the tech stack side of things, it’s understanding what lives where and what it means to the APS advanced planning scheduling software vendor. Okay, so

Nicole Donnelly  42:48

the advanced planning and software good or bad the APS vendor, they’re they’re really going to a good vendor is going to take the time to really understand what all of those inputs are, what are the the all the sources of truth, if you will, and create a bridge that pulls that data in consistently on a regular basis into the software. And that’s going to be built out during implementation. So that ongoing, it’s just going to it’s basically like a good APS vendor is going to meet you where you are, they’re not going to say, Well, you’ve got to invest in this technology first, in order for this to work, they’ll be able to make it work with whatever your your process is, and build it out from there. Right. Is that right?

John Buglino  43:28

Absolutely. And it really depends on what you’re hoping that the vendor can do for you. Right? There’s vendors that can help from a demand side, just understanding demand, right? There’s some people that don’t want to look at their demand over the last two years, they just want to see it in a nice view. And then they want to see a forecast moving forward. They also same thing with inventory. Don’t tell me don’t I don’t want to guess what my inventory is just show me in a nice chart. Well, my inventory levels are, here’s my restock levels, here’s my safety stock levels, just give it to me over a month, quarter and a year. That’s it, that’s all I want to say. And that’s what the vendors work to do is understand the data and give the data in a digestible format. But also, to make it easier to manipulate. Right, it’s easier because one of the big advantages is that the system is connected to the host systems of the client, or it can become your new host system, right? So you have to update inventory, you feed it and it becomes your system of record, right and then and then if you mature and get an ERP or any other kind of technology, make sure I can connect with it. This way you can understand what what data is delivered where and what the data means.

Nicole Donnelly  44:43

So it sounds like in order, you know, the partner, the client that’s looking for this really needs to understand what their end goal is, what the requirements are upfront and really communicate those to say, you know, look, I really need to be focused on building this out to understand or make make Use of the data on these specific constraints, because this is the end result that I want to get. So so in order for it to be set up for success, those clients really need to have a very clear vision of what they want that to accomplish and be very clear about the data points that they need to be ingested. Okay. My next question about this is Oh, and I’m starting to lose it. But it’s going to come back to me, how can this APS software, because there’s so many fluid, so much of it is so fluid, right, like changing all the time, and when you have an MPLS? People have to manually go in there and change it? I mean, I guess this is the proprietary part of the software, but like, how is it able to just really just understand the fluidity of these changes? And, and how does it work that way, without someone having to touch it somewhere? Or is that as you know,

John Buglino  45:53

I’m with you. I follow? Yeah, no, it’s really. So the right, the right vendor will take the time to get all the data points and all the information into the software to help make the best decisions moving forward. Okay, how do you make the sauce, AI machine learning optimization techniques? That’s all the that’s, that’s all the back end,

Nicole Donnelly  46:16

wizardry?

John Buglino  46:17

That’s the wizardry that not for this call, maybe another one?

Nicole Donnelly  46:21

Sauce? I probably wouldn’t understand it anyway, even if you told me.

John Buglino  46:25

But. But that’s, but that’s the beauty of the technology, right? And that’s why it’s always last because the planning people and process has to go before it. Right. So once all the details are in the system, if something were to change, the system learns and knows what is impacted as a result of, right. So

Nicole Donnelly  46:46

the algorithm is designed to be able to have a holistic view of every other piece of information and make adjustments based on that rather than having to manually go to every other organization. And

John Buglino  46:59

wow, cool, right? So so for example, if you need four widgets to create a product, ABC day, and you say, I’m going to have sufficient inventory level of all four, all four to make my product, but then something were to happen to one layer, right. So C, so say C has zero inventory, but it’s going to be back online in two weeks. The system already knows what’s needed to make that finish good. Because it knows it needs all four widgets to make the final product. It also knows not to schedule because it can’t schedule something that’s not there. Right? It’s technology, it needs ABCDE. Without C It’s like cannot compute, right? It’s like a graph in Excel is like, what are you referring to this, it can’t happen. So the system then goes and looks and says, When is C back in stock? Right? If that inventory levels back in stock in two weeks, that’s when the finished goods gonna get rescheduled? Because the system knows, oh, ABCD are now in sufficient quantities to create finished. Good. Okay, here’s everything. And it’s two weeks later, right? So it looks at all those parameters. Same way. As another example, if you were to pull an order forward, right, a manufacturer wants to over deliver for a client, right? You call me up and say, I need to have my my widgets tomorrow. Okay, I can do that for you. But at what cost? Right? What is that going to do the rest of my operation. So when in the software, you physically take the order and tell the system make this a priority, make this in front of everything else, and then it looks at and says okay, doing that is out of order. But we know what’s needed to create this finished good. And since you’re prioritizing over something else, now, as a result, here’s what the impacts are. Right? This is going to deplete item line C, right. So now everything for C is now not going to be able to be satisfied as originally intended. Because you pulled an order in, that’s going to starve out the inventory level of item C. So the technology is told what to do and how to compute, right? Think of it. Whenever you look at a keyboard, you the computer knows if you hit this key, that’s a, you hit this key, that’s w you hit this key that’s escape, it knows the commands and the prompts, because you’re training it of what to do. And as the machine works, it learns that’s where the like I said the fancy stuff not for this call gets in place the AI and the machine learning the optimization techniques take over to where it’s okay that the inventory levels being depleted. Here’s my replenishment schedule, everything’s, everything’s going well, I can now see my reads my new schedule, everything is off and running. No big deal. Everything’s fine.

Nicole Donnelly  49:46

And I imagine with a machine learning, it’s just gonna get better and better over time and much more efficient over time in terms of being able to predict and forecast all of that. Right. So what do you see typically, like from a time perspective, If you have an organization who’s, you know, typically maybe they have a team of three or four people managing the production schedule, and they decide, you know what we need to really advance in our maturity here, this has taken way too much time. What is the time savings that they’re spending once they’re able to move to an APS software? To manage, there’s your production,

John Buglino  50:23

the savings, it were down to minutes, right, it’s minutes to generate this master production schedule instead of days. And it’s mid like anytime

Nicole Donnelly  50:34

there’s a change, and it take days, it just takes

John Buglino  50:38

the software just like I said, it calculates everything at like supercomputer speeds, if you will, yeah. But it really cuts down days and hours to minutes, right? Then you get some more advanced, where teams of three and four say, Well, now I can do more. what if scenario management and I can actually look at other items, it’s like, Absolutely, you now have your master production schedule, there’s nothing for you to worry about. You can plan for the unexpected and just go to town treat it like a sandbox, right? Yeah, look at what happens if seasonality, we got it wrong, right? Or what if something happens in some product goes viral, and now sudden, we have to make three four times what we need to? Well, now you can plan for that. And you can look at it. And you can understand that. So we get you out of the muck and mire, right, and you’re not three days to generate something and then have to go back. Now as you’re looking ahead, right, we’d like to say you can pick your head up, and actually look and help and have your organization be more efficient. Because now when a disruption happens, you’re minutes away from a schedule that can then be executed and feasible, rather than hours or sometimes days.

Nicole Donnelly  51:51

I mean, I’m just thinking about like days of an entire, like production line waiting. I mean, just add up the hours, the time the labor, the expense, the last, you know, goods that you’re not producing the Lost inventory, all of that. You add all that up. And that’s significant, just for one change.

John Buglino  52:13

From one for one change. Yep. And you’re also the one you miss not even miss but the one in there is the client, right? Your manufacturer, you have a client that’s expecting something of you, and you can’t deliver will go back to trust. That’s that’s where that conversation comes into play. And the other beauty of the the APS or advanced planning scheduling software, is you were able to over and you’re able to over communicate or communicate effectively changes. Right, so now the conversation shifts. It’s not Hey, Kurt, we can’t get you what we wanted. I’ll let you know when we can get it done. But just bear with us, you know, you’ve been offline for a really long time. Just just just give me some time. Now the conversation is Hey, Kurt, just letting you know your order that was supposed to be here on Thursday, we have to push to the Monday. Here’s why are you okay with that, I promise you, there’s nothing else that’s gonna go up Monday’s the new date. It’s a different conversation on it. Yeah, you can count on the first example, we’ve had clients where they’ve just lost orders. If you again, you the manufacturer is servicing a client, right? If they can go someplace else is going to get it to them, they’re leaving, right, that revenue is gone. And then you know what that client and that trust is gone as well. So that’s another advantage of using the right vendor to kind of help you there.

Nicole Donnelly  53:38

I mean, let’s so many drop the mic moments because honestly, that’s the biggest advantage of all at the end of the day you’re in business to serve your customers at the end of the day, and to be able to establish trust with them and be reliable and dependable and and get things to them in the timeframe that they need. And be very clear with them if there’s a disruption that’s going to impact that and be able to tell them the day that it’s going to work like as a customer that instills trust in me I feel like I can rely on you as a partner. So I mean to me that’s like the we’re coming down to the hour and I’m just like well that’s the magic of this is that you’re able to really be able to be the hero for your customers. And this is sheesh

Curt Anderson  54:28

Ben John you got a huge sheet that they owe you that’s even better. That is better. Mic drop. A major Sheesh. So cool. How about like, sanity check. Pick your head. Just Oh my goodness. There was so much John this was a masterclass and not like I’m a logistics I was a logistics major back in college like I totally just geeked out right now. I have like a full page of notes. This was just so brilliant. I just and you really shine a whole New Light. You know, we’ve been friends for years now. And you know, I’ve always understood what you did, but I just I really you took it to a whole new level. So how about a big round of applause for John? Today for just dropping Mike after my he’s my Yeah, decided to Florida. Cool. I know you’re new you

Nicole Donnelly  55:22

No, yeah, I think for John, you did such a great job explaining some of those major pitfalls that happen with a master production schedule, and really outlined very, very clearly, you know, when APS is a good fit, and how it can really transform a manufacturing facility, so thank you for

Curt Anderson  55:43

the call. I’m a little cheers to jazz.

Nicole Donnelly  55:49

Up Tessa, thank you. Here’s our swag and hey, Vaughn is like the king of swag. He’s always good stuff.

Curt Anderson  55:56

It held up,

55:58

held up and held. You know, made my day.

Curt Anderson  56:03

The most handy guy in the planet but Nicole, I just, you know, little handy, you know, duct tape there. So

John Buglino  56:10

the update the team in Chicago and said, Look, yeah, no, I listen.

Nicole Donnelly  56:16

And we gotta we gotta we gotta praise from Dave Chrysler. So that Oh, thank you, Dave. Dave, thank you, God

Curt Anderson  56:21

bless your brother. And we need a man about Dave Chrysler and Jen alpha. And Jon Burge. Lino on the same stage, Nicole, that might that would be a good, because you know what I’m constrained. Last week, we took a tour of a great manufacturer in Chicago. And a gentleman was an efficiency expert. In January, we were talking about the book, the goal, and just he was walking through all the constraints that he’s alleviating. And so you know, like, your software is just such a powerful, man just be able to pick your head up and get a good night’s sleep. You know, just yeah, that’s it. You know what, like, you’re like asleep provider, you know, you can help. Like, you’re almost like a therapist, John bugling. Oh, who knew that John had that in and he’s just a therapist. So anyway, let’s start winding down. So ain’t no program this week on Friday, so we’re taking a little holiday. And so Damon is off. He’s enjoying some family time. Nicole has a big wedding that she’s going to I’m going to be spending some family time. John, what do you have planned for the fourth? Anything fun, exciting with a family?

John Buglino  57:27

Just barbecue and friends? That’s really, really all I need.

Curt Anderson  57:31

That’s the last last bike shop of the moment right there. So the call any parting words, words of wisdom

Nicole Donnelly  57:37

of a question I’ve been dying to ask John I don’t have any parting words but just this one last question for John just as one last one. John, if you’re a spirit animal what would you be

John Buglino  57:52

so the spirit animal and I’ve answered this before is an eagle an eagle I like soaring above I like looking further out big plan is yet type of

Nicole Donnelly  58:06

eagle with you this guy over here. He’s an eagle too.

Curt Anderson  58:10

But for totally completely different reason. Mr. John big Leno lacking a great head of Italian hair. And so I prefer to myself as the ego because of this, you know, I’m the quality but you’re just you’re you’re soaring high so anyway, we’re at time we will wind down John thank you. Seriously this you guys just pure gold. masterclass, just so much fun. And thank you, my friend. We appreciate we send warm wishes and just an incredible safe weekend to everybody out there. Thank you guys, for joining us today. If you’re just coming in way go back and catch a replay because this was pure gold. So Happy Fourth, God bless. And last thing, man just go out and be somebody’s inspiration just like our dear friend John wiggliness. Because man, this was your inspiration here. So thank you guys, and we’ll see you soon. Thank you