Manufacturing ecommerce Success – with Angela Thurman

Damon Pistulka  00:00

Here we go.

Angela Thurman  00:02

And here we are. We

Nicole Donnelly  00:04

are live. Oh my gosh, manufacturing eCommerce success. It’s a wonderful, beautiful Monday in DC. How are you doing today, Damon?

Damon Pistulka  00:14

Awesome. It’s Monday motivation time and I’m ready to roll because we got Angela in the house today.

Nicole Donnelly  00:21

We got Angela and she is going to bring all the motivation today. She’s just just a powerhouse and can’t wait to hear all of her amazing words of wisdom and experience. So welcome to the show. Oh, thank

Angela Thurman  00:36

you, Nicole. I’m doing great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Damon. So good to see you again.

Damon Pistulka  00:42

Yes. It’s awesome. Always

Nicole Donnelly  00:45

so awesome to have another woman in manufacturing on the show. We just had Megan Ziemba on, I think it was, oh, amen.

Angela Thurman  00:54

I love Meghan. Yeah, I wore my my mavens of manufacturing shirt to the Houston Food Bank on Saturday night, all of my manufacturing friends would be able to identify me.

Nicole Donnelly  01:09

I love it. Tell us about that manufacturing event that you went to the food bank, tell us what you guys do.

Angela Thurman  01:16

I’d love to Yes, of course, we had a great event on Saturday. So the, the local Houston, members of the Texas chapter of women in manufacturing collaborated with the Houston chapter of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, as well as the University of Houston’s student chapter of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers to volunteer at the Houston food bank. Now, the Houston Food Bank is giant, gigantic. And it is one of the largest and most efficiently run food banks in the United States and IT services 16 counties Wow, in Southeast Texas. So imagine their impact for hunger relief, because it’s just tremendous. I just, I have such a heart for the food bank. So we decided to sign up for a shift at the food bank, and we had this, you know, triple collaboration event going on. And it was just so much fun. And getting to work with my peers, plus the students and getting to know, students and encouraging this next generation of manufacturing engineers was just fantastic. And of course, you know, when you, you bring a bunch of manufacturing experts into a situation like that, we were assigned a task to scan all these food items, and sort them. So some things were actual food I items like bottles of drink, or you know, water, juices, soda, things like that. And then others were packaged food, cereal, prepared meals, things like other things like that similar items. But then there are also household cleaning products and things that were non food. So they had to be separated out in different boxes. Of course, we very quickly established a process and, and and it didn’t take us long to optimize this process, and then execute. So we finished our task ahead of time, and they’re like, Okay, go take a break. And we’ll find some other work for you to do. So once we finished sorting all these items, then they brought us into sort produce. So we were bagging five pound bags of mandarin oranges and sorting through this big gigantic bin of oranges and having to sort through the good and the bad, right, the good, the bad, the ugly. And we quickly found a way to optimize that process as well. So we had people picking up the good oranges, and at first was like, you know, the good and the bad it was kind of in taking too long. So a couple of us just focused on calling out the bad oranges. So that the good or just is like I’m calling out the oranges and I’m pitching you the good ones as I go along and just went a lot faster.

Damon Pistulka  04:56

That’s awesome. That’s awesome.

Angela Thurman  05:00

We got some people here that Chrysler would probably like yeah,

Damon Pistulka  05:03

Dave Dave’s here. And Nicole, we got some comments coming in already. We got Dave’s here today and Scott. Hey, Scott.

Nicole Donnelly  05:11

Nice to see you. Hi, Christine. And Dave price was in the house let’s go do you any good so good to see you.

Damon Pistulka  05:20

It’s so it’s great when you know when you get manufacturers together I don’t care if you’re doing something like that the food bank or at the at the baseball park or at a school you know Payton up fixing things up because you could just tell things happen. It’s like we’re here to do something. This is what we do every day. Just give us a stuff and get out of our way.

Angela Thurman  05:40

We don’t even think about it. We just fell into this rhythm automatically. We didn’t discuss it we just did. Yeah.

Nicole Donnelly  05:51

Great culture, right. Great culture in action. You all just kind of like, you know, like the birds, the V that flies together, right? You just kind of go in your spot. And happens. It just happens. Well, cool. Well, Angela, it’s so great to have you on today. Thank you for so much for joining us. And thanks everyone out there for listening in and tuning in. This is such gonna be such a fun, wonderful conversation. And I do have to do some some I have to do an homage to Kurt, who is not here today. We miss him terribly. But he is off with his family today. And just want to ask the first question that Kurt always asks. And this is Angela, when you were a little girl growing up? Where did you grow up? By the way? Where was Where’s Oh,

Angela Thurman  06:34

stream northwest corner of Arkansas. So I’m from Benton County, which is that little county in the corner by Missouri and Oklahoma, where that all comes together?

Nicole Donnelly  06:45

Beautiful, beautiful part of this country. When you were a little girl growing up? Who was your hero?

Angela Thurman  06:52

Marie Curie.

Nicole Donnelly  06:54

Wow. Awesome. That’s amazing. You went to Marie Curie tell me Oh,

Angela Thurman  07:03

I read her biography. I was in the fourth grade. And I just thought, Oh, she’s so fascinating. And she was Polish. And so that’s why one of the elements she discovered is called polonium this because she was Polish. You know, she had this very romantic story with her, her husband and you know, going to the Sorbonne and, and she She not only did she win Nobel prizes, but there are different fields of study. One is in physics, and one is a chemistry. And I just thought, you know, she, she hears this poor little Polish girl, and looked at look at what she accomplished. She changed the world. Oh, yeah.

Nicole Donnelly  07:53

The world what an inspiring, inspiring role model for you. Yeah. So cool. And I can see that her. It’s her inspiration is totally led to where you are today and impacted you in a huge way. That’s amazing. Very cool.

Damon Pistulka  08:07

Yeah. So so I don’t know, if you have, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Angela a couple times. And I just, I gotta say, there’s some of the coolest stuff in your background. So let’s just let’s just go back a little ways, because I want to I want to share this. Why you went to college? And and what what did you go to college for?

Angela Thurman  08:29

Electrical Engineering?

Damon Pistulka  08:31

Yes, yes. Or? No? No, but this just gets it’s that’s just like scratching the surface. So you grew up in this small area, you know, kind of remote area? Ozark Mountains. Yeah, exactly. Right. I grew up remote as well. You went school, got your engineering degree, then you went and got your your master’s in science and telecommute communications management. But where the heck was your first job coming out of college? If I remember, right, what are your first job? Because it was the coolest thing?

Angela Thurman  09:05

Yeah, so my first real job out of college. I worked in the power management and distribution branch of the space station at NASA glass, which is now Yes. At that time, it was NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Now NASA Glenn.

Nicole Donnelly  09:26

That’s amazing thing.

Damon Pistulka  09:28

You actually design stuff in the power systems on there, right? You’ve been working on? Yeah.

Angela Thurman  09:34

Yeah, there’s on my LinkedIn profile. There’s a there is a NASA tech brief on the load converters of the space station. So so my job was to we had subcontractors that built the prototypes. And so my job was to work on that design and to test the prototype equipment before it would then eventually go in. to production to go on the space station. Because when I worked at NASA, it was pre launch.

Damon Pistulka  10:09

Yeah.

Nicole Donnelly  10:10

Wow. This is like Hidden Figures, man.

Angela Thurman  10:15

Not quite that old but yeah,

Nicole Donnelly  10:17

well, yeah. But I mean, you know, that’s baller it is.

Damon Pistulka  10:21

Then yeah. Because you talked to Angela Angeles. She’s just she’s just unassuming and she’s got all this cool background stuff. So then we, you move forward into your career a little bit more. And you did something in Atlanta with telecommunications. That was I’ll let you explain it, but she did something that I set a precedence for, for the world.

Angela Thurman  10:47

So my, my capstone course for my, my master’s degree was designing. And then of course, actually building a metropolitan access ring around the city of Atlanta, because the company I worked for Williams communications, owned a satellite, uplink, uplink and downlink. Obviously, it was called up south teleport outside the city of Atlanta. And some of our Prime customers were TBS studios, CNN, and other major Fox Studios, you know, for all the sports, ESPN, right. So, so I need to be able to connect all of these premium customers, Fox, four for the, the Atlanta Braves, you know, and all the other baseball all the other sports, the stadiums and so forth in Atlanta. Tip Turner, TBS VNN, the CDC, oddly enough, and the upsell teleport all of these major customers in Atlanta, with a very high volume, like really, really high, I could tell you, it’s called an OC 48. So an optical circuit of 48 power. So, I saw I designed that. So now a metro access network is a very common thing. But that was my that was my design for my master’s degree. And of course, you know, a lot of the customers were like, I you know, I don’t want my, my information to be at risk, you know, CNNs like I don’t want TBS to have access to my information. And I’d have to explain to them why it wouldn’t be shared and how the signals work. There’s no way they could get it. But it was fun. It was really fun. No pressure,

Nicole Donnelly  13:26

no pressure, no pressure, like designing the prototype that’s going to be used to go the space no prep, the designing of Metro access now. Oh,

Angela Thurman  13:37

yeah. When I was at NASA, I blew up to load converters that are worth $250,000 apiece. And I turned to the Westinghouse guy. I’m like, Well, Dave, I guess it wasn’t failsafe now. Was it? Nice. Here are 25 years old. A mid level career, you know, white guy. His chin just dropped? Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  14:12

Well, it’s better doing it in Cleveland that it is in the space station.

Angela Thurman  14:16

Right. Right.

Nicole Donnelly  14:18

Exactly. I know I I just saw that movie Oppenheimer a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know if you guys have seen that movie. But it’s just insane. What goes into anything related to that kind of technology, all the testing that you have to do and everything. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  14:41

And so as you look at your career that Angela, you had a bit of project management work, just a little

Nicole Donnelly  14:46

bit. Some pretty, I don’t know, medium profile project steam. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like another day in the office with the Angela.

Damon Pistulka  14:59

The space station Putting the pushing the reset defeater the breaker reset button and not working or something on the repairman,

Nicole Donnelly  15:10

we got some great comments coming in. We got Dave Chrysler, I’m not a rocket scientist, but I know a bunch of them.

Angela Thurman  15:15

No, no, I’m not a rocket. I’m not a rocket scientist, but I can introduce you to what

Damon Pistulka  15:24

Devin is here, coming here from Alaska.

Nicole Donnelly  15:30

He just came on the podcast on Friday, and he had me in tears. It was amazing. Hey, Kevin, it’s great to see you. And Christine, that is a great movie. Really great movie very powerful. Well, Angela, this is so awesome. So I wanted to tell us a little bit more, let’s get going down that path. Let’s, you know, how did you you know, what, what made you decide after all of that wonderful experience for NASA and, you know, building out those, you know, for all of those networks? What led you to start starting your own company? What What took you down that path? What What was the catalyst for you that was like, you know, what

Angela Thurman  16:07

I want to do now well, this is actually my second foray into being an entrepreneur. And both times it was because I was laid off or let go from another, another company. So I have been working, you know, as most recently I spent 10 years at Collins aerospace. And I was a, a subcontracts Program Manager, which was a great use of my three principal skills, which are engineering, program management, and contracts management. Yeah. So at the end of 2020, you know, COVID, was really shutting a lot of things down. And the aviation industry really, really suffered. And Boeing had shut down the 787 production. And just one thing led to another and, and I found myself without a job. So I, I looked around. I’m in Houston, there’s a lot of high tech work here. And of course, we have NASA Johnson. And I thought, well, that’s helpful. I was actually in the interview process with with Boeing for a job at NASA. But the commute from where I live in Houston to the Space Center, is over an hour one way. And yeah, and I’ve been working from home for eight years at that point. It’s hard to go after you’ve been working.

Nicole Donnelly  17:53

It’s hard to go back to an office. Yeah, yeah, have,

Angela Thurman  17:56

I had two, two dogs, I now have three. And my, my oldest girl will be 17. In October, wow. And I’m like, I just can’t, you know, I just, I just can’t. So I was drew from the interview process. And the Boeing guys are really, really, like, I’m sorry, but I can’t, I can’t go into the office every day. And I can’t commute. And I had the opportunity for a contract, contract job. But it was with a German software company. And their ERP system could not pay me as an individual. They needed me to form an LLC, in order to get compensated. So I thought, well, that’s a good idea. Why don’t I just form an LLC, and maybe do this full time? And so that’s how it all got started.

Nicole Donnelly  18:55

It was like you stumbled into entrepreneurship, right, like the happy accident. necessity. Avid

Angela Thurman  19:01

attention. Exactly. Kevin. Exactly.

Nicole Donnelly  19:05

Yeah. And never looked back. Right. That’s kind of how it was for me to similar situation, but you never looked back. You’re just living it loving it. Doing good.

Angela Thurman  19:14

I, I really, I really do love my lifestyle right now. And as long as it pays the bills, I’m gonna keep doing it. Very true. Well, go ahead and

Damon Pistulka  19:29

take away Nicole.

Nicole Donnelly  19:33

I love this. Christine says and boom an entrepreneur was born. Yeah. Let’s talk about you know, your your role. You provide project management as a service, which I think is really interesting, and in many civically. And so what are some of the biggest challenges that you’re seeing now in manufacturers when it comes to suppliers, contracts, project management, what are those problems that you’re seeing, like again, and again and again, that Add, you know, that manufacturers are having and how are you helping all those?

Angela Thurman  20:05

Well, first of all, project management as a service, I’m actually having that trademarked. Yeah. And then so some of the things that I see manufacturers struggling with right now, while I was at Collins, I was one of just a handful of team members in the organizations and Collins is a huge company, right? It’s part of the Raytheon organization, now, they were acquired, UTC was acquired by Raytheon. So while it was still just Rockwell Collins, I was selected to lead a team of subject matter experts to go into supplier locations and help the suppliers with a supplier risk set. So we would evaluate their capabilities across a broad spectrum of risk areas. So it could be their business continuity plan, it could be their hardware or software engineering practices, it could be HR, it could be financial. Just their financial practices as a whole, it could be inventory control, it could be a whole gamut of potential risk areas. And then if they were found, less than superior, we would help create a, an improvement plan. And so there, within Rockwell Collins, there were only, you know, maybe half a dozen people that were qualified to lead these teams and I was one of them. And I loved that kind of work. Because it, we didn’t consider it an audit, per se, it was an assessment. And you know, the supplier was very involved in this, they would rate themselves first. And then the Collins team would go in and write them. And we compare the variances. And, and it really was helpful to the supplier, because if they wanted an outside consultant to perform this type of analysis would cost them, you know, probably hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And then I also helped perform repair capability audits, so repair station audits, because in aviation repair capability is very, very important. So one of the things that I’m seeing just across the board in manufacturing, is the, the establishment of KPIs in these, it what whatever, whatever you want to measure, choose something, measure it, and then then maintain that over time. Right, see what the trend is, are they maintaining, are they improving? Are they beginning to fail? But, you know, if you do have suppliers that are trending down, you know, nip it in the but and set up, set up an improvement plan. But if you don’t know what your quality measures are, you don’t know if you’re getting a bad quality.

Nicole Donnelly  24:06

So drop it

Damon Pistulka  24:08

right there.

Nicole Donnelly  24:09

Yep. Drop the mic establishment of KPIs. It’s so and that is so true. Angela, across every business unit. There needs. Yes. across the business.

Angela Thurman  24:22

Yes, yes. And you and your supplier, your vendors need to agree on what these KPIs are. And then you need to have open and honest communication in some forum. Maybe it’s a monthly meeting, maybe it’s just submitting a monthly report. You don’t need to meet. But if you’re just getting a report and nobody’s looking at it, nobody cares. That’s number one. That’s waste and you’re not being clean. When you’re generating reports that nobody reads. That’s waste. So you need, you need to be reading the reports you need understand what’s being reported. And and then act on it. So if you’re getting some type of defect report, like, you know, X number of defective parts per million is your goal. All right? Are they hitting the goal? Are they exceeding the goal? If they’re exceeding the goal, reward the compliment them just say thank you. Fail. Created and find out why. Yes, I love you know, if it’s on time delivery, if it’s, you know, calls per minute, whatever the whatever it is, whatever the KPI is, you know, understand it and, and act on it.

Nicole Donnelly  25:55

Oh, and you know, what you said something really interesting about reporting, because it’s, how many times have we gotten reports that we’ve never looked at? Right? Like, it happens a lot, right? There’s, I remember reading about Jeff Bezos, in his Amazon meetings. I don’t know if you guys know this, I found it fascinating that in the meetings, he banned slide decks, and everyone gets a memo that they have to read at the meeting. So they spend the first 20 minutes of the meeting. Everyone has to read the memo before they talk about it. And I thought like, That’s brilliant, because how many times do you go to a meeting and someone hasn’t prepared for it, or didn’t have time to read it or whatever. And this way everyone in the room is dealing with and knows and has access to the same information, there’s no excuse, you have to like review it, you know. So, anyway, I thought that was fascinating. But

Damon Pistulka  26:45

that is key. That is key. And you know, as you know, I’ve seen the both of you that, you know, you go into these meetings and someone starts talking about something and somebody else that’s a should be weighing in on it, or a maybe even having to make a decision that you’re like, Well, I, I need to review that. And it’s time it is especially when you’re talking about a KPI performance review meeting, right? Because if you’re going to have one of these ways, and I just love being a stickler like basis on these things, you come to the meeting, knowing what your numbers are, they better be in the reports, because we’re not going to go through every number on the report. We want to, it’s there because everybody should look at it. But we’re looking at exceptions, issues and solving problems. If you keep that focus on that and stay off of those things that, hey, I was supposed to do 10. And we did 10, or we did a lemon. We don’t even need to talk about that. Let’s talk about the one we’re supposed to do. 10. And we’re going three. Angela, you got to see you got to see a lot of this when you’re helping people with project management. I mean, it’s just a lot execute, not just, but execution is really the hardest thing, isn’t it?

Angela Thurman  28:04

That Oh, that’s that is really hard to set, because execution is only like, yeah, one portion, you’ve got the whole initiating, planning, monitoring and controlling and then closing. There you go. So for some people, the initiating, initiating, and planning is the most difficult bit and then once you get that done executing, you know, roles. But true execute execution is where the hard work is, is done. And the team needs to come to the table and do the work. Yeah.

Nicole Donnelly  28:48

I think you guys are both right on this. I think it depends maybe on the organization. Maybe some organizations which are very process oriented and maybe not so open as open to change. Getting them bought into the whole transformation is a much more massive, difficult undertaking. And once we’ve all bought into it, they’re like, we get process. We got this all figured out, right? Yeah. Other organizations that are much more like nimble and innovative. And all of that changes, like, much easier for them. But then the execution part of it might be harder. So maybe, I think you guys are both right. I think it’s business specific. Right. And I think agile probably that’s your experience is when you go into these various businesses, you have to be able to identify, you know, all of those barriers, roadblocks and everything. And together a plan that’s going to work for that specific business.

Angela Thurman  29:42

Yes, yes. Yeah.

Nicole Donnelly  29:45

Very cool, man. Well, tell us a little bit more about last week you were traveling, and you were at a conference and you were talking about you were representing women in manufacturing chapter. Right. Tell us a little bit about But you were talking about there was all about digital transformation, we hear that word that’s a big buzzword every every company is going through digital transformation. Let’s be honest, this is like, digital transformation is like status quo these days, like you have to be digitally transforming your business, otherwise, you’re not going to survive. So what about there? And what what do you think manufacturers because, you know, we hear these statistics that were like 70% of all digital transformation projects fail and all of that. So tell us about what you were sharing there. And what are some things that we can be thinking about, audience can be thinking about, about digital transformation.

Angela Thurman  30:36

So digital transformation, and this is one of the things that we pointed out at the conference last, which was the AI manufacturing and SCADA Technology Conference in Dallas. And we had a panel discussion of women and manufacturing members from the Texas chapter at the conference. Now, digital transformation is a very broad topic. And for that, in a 30 minute panel discussion is quite a challenge. So one of the things that we one topic that we touched on was ERP systems, that’s, that’s an example of how digital transformation has touched manufacturing. And ERP systems are designed to collect and share information in real time throughout the organization. So this can give you data on inventory management, on sales, on production planning, on design, ref control, you know, just a tremendous amount of data about your products, and your customers and your sales throughout the organization in real time. And whenever you have an update or a change to, you know, complete, like new rollout of an ERP system, it’s going to be really, really important that you have the the buy in from your leadership, but that you also have the buy in from the users. So you want to make make it clear why this change is taking place, and how people are going to be affected, and their daily lives. And, and hopefully how it’s going to be an improvement for that, how you’re going to make how this change is going to make their work load easier, and so forth. And then one of the biggest things is that you’re going to track adoption. Because you that’s ultimately what you want, it won’t be a success if the users don’t adopt the new change. Yeah. So you’re gonna need members of the team of the project management team or the change management team, to be ambassadors for this change, to help to get that adoption.

Nicole Donnelly  33:25

What does that mean? Like, how can you be a great ambassador, what does a great ambassador do to help with adoption?

Angela Thurman  33:33

So when I was when I was at Collins, we, we decided to roll out saps arriba. Software for for contract management. And so, you know, a lot of companies use SAP and this is just another SAP product. So, once the rollout took place, I then began to hold weekly meetings for for the subcontracts organization to just be a q&a sounding board. So members of my group, my organization, so there’s like 150 subcontract program managers could attend my weekly meetings and ask questions or, you know, say, I find how to do that. All right, I would log that question. And if I didn’t immediately know the answer, I would find out by the next week’s meeting. And it was okay to say, I don’t know, but I will find out. And so together, we, we learned and this log was, you know, it was on a site where everybody could access the q&a log. And, and and just said That that was how I was an ambassador. Yeah. To just feel empowered.

Damon Pistulka  35:05

Yeah. Because it because there’s because if someone doesn’t step up to take responsibility for getting questions answered, a lot of times people just get frustrated and use their old workarounds instead of adopting the system. Exactly. And just by stepping up, you’re helping people and then also publishing kind of an FAQ site where he got this question, what’s the answer? Is an awesome way to, to keep that going long term to?

Nicole Donnelly  35:35

Yeah, and make it efficient for people to get answers to the questions. So they’re not having to, like repeat themselves over and over or someone tells them the wrong thing or whatever, you have one place where that’s like the master source of truth. That’s wonderful.

Angela Thurman  35:50

Well, and then you don’t have people just moaning and groaning it’s horrible. I hate it. You know?

Nicole Donnelly  35:59

Why do we hate change so much? It’s so funny. It’s like, we have this love hate relationship with change. We all kind of want it. But then when it comes, we’re like, I don’t want it anymore.

Damon Pistulka  36:11

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s for sure. And, and is a great example to Angela, because ERP implementation is probably one of the most despised things and across the board, you know, you think about anything you can do on a manufacturing business. And when people hear ERP implementation, they just think of Chuck fingers on nails.

Angela Thurman  36:38

Well, your ERP system basically touches Oh, yeah. And and,

Damon Pistulka  36:43

yeah, yeah. And then you get the go ahead and call sorry, this long ways. People people out, you know, so you get this ERP system, right? And it touches everything, because Angela says, first of all, I got 47 different departments that have to all agree on how we’re going to use it. And then they want to keep doing it the way they’ve always done it, which is the most horrible thing you can do to an ERP system, because we, it takes orders like this and flows through like this, but and goes through this way. And you’re saying, but no, we want to go through this way. And, and it’s like, so you, so some people actually will go customize stuff to do this. Oh, yes. flow through the ERP systems. Now, what you’ve just created is a one off version of that ERP system, which you you have taken ownership for the rest of your life, rather than figuring out how to really optimize your, your processes around the how the software is meant to work is such a huge waste of time, even in the smaller companies where I worked, they would you would spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars trying to do that, just because Damon likes to do it this way. And in the end, you just added however many years, you had that systems worth of extra work. Because every time you upgrade every time you want to make another change, you have to all that stuff has to be considered.

Angela Thurman  38:14

Well, then, another another area for digital transformation, of course, is the internet of things. So all of these digital asset to your your companies is your you’re creating more connectedness within the fine, you’re building a smart factory. Well, that’s wonderful. But now you need more computing power, and you need more, let’s assume cloud storage space. And you also are creating more network vulnerability for in the case of cybersecurity threats. So all of that has to be considered as well. Yep. So

Damon Pistulka  39:05

one of my friends running a manufacturing company, they got hacked through their plasma cutter out on the floor. Killed it. Killed incredible.

Angela Thurman  39:15

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  39:17

So it’s, it’s everywhere now. Because every machine is hooked into your network. Most of them are able to access the internet and do what they need to do.

Angela Thurman  39:26

Yeah. And let’s assume that you’re allowing your employees to have their own personal devices connected to the network, because you want them to have round the clock availability. So they’re the personal phones, or iPads or whatever can be connected to the network to access their email, let’s just say email only. Well, now their phone is a device connected to your Network and all of the apps on their phone become a point of vulnerability for your network. Yeah,

Nicole Donnelly  40:12

oh, true. All true. You taught going and going?

Angela Thurman  40:16

Yeah, it just it just spirals.

Damon Pistulka  40:18

It does. It really does. I like dad’s comment that dad does ERP implementation. So

Nicole Donnelly  40:25

yes, this is a great question. It’s funny to hear out europeas despise business process management up front can eliminate some of the kingsun frustrations. Do you recommend bpm? Angela? Absolutely. Tell our audience who might what is bpm tell us tell us a little bit about what that is, and, and your thoughts on that

Angela Thurman  40:47

business process management. So, so I think that all of your processes need to be documented, those documents need to be ref controlled. And you need to have a process around how you update and release your processes, your documented processes. But to for what Dan’s alluding to, you would want to have a process around how you handle ERP updates the decision process around how you would just make a decision on whether to implement changes, and and how to execute those changes, including adoption.

Nicole Donnelly  41:50

And do you need a process on your process? Of course, wait, what processes are importance? Oh, man,

Angela Thurman  41:59

I recently was working for a client. And some of their processes had not been updated in well over eight years. Oh, wow, that the ref control showed a date. That was like 2014. The the company, the company name that owned that process no longer exists. So Wow. We may we may want to revisit that. That was beyond the scope of my project. Yeah. I just made a note. Recommendation.

Nicole Donnelly  42:50

Yeah. What are some other like fantastic failures that you’ve seen maybe that manufacturers can avoid anytime they’re going through, you know, an ERP implementation? Or did you tell us about so things that

Angela Thurman  43:05

identify stakeholders? So this is one of those things that you do up front?

Nicole Donnelly  43:10

Stakeholders? You don’t

Angela Thurman  43:12

want to be halfway through an implementation and find out that you completely forgot about a whole division? Yeah, that’s going to be impacted by this change. It’s like, oh, you know, tax accounting, we didn’t realize that tax accounting was going to be affected. And then, and then you have to stop and figure out how to fix this. You know, you don’t want to be a

Damon Pistulka  43:41

huge waste of time at that point.

Nicole Donnelly  43:43

Yeah. Because if you’re not including the stakeholders, you have to go all the way back to the drawing board. You have to go

Damon Pistulka  43:49

all the way back to

Angela Thurman  43:49

the beginning, all the way back to the beginning. Yeah, so it’s not wrong. It’s the time identifying your stakeholders up front is is hugely important. And so you can’t do a project manager cannot do that work in a vacuum. You have to you have to do you know other team members? Ask your sponsor? You know, get people involved upfront and early. about who else who else should we think about who else who else might be using this? Yeah. The best way to do that is to map out the process.

Nicole Donnelly  44:36

I think Dave Chrysler might be singing over there.

44:42

I think. So,

Angela Thurman  44:44

if you map out the, if you map out the process, you can begin to identify who’s going to be affected. Yeah. And then ask them. Hey, if I if I push this button, is it going to you know, is it gonna eventually, you know, leave some skittles in your desk.

Nicole Donnelly  45:09

So Drew, my God,

Damon Pistulka  45:10

good stuff. So yeah, you got you’ve, you’ve done a lot of work in the women in manufacturing, I want to talk about that a little bit. What are some of the things that that you see that’s really got you excited about women in manufacturing and getting more more young woman involved in manufacturing?

Angela Thurman  45:34

Okay. So I joined women in manufacturing back in February or March of 2021. And part of my motivation for joining what to network, because as I said, I, I was at that point of not knowing where my career was going to go. And I thought you guys know Laurie Nevin, right. Okay, so Laurie is a good friend and actually former supplier, she used to work for a company that supplied Collins, and that’s how we met. She was giving a presentation on project management to win Washington. And so being friends, I thought, I’m going to support my good friend, Laurie, I’m going to attend this event she’s giving. And, and so I attended the event. And I thought, wow, this is just awesome. I hope there’s something like this in Texas. And there was so so I joined when, and I affiliated with the Texas chapter. And it was just a fantastic way of meeting other women in, in manufacturing. And, you know, I’ve met chemists from Dow and BASF. And have course, Karen Rivera, you both know, is date chair for women in manufacturing now. And she’s just amazing. And then so many other really, you know, really amazing that I wouldn’t otherwise have had the opportunity to meet given where we are located and the the difference in our, our real world titles. Yeah. So that’s, that’s been really encouraging. And then, because of my role on the board of directors, I have the opportunity to plan events here in Houston. So we have a monthly meet. And I get to meet these women in person. And then we also have virtual events. Next month, I’ll be going to the International Conference in San Diego, this will be my second time to go to Summit. And just get have a few days of just lots and lots of training on all sorts of topics related to manufacturing. We have some really excellent presenters and get to spend some time also networking with other when chapter when all different web chapters. But I love the the WIM Educational Foundation and their platform of training. So they have all kinds of different training. We have every month a virtual learning series, which provides all women members with some training that is usually related to manufacturing. But then, they also have cohort training. So we have one coming up. That is the empowering women in production, which is the only training that I know of, of its kind. And it is specifically designed to train the women on the production floor with leadership skills and all kinds of just all kinds of skills to help build up their professional development because I think that’s an area that is too often overlooked. Lots of companies train or new managers or their executives, but they overlook the women that are on the production floor, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of professional development specifically for that. And then of course, Wim does have that new manager and that executive development program as well. And in fact, the executive development program is offered through Case Western Reserve University, which is a very, very well rooted University in Cleveland. Then there’s like the moms and manufacturing event that’s held every year. And that’s, that’s actually a virtual event. So they’ve tried to make it as convenient for moms as they can. Oh, I love that. Yeah. So we just, yeah, just stuff. So great. We

Nicole Donnelly  50:46

were talking with Megan about this last week, and I’d love to ask you the question I asked her, and that is, what is it that you think women in manufacturing bring to manufacturing uniquely? And what can women and men be doing to support

Angela Thurman  51:01

that? Okay, so I think that women bring a different perspective, in that we have a different problem solving. Methodology, I think we, we I think we approach problem solving a little different than men. Because we I think we, we think a little bit more about consequences, and you know, the ramifications a little bit more, not just straight to the point, how do I do this? But it’s like, well, if I. So if I did that, you know, what kind of solve it a little bit differently. And we may be more likely to engage partners to help us solve. I can

Nicole Donnelly  51:58

vouch for that.

Angela Thurman  52:01

Yeah. And, you know, nothing women in manufacturing is not. I mean, it’s not exclusively for females, we certainly welcome male allies to the organization. That’s great. So yeah,

Damon Pistulka  52:16

well, it’s you know, that the fact of the matter is manufacturing, we need so many people we want, you know, everyone, everyone and their friends and their friends, friends, just because we don’t have enough people in manufacturing right now. And that’s, you know, that’s adopting as many robotics as we can and AI and everything else, because they’re just not enough people anymore. I you know, I think it’s still true was a few months ago, though, I heard that you can’t fill all the manufacturing open positions, with all the unemployed people in the US. Wow, it you know, something like that. It was some crazy fact like that. So, yeah. And we got the other thing you got going on. That’s, that’s pretty cool. We’re gonna jump off here. We got a few minutes to jump off here, though, is is first of all real quick about m&a University. Yes, m&a University.

Angela Thurman  53:09

Well, first of all, I am doing some pro bono work for m&a university, as as being the project manager, with Katie McDermott. Nice. And so I’m so happy to see that both of you are volunteering to teach a course as well. What I’m doing is, each Wednesday, in the month of October, I’m going to be teaching a course on project management, a topic in the field of project management. So that’s already on the m&a University site, and you can sign up if you’re interested. I’d love to see some people registered before October. Yeah,

Nicole Donnelly  53:53

yeah. And I, this is a great, wonderful, wonderful free service that MSI offers. I was part of it last year. And I think just so the quality of education having someone like you there Dave Chrysler, you know, did it last year as well. There’s just a really, really high quality content that comes from this from m&a that’s being offered completely. You know, it’s a free free service. So please take advantage. It’s really great. Whitney says super excited for m&a university this year. Gail here. Hi, Gail, Gail love insights from an thanks again. And

Angela Thurman  54:34

Whitney and Gail.

Nicole Donnelly  54:37

Yeah. And then Kevin, I found that women’s unique view of processes give insights and kinesiology to manufacturing. Right. Yep. We’re getting a lot of comments and then Kevin also, he says he wants to provide you with a free bag of treats for your dogs. So

Damon Pistulka  54:56

single ingredient,

Angela Thurman  54:58

dog Are Oh, that is so awesome. Yeah, normally, normally the only treats my dog gets are my dogs get our carrots, which they love. I have videos, my dogs eating carrots, it’s just. But Kevin, I will welcome that. Thank you.

Nicole Donnelly  55:19

And then shout out to Katie McDermott who who puts on m&a and amazing work. So definitely check that out. And I know you have you have a new project management training that you’re offering, I think it’d be great to touch on that really quickly. Before we close up the show one tell everyone what you’re launching.

Angela Thurman  55:38

So yeah, so we are offering a learning management system. So that is focused on project management, as well as the soft skills that help help someone be a better project management, or product manager. And right now, I’m the bottleneck, just getting all the content. But oh, we hope to have that ready. At the end of the month or next week. Next week, hopefully is when it will go live. And anyone wants to see a five minute sample of what that looks like. Just send me a LinkedIn message or an email. And I’ll be happy to send that over.

Damon Pistulka  56:25

Awesome. Yeah, awesome. Awesome.

Nicole Donnelly  56:29

Well, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Oh my gosh, Angela, from you know, sending spaceships out into space to connecting our networks to supporting women in manufacturing, to teach us about digital transformation. Thank you. So

Angela Thurman  56:50

we didn’t even talk about wedding planning. Oh, my gosh,

Nicole Donnelly  56:53

you are truly a Renaissance woman. Oh, Dan has a quick question. I want to point out he asks if your course includes waterfall agile. And

Angela Thurman  57:06

Dan, in that response, it can take a little while. But it entirely depends on the requirements of the project. So that’s all I can tell you right now.

Nicole Donnelly  57:21

There we go. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Where you are, this is great.

Angela Thurman  57:27

Come to my class, and we can talk about it further.

Damon Pistulka  57:30

Yeah, there you go. Very good. Good.

Nicole Donnelly  57:34

I don’t know I know Curt always has this amazing closing question. I just don’t know that I can do it justice the way Curt does. I think you’d love to ask it Damon pistol aka you know,

Damon Pistulka  57:45

well, Nicole. First time for everyone.

Nicole Donnelly  57:51

You know, I’m not a huge baseball person. But this is the question they are always asks. Curt if you’re out there, just I know. I’m not going to do you. I’m doing my best. Okay. So Angela, Do you like baseball?

Angela Thurman  58:05

I do. I’m from Houston. We got the Astros Astros fan.

Nicole Donnelly  58:09

Okay, so your Astros fan? Let’s just imagine that it’s the ninth inning. bases are loaded.

Damon Pistulka  58:20

Two outs, two outs.

Nicole Donnelly  58:21

And your coach comes up to you and says Angela, you’re up your turn to the plate. Gotta hit you gotta hit that home run that Grand Slam.

58:34

Okay

Damon Pistulka  58:35

got it personal and second. On second you got drive and win the game.

Nicole Donnelly  58:40

Oh yeah. Bottom of the night. What is your walk up song?

Angela Thurman  58:47

Oh. Oh, it’s definitely something by pink and Trouble, Trouble? Trouble. Yeah.

Nicole Donnelly  59:04

The first pop song we’ve gotten in a while Damon.

Damon Pistulka  59:09

That’s a good one. We have had some amazing answers to this question though.

Nicole Donnelly  59:15

Let your bodies hit the floor. Right let’s Yeah.

Angela Thurman  59:21

Cupid Shuffle

Nicole Donnelly  59:29

chrysler says amazing show everyone. Kevin says good pick. Angela. All right. Yeah. And so this has been such a great show. Damon any last and final words that you have that you want to share?

Damon Pistulka  59:44

Have a great week. Everyone. We’re you know, we don’t even realize that we’re sliding into the holiday weekend. This coming up weekend. You know already here but we’re not having a show on Friday. And I don’t think we have show the following Monday but just have a great weekend. Be safe and enjoy time with friends and family.

Nicole Donnelly  1:00:02

Yeah, absolutely. Angela

Angela Thurman  1:00:08

um it’s only 90 degrees today in Houston so I’m enjoying the cool weather.

Nicole Donnelly  1:00:15

Hopefully the humidity has nice. Nice. Well good. Well thank you everyone out there for listening and for tuning in. It’s so nice to see all of our manufacturing friends out there commenting and sharing the love and thanks everyone. Thank you guys. Hope you guys have a wonderful weekend Angela. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy those dogs and have a wonderful and Damon you to enjoy all that crap you got this weekend and we’ll talk to you. All right. So much All right.