Ron Crabtree, CEO of MetaExperts, is driven by a mission to stop waste in organizations by addressing digital transformation, labor shortages, and operational excellence.
We learn about Ron’s journey in supporting businesses, especially in manufacturing, to navigate these critical issues. He explains his framework for transformation, focusing on three pillars: digital transformation with practical applications of AI and automation, workforce development to address labor shortages, and Lean Six Sigma practices to eliminate waste and optimize processes. He highlights the importance of value stream mapping and applying the Pareto principle to target key areas for improvement, helping organizations become more efficient and resilient.
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Stop the Crazy Waste with Ron Crabtree
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Ron Crabtree, the CEO of MetaExperts that provides Interim Top Talent from a global network of OpEx deployment experts and resources for flexible, on-demand, short-term contract or contract-to-higher needs. Welcome to the show, Ron.
Awesome. Thank you for inviting me, Steve.
Yeah. It’s great to have you and you have a great company and a great topic area that we have not covered so far. Let’s start with the question that I like to ask all our guests these days. What is your personal “Why,” your personal mission, and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?
Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time giving a lot of thought to the common challenges that organizations face, right? And this is particularly, I’ve kind of leaned toward manufacturing and organizations involved with making, moving product, using lots of product. And here in North America, in particular, practically every Western country, we have three things that keep executives awake at night and it gives me a lot of pause. And the first is digital transformation and digitization of work. The big buzz is artificial intelligence, AI, is supposed to be the big solution, and incredible pressure and a lot of angst around, well, what do we do with all that? And you see statistics from some of the big consulting firms out there, about 80 to 90% failure rates of organizations spending time and money to try to digitize and digitally transform and just not getting anywhere fast. The second one that I think everybody kind of recognizes, but maybe doesn’t name it real well, is this phenomenon called the forever labor shortage. And I’m just holding up a little picture here of something I found on the web late last year. It was based on data that came out of the Congressional Budget Office, and they’re describing the percentage of growth in the workforce in North America. And if we take a look at the last decade of the 2000s, it was almost 12%. In that decade, 12% of the workforce entered the workforce in that decade. But the following decade, it dropped below 8%. The most recent decade, it dropped below 6%, and that number is going down. So there’s incredible angst out there around the war on talent, the war for talent, and where are we going to come up with people, particularly in North America and most Western countries, where is that workforce of the future coming from and how are we going to cope with it? And then the third thing is, is just flat got to do more with less, less logistics, less transportation, less material, fewer mistakes, smaller facilities. We have to get leaner and meaner every day because that’s, frankly, one of the things you have to do if you’re going to cope with this forever labor shortage phenomenon.
Okay, so the three areas that we will be discussing, and I think it’s kind of your framework, maybe it’s the three pillars of meta experts, I don’t know what to call it, but digitization, digital transformation, a lot of people talk about that, and then how do you get the labor, how do you cover your labor shortage and then how do you drive the operational excellence so that you get done more with less. So let’s tackle them in turn. So what is this digital transformation all about? So what is the idea behind it?
It’s a moving target and the only constant in business is change. And as it happens, I was actually approached a few years ago by one of the world’s largest e-learning companies around creating an all-new digital transformation awareness program. So I pulled together a handful of our really senior experts, of our meta experts community that knew a lot about digital transformation, different aspects of it. And we did some really deep research around what are all the elements that should be considered in digital transformation. Everybody’s talking about AI, artificial intelligence. Well, that’s one of more than 30 different components of a digital transformation strategy that organizations have to be conscious about. We went up forward with that. We built out five functional courses. In other words, for each major function in a company like marketing, sales, and new product development, what technologies impact them the most? What about internal finance and IT operations? What about supply chain? What about operations and quality? And then finally, what about HR, human performance and change management? So we mapped all those out and developed that courseware and then we flipped it and we created four industry courses, right? So for tangible goods types of industries, what are the real technologies that are impacting those functions across them? And what should you know about and be aware of? Same thing for providing medical care, same thing for nonprofits, general business services, and then finally, government and financial services organizations. We have four different slices to it. Fast forward today, our customer is actually Gartner Magic Quadrant globally for their digital transformation awareness program. I got to have a small hand in that, but that caused me to be a very, I’ll call it, aware consumer of what we’re talking about for digital transformation. And my advice to organizations as you go down the path is don’t get caught with the shiny object syndrome, right? AI isn’t the solution to all of our problems. In fact, I’m seeing a lot of stuff in the news and circling through that experts are beginning to wonder if AI is ever going to deliver on the hype and there are billions being poured into it. And I saw a pretty interesting quote the other day that I don’t remember who it was ascribed to, but it’s “Workers with AI will outperform workers without AI.” And I think that’s a healthy way of thinking about it, that artificial intelligence probably land on where it matters, where it makes a difference in the performance of individuals doing various tasks and organizations is going to be powerful. And it’s going to be a definite productivity booster.
Yeah.
But is it going to change our world? I’m not so sure.
Yeah. One of my guests said that people, also in human history, we always developed tools that we would use to leverage our performance and AI is just one of these tools that extends our performance. It’s like glasses for the eye. It improves or the contact lenses. It’s a tool that improves our vision. So it’s basically the same thing. So generally speaking, digital transformation, is it about paperless environment? Is it about being connected to the internet? Is it about efficiency? What’s the big idea about digital transformation? But if you want to synthesize it, because obviously there are a million facets to it, but is there like a big idea behind it that you could synthesize down to, like a simple idea that maybe it’s about going from the industrial to the service economy, from the service economy to the experience economy, maybe in parallel we are also going from the manual economy to the, I don’t know, machinized economy and maybe towards a digitized economy. I’m just wondering what is the big trend behind all of these buzzwords?
I think what we’re going to learn, just like we learned 20 some years ago, as you got into enterprise resource planning systems and implementing a single repository to automate all of our work from a corporation perspective. And it was promised to be the great silver bullet cure. And ERP systems implementation, that’s enterprise resource planning, reintegrating finance, new product development, and product data management, all the information about products and services and integrating all of that so that information could be shared seamlessly and creating one version of the truth. One set of operating plans. This is the plan we’re operating to and everybody’s working to the same plan. A lot of promises were made and unfortunately not very well fulfilled.
So digital transformation, from my perspective, is a very personal journey. Each organization is going to have to figure out on their own to some extent. And the reason I say that is what it takes to compete in your industry. Share on X
What’s the basis of competition? What geography are you in? What are requirements, mandates that you need to be responsible for, all shape where the true opportunities from a digital transformation perspective are likely to be. And I’m kind of old fashioned. I always go back to this notion of, some form of value stream mapping and being very, very precise about where are we going to apply technologies. And basically mapping out and understanding where are the issues that need to be solved, right? Where do we spend lots of wasted human effort? Where do we have lots of quality? That’s quality of information, product or service. And where do those problems manifest? And then a very laser focus getting deeper into the weeds around, okay, if we’re going to leverage AI, if we’re going to leverage edge sensor technologies, if we’re going to leverage robotic process automation tools, machine learning and some of these other aspects. Where are we applying it? And what’s the true business case? What is current state and what is future state? And what’s that better future state look like, taste like? How does it perform? And unfortunately, I see digital transformation as death by a thousand cuts. There is no silver bullet cure. AI is not gonna sweep in and solve all our problems. It’s a very focused business specific, almost functionally specific attack on the sources of waste, where we’re wasting people’s time, so we can free their time up, so we’re not gonna be so short on labor anymore, and all these other aspects. So to me, there’s no simple playbook for that. It really comes down to a very thoughtful, pragmatic approach to, where’s our performance gaps? And then getting down deeper into the processes at root cause and using tools like value stream mapping to correlate which systems are we touching, which databases are we touching, which human beings are involved, which regulatory agencies do we have to be responsible to, and putting those pieces together and then working backward to, okay, here we can actually measure the impact of that and we can get a very specific discrete business result from what we’re doing.
What I’m hearing is…
Iterate very quickly.
It’s about mapping out your value streams in the business and then how to leverage technologies to get the more effective and efficient future state.
Exactly.
Digital transformation; it’s an efficiency effort. So okay, so that was the first one, digitization. The second one was this idea of dealing with the labor shortage. So what are the tools or what are the solutions to dealing with the labor shortage. And your business is providing temporary executive and operational and even permanent operational people, which is basically reshuffling the cards, right? It’s not, it’s not generating new labor. It’s just getting access to the labor pool in a better way. I mean, I also see a lot of, obviously, automization, automizing things is a way. Also, outsourcing. A lot of people outsource to the Philippines, to India, to Africa now. So that’s a way of dealing with the labor shortage. What are you seeing as other ways of rebuilding this labor shortage?
You just mentioned several important elements. I’m actually working on a project right now, where we’re basically mapping out all the different things an organization should be considering to deal with this forever labor shortage problem. And you just rattled off several of them. I’ve got more than 100 elements we already have in the matrix. We’re in the process of actually pulling together part of our MetaExpert community and fleshing that out in terms of what are all the things you can do? So here’s the three general things that I always suggest to an executive. If you see long-term, we’ve got a problem. The first is, what are we doing to be an employer of choice? There are specific strategies, more than 20 of them. You can Google that in a few seconds and get a sense for those. But, what about our brand as an organization? How do people describe us as an organization? I had a great conversation in one of my podcasts with Jim Bitterly with EDSI, and he was sharing some really good insights at the corporate level, think about the organization. We talk about the chief human resources officer, right? Responsible for developing human capital. Are they tucked under operations or under the IT department and over in finance? Or is it sitting at the board of directors level as a strategic initiative for what we’re doing to support that workforce of the future? Where is that even matrix in the organization?
If it's matrix at the top, that's a very positive sign that that's something important. Then after that, you start looking at things like workforce development programs. Share on X
There are a hundred slices to how that can be done from what about public-private partnerships to go in through K-12 schools, I’m talking as early as kindergarten, and begin to socialize with children the sorts of jobs that they can step into in their communities that may or may not require a college degree. Maybe it’s a trades background. The fact is we’re going to need people to physically do stuff. Robots aren’t going to replace all of that. And human decision-making is not going to be replaced by artificial intelligence. I don’t see that happening. I see it augmented, very much so, but I don’t see it replaced. So, that long-term, it takes years. You’re planting, literally planting seeds like growing a forest of trees to make paper with somewhere down the road. In fact, I like the shipbuilding stories out of the 1500s. They used to travel and plant oak trees. These are the shipwrights. We built the plant oak trees here in the United States. They’d wait 50 years, 75 years for those trees to maturate. And then they would go and harvest those for the key components to build wooden ships. Now that’s workforce development in the future. That’s very strategic. Very long view public-private partnerships. And then what are we doing at the local level to go into our community and help retool, right? I heard a really cool story recently about an organization that was bringing German trades training to the inner city and targeting young black people who traditionally don’t get the attention that they really should have and are not given the development opportunities to grow forward into trades jobs that pay very well and creates a really good lifestyle for them and their families. I thought that was an incredible story. Well, here again, that’s years in the making.
So, Ron, we talked about becoming an employer of choice, workforce development programs. I guess this retooling is also part of that, the K-12 as well. What’s the third leg of the stool here? What you said there are three general solutions. What’s the third one?
Well, to be very blunt about it, if you’re not well down the road of adopting good waste elimination, continuous improvement practices, call it Lean Six Sigma, call it operational excellence, call it what you like. If you’re not well down the road and have not made it a substantial part of your culture, to continuously, as part of the culture, to question why, right? To continually be on the alert for what’s changing, continually be on the alert for what’s going on that’s creating waste, that’s wasting our human resources, it’s wasting materials, it’s wasting whatever. Then using that to cautiously and carefully continually engineer out, design out of our future processes and attack the current processes as you go. And here’s a real important element. I’ve talked about value stream mapping, and that tends to correlate with a Lean Six Sigma mentality, right? You’re taking a look at the people who are doing it, the systems that are touched, the amount of time they spend doing it, the elapsed time, you’re looking at the first time quality capability, and all the costs associated with process, and then you’re backward engineer to a Pareto analysis, right? What 20% of the process steps we’re causing 80% of the cost, 80% of the quality problems, 80% of the delays with bringing a product to market or turning around an order that a customer has placed. That’s a real critical component, but due to a transformation perspective, it’s at that level of granularity that you have to examine what are we doing, why are we doing it. Well, really, we have seven different systems somebody has to interface with to get the answer to this question in the process. Maybe if that were automated, it would make a big difference. I guarantee it would, because you’re less dependent on human decision-making and humans are only 85% effective at best, right? We’re error prone, that’s the human condition. You’re eliminating those opportunities for errors that are human driven, and then you’re leveraging the human knowledge, right? I’ll call it AI guided decision-making and then basically bringing forward things to humans to make good decisions where it actually makes a difference.
That’s great. So tell me a little bit about value stream mapping. What does that look like very broadly, like high level?
Yeah, so value stream mapping, I always like to talk about the customer, right? And typically, if I’m going to map a process, I want to get a very discrete product or process with a very specific customer in mind and kind of start with the customer and work backward. What’s the customer experiencing? What are they frustrated by? What makes them crazy? We may talk about that here a little bit later. And then basically mapping backward, customers experiencing this. Okay, so what happened before that that resulted in the customer experience? Okay, before that, what happened that allowed it to break down in the process, right? And create a problem for the customer. So the core things you really have to look at is who’s doing it, how long does it take? In other words, the actual clock time, the money we’re spending to do the process, what’s the elapsed time? In other words, I call that inbox delay. It’s either waiting for its turn to be worked on because it’s a queue of work, or we have to wait for a response from outside the organization. For example, reaching out to the customer with a question or going for a permit or regulatory approval. That’s the elapsed time, the delays. And what’s our first time capability? In other words, what’s our first-time write capability? What percentage of the time do we get it right the first time? And what percentage of the time do we have issues? And the issues can be many, but you have to put values to those. And then finally, for that particular step in the process, we ask all those great questions. What are the artifacts, screenshots, reports, source documentation? What are the things we need to do the work at that step? And then lastly, what are the different technology touches? What are the primary systems or places I have to go digitally to find the information? And then, in addition to that, what are the secondary systems and data sources I may need to go to? For example, if everything goes right the first time, I look here, here, and here, I make a decision, and I go. But when there’s a problem, I have to now go look one, two, three, four other places to find the missing information and bring that back to the process. Once you map all that, create a matrix of it, you can create a heat map really quick and really begin to identify of the 27 different systems we’re messing with, these six, if they were integrated, would have an 80% impact on our performance, be it the quality, the speed, or the cost, or all three. You’re very laser focused about where to apply your scarce time, money, and resources for digital transformation purposes.
Love it. So, this is huge. So, basically, the way to build a better organization is to become an employer of choice. So, you attract all those A players that can actually grow your business and then develop people, the kind of people that you need. If they are not available, you have to manufacture them, so to say, you have to go to the store and groom them and work with others to train them for you. And then you work on operational excellence and you work back from the customer problem. And then you look at how to optimize the process and then how do you ultimately digitize it. And then you use the Pareto principle to work on 20% that delivers 80% of the result.
Bingo.
Very, very powerful. So, Ron, if someone would like to learn more about your approach and your company’s approach and they’d like to connect with you, where should they go and what resources can you offer them?
Well, you can certainly go check us out, what we’re doing at metaexperts.com. I’m very active on LinkedIn, so you can check me out on LinkedIn very easily. And then if you want to reach out to me, a million people have my email. It’s rcrabtree. So it’s just the first letter of my first name and then my last, rcrabtree@metaops.com. And then also our phone numbers and stuff are right on the webpage. So you can call the office and get in touch with me that way as well.
Okay. So the website is metaops.com. So Ron Crabtree, the CEO of MetaOps or MetaExperts, I guess is the doing business as MetaExperts sometimes. And yeah, if you would like to elevate your business, you want to digitally transform, you want to fix your labor shortages, or you want to create a Lean Six Sigma processes, value stream and digitize and do all that beautiful things, reach out to Ron. And if you enjoyed this talk, this conversation, then stay tuned, follow us on YouTube, the Management Blueprint Podcast. Follow us on LinkedIn, Steve Preda Business Growth. And until next time, have a great time. And thanks Ron for coming and sharing your goodies and your golden nuggets.
Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Thanks for inviting me.
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