David Norris  00:00

I would say number one, ask the questions. Ask your team, ask your leaders, ask your executives, whoever is listening. You know that in the layer that you work with. Ask the question. When’s the last time we looked at fill in the blank? And that usually is the best starting point. I say pick one process that you’re interested about. It doesn’t have to be the coolest process. When’s the last time we looked at it? Let’s start walking. Let’s go and get the in there. Let me just see what this looks like. Let me watch them do this, and then you, as a leader that’s been in the space for a while, know if that’s something’s off there, or and then you start digging and you start asking different questions and you start asking better questions.

Patrick Adams  00:54

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Lean Solutions podcast. My name is Patrick Adams, and I am joined by Catherine McDonald from Ireland. Catherine, how you doing?

Catherine McDonald  01:02

I am very well, Patrick. Very well, and it’s great to see you. It’s been it’s good to see you

Patrick Adams  01:06

too. Yeah, it feels like we we haven’t been together on a on an episode in a while.

Catherine McDonald  01:11

Months, months, and months. Yeah, where did where did it go? Who knows?

Patrick Adams  01:15

Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess.

Catherine McDonald  01:17

It does.

Patrick Adams  01:18

Well, Catherine, today we we have a guest who’s going to talk about the the topic of not automating waste, which I think most people would say that is like a no brainer. Like, why would you automate waste? But in reality, I mean, so many organizations that I go into they’re spending hundreds of 1000s, if not millions, of dollars to implement automation, and they’re not taking the time to stop and drive out waste before that, and unfortunately, they end up automating a lot of waste, and that’s a big problem for many organizations.

Catherine McDonald  01:53

It is. It’s so hard to understand, but yet when you’re in the moment in those organizations, it’s almost like it seems like oh here’s a solution. It’s it’s it’s seen as a a solution, but as we know, there’s no quick wins very much anyway in in in process improvement. So yeah, when it first came out, I think that was definitely the the big issue. It was just seen as this magic bullet, this something that could just save us so much, but I think people and organizations are getting a little bit wiser now. So hopefully, our guest will tell us all about that as well, because he’s a bit of an expert.

Patrick Adams  02:29

Yeah, and I think that you’re you’re starting to even talk a little bit about AI because AI falls into the same boat. Both whether you know you’re talking automation that’s not AI or or AI driven automation. Either way, I think that that’s the all of that needs to be considered, and that’s why we have our guest David Norris, who will be talking to us about this today. Catherine, do you want to tell me a little bit about David’s background, and I’ll bring him to the stage?

Catherine McDonald  02:57

Yes, I would love to. So our guest today is David Norris, and David is an executive leader focused on helping organizations transform strategy into measurable results. He is deputy general manager for Eagle River Water and Sanitation District. He is also the founder of Elevated Strategic Solutions, where he advises organizations on strategy execution, organizational assessments, operational excellence, executive advisory, financial resilience, continuous improvement, and probably a whole lot more in between. Throughout his career, he has helped organizations generate millions of dollars, and his passion is helping organizations eliminate complexity, unlock capacity, and build systems that improve long-term performance. David, welcome to the show.

David Norris  03:42

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks. Nice to see you guys.

Patrick Adams  03:46

Well, we’re excited to have you you on the show. We’re we’re going to be talking about the the problem with automating waste. And again, I like I told Catherine when we when we kicked off here, it seems like a really simple concept, you know, something that you would never do. But unfortunately, many organizations fall into this trap of, you know, with maybe unknowingly or maybe knowingly. I don’t know. I’m, I guess, I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are. But you know, why why do organizations jump into automation before they actually take time to step back and really improve their processes, and and and you know, I’m curious to hear like if you have any statistics or know like what what does that actually do to the organization when they when they go down that path?

David Norris  04:33

Sure, I mean I can speak to my experience in the space and really my passion through organizations I work with, but I would say you know the highest level to think about this is the world we live in. We live in an immediate gratification world, and therefore it doesn’t stop at organizations either. They they those that are seeing an issue go to we need to fix this issue now. And as you know, and I think you you mentioned earlier that there’s no quick wins to this, and I would wholeheartedly agree that that that the real work is in in the detail and and what needs to be done for a long lasting solution. So I think that organizations are quick to look at the shiny toy. Let’s let’s call it AI. Sure, has been around since the 50s, as we know, but more expanding quickly now more than ever, right? So, how do how do you harness that with a problem they’re seeing in an organization, and and what what are the steps to do that? So I see this time and time again, where we need we need to automate this thing that we’re seeing. This problem we’ve identified. Let’s do that with a solution. Let’s do that with technology. Let’s do that with automation of whatever that means to each organization can be something different. But I see it a lot, and it’s due to we need that solved. We need that solved now. We don’t have time to dig into the details, let’s just fix it, and that’s that’s the easiest. Maybe it sounds very simplistic, but that is what I see over and over again. It’s like we need the thing, and I spoke at an event last week, and I said these things, which is we need a system, we need a new system, and that’s the starting of it. Okay, great. Let’s buy the system. Let’s put it in. However, the the root cause of the issues you’re seeing for why you need a system, let’s say, is is rooted in the processes and in the details that that really need to be cleaned up first before you implement any kind of automation or improvement with technology.

Patrick Adams  06:42

What do you? I mean, what what do you think that this mistake is costing them? Not not just in the money, because there’s obviously a lot of money that they’re spending, the checks that they’re writing. But what what are some of the intangibles that it costs them, or or you know, in your experience, what have you seen?

David Norris  06:59

Well, I I’ve definitely seen similar things as well, and while it may not be a physical piece of equipment or something like that, it can be a very complex, convoluted solution for a process that doesn’t need that complexity. You know what I’m seeing is in yes, there’s the hard, and then there’s the soft costs, or you know, my finance background, direct and indirect costs associated to everything. And time is money, so when you’re talking time, you’re also talking money, but but you’re talking staff, and why are they doing it? And is someone asking why are we doing this process? You know, the answer to that because we always have. That’s the my favorite statement there. I would say that you know morale is kind of predicated there in like something you can’t really calculate, you know necessarily. You know I’m a big leadership guy, so if we aren’t training the next level of of people to be the next leaders, and we’re not giving opportunities for growth and feeling meaningful and impactful in the work they’re doing, and yet you know we’re we’re automating this process via the same process we had before, then they aren’t feeling fulfilled, and therefore morale drops, or they start looking, and you lose staff, which costs two to one every time you do that. So, to me, let institutional knowledge walk out the doors. You can calculate that, but I think that that’s the intangible like impact or ripple as you do stuff like that. And you know, yeah, there’s the the the cost, but then, you know, cost of next best solution, which is opportunity cost for the econ, in in my heart, you know that that is really needs to be analyzed as well.

Catherine McDonald  08:52

Listening to you, I mean, the the cost is scary if you were to really look at it all. However, we don’t want to put people off automation. It’s there for good use. It’s there to help us. So the question becomes: How do we know when a process is ready for automation?

David Norris  09:10

Then, for me, I’ve looked at you know finance is a great way of looking at these things, and like you know, have you looked at audited your business. Have you looked at all of these red tape areas that that paying bills, collecting funds, paying people? You know, these are areas of opportunity that always can get improved. The the lean mindset is not fix something and never look at it again. It is continual lean processes. So you continually look back at it annually, biannually, however often that makes sense for each organization. But I would say that that’s the way to think and start with that that question is how do we know? Well, let’s look at it. Let’s see how long it’s taking. Walk the process. What does it mean? Is that. Too much is that too little? Do we not know? Do we do? Do we have comparisons? Do we know what’s out there and how others are doing this in this space in in the same sector?

Catherine McDonald  10:10

Okay. So what you’re saying there is we need obviously lean and digital transformation to work together. And generally speaking, then are we saying that lean comes first? You’re talking about asking questions, going to Gemba, taking this approach where we involve the people doing the work to understand where are we at with this process, what are the issues, where is the opportunities for improvement. That is all lean, right?

David Norris  10:36

Yeah, 100% and that’s really what I do time and time again. Is I start there. You know, you ask the right questions. You get into the detail. the The automation comes as a tool later. Once you really unpack all of that, you get your key stakeholders in the room. You find, oh, we missed group A and B that are impacted by this thing because you always have that. You bring in. You you need that collective voice. You need that buy-in. I’ve done this many times where it’s quick and fast. And yes, you can improve things. Does it last long? No. It always goes back to the way it was because it’s not rooted in that methodology and that like framework that lean brings, however you want to think of these things. You know, I always use the five whys. You know, the fishbone concept is is a good way. But usually, by the fifth why, you get to the root of the problem versus your perception of what the issue is. You know, another key element of what you’re talking about here is going in with an open mindset, not going in with I know the solution is X. We’ll just check the box and do that. Organizations do this a lot, where they go and do a rapid event, and they they check the box and say, okay, we did it, and we knew exactly what we needed in the beginning, and it ended up being exactly what I think at the end. That’s that should not happen. Typically, you know, you need to really kind of unpack it. Great example is all I love picking on finance, but I but I always pick on that, and and you know at least here here at the district, part of what I serve here and is to pay bills, right? So everyone needs to pay those bills. So how do you do it? You know, for for us, and not that long ago, was paper. So we had paper invoices pushed around, and they were scheduling appointments with me to sign a stack of checks. You know, so instead of going to we need to automate our payment process. I needed to go down to the root of the issues, which were our systems. So a lot of times, companies will try to automate using those lovely words: automate the process, automate this thing without unpacking the details, obviously. But what they’re doing is they’re fixing a symptom, they’re not fixing the system, and that is the the issue. Is you’re chasing the symptoms of a bigger problem.

Patrick Adams  13:09

Yeah, they. I mean, and and if you hire a company to come in and you know help you with automation, they they’re not going to necessarily dig into this waste and try to because that means less work for them. So this has to be something that companies and leaders are looking at before they bring in an outside company to to automate their processes and make them better. And you shared a I think just a small example in already with us. But do you have like any other practical examples of how eliminating, or I’m sorry, eliminating unnecessary steps before automation led to some better results? Maybe, maybe in the in the administrative space, sure, transactional or you know hands-on operations or anything. Any any examples really?

David Norris  13:58

Sure. Yeah, I’ll expand a little bit on the the payment concept there because I think we can all relate to that. It isn’t unique to any industry or business, which can I think be appreciated. You know, so have you looked at how you pay pay bills? That you have to pay bills. Payroll can be extrapolated as well, but you know, for us, we we were looking at a very antiquated step. I mean, there was literally the like stamper thing, and we are in 2026 now, and this wasn’t that long ago, where we were pushing digital, you know, these papers around and and and then printing checks. Well, I started with okay, do we? What is the the symptom was too too much time and effort. It was taking too long to get checks out to our vendors. Vendors were complaining, stuff like that. Pretty common. Okay, and and you start there. It takes a while though. They are they are slow to respond, so you you got to get the paper out of the way. Is what I. Would say, then you need to work on how do you have approval. So for us, we had, I think, five approval steps. Guess what happens when you have five people signing off on a $30 invoice? We spend 3000 to do that. One and two, that person’s on vacation. Do you have a system that like kicks it to the next step, no. So we had to build those things. We use Microsoft, so we had SharePoint, and we use automations in there. I just happen to have a skill set for that, so I implemented that solution on my own. Just kind of like let’s let’s do this workflow here. Let’s get this set up. Then we eliminated unnecessary steps. I needed budget owner only to approve certain invoices, and then anything above a certain threshold was kind of the escalation point. You know that’s kind of where we are now: is full-on automation, where it goes into the inbox, it reads and scans the inbox, it puts it into a workflow for us to see as leaders. We approve it. It gets escalated as needed, and the ACH goes out on Fridays. Pretty simple in theory, but it was many years of work to try to unpack that. The one thing common mistake I see is how are we doing on that? Right, we’re done. Yay! Then what? The next step is dashboards and metrics. So we have KPIs driven on percentage of ACH, so that we keep our eyes on target. You know how how fast are we doing this? We check in annually on that. Do we need to tighten it? Is there an improvement we need to make in continuation?

Catherine McDonald  16:36

That’s a really good breakdown.

Speaker 1  16:40

Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  16:40

you maybe think they’re about the barriers to all of this because yes, it takes time. Yes, you it has to be driven by leaders. Obviously, there’s loads of different things that can go wrong there even already. But one of the things you mentioned at the start was just understand your current state, understand the the problem, and oftentimes I think that data maybe isn’t there, or that problem isn’t clear, and that’s really what prevents the whole lean approach from happening because no one is really clear that we have a problem here, or what would happen if we did this differently. So, what’s your advice? You know, for for leaders or managers in organizations who really want to start this off and are kind of stuck because they they don’t have that clear measure of the problem. So where do you go if you don’t have that?

David Norris  17:32

Of course, that is the the biggest barrier to entry. Correct. I mean, you at least have acknowledged that you want to look at something, I I always say just ask the questions, and then you get to the where is the data is always the question. How do you get the data? The only way to do that is to get down in there. You you make sure if you’re you know capable of of getting with like the right manager, the right sups supervisors, the right staff level, and ask those questions. They’ll they know. They definitely know where the data is, or it’s messy, but it’s capable. How do you extrapolate it? What’s the systems? Where are they? You have to have something. You have some payment vehicle, even if it’s QuickBooks, even something you have something, you know, and then start there is what I always say. You got to start with something. You can’t start with the oh, we need this fancy tool. You can’t start with we already know our issues. You got to start with the questions. I remember

Catherine McDonald  18:35

someone saying to me a few years ago. So we learned DMAIC, D M A I C. I remember when we were studying, and I know it’s a six sigma, but some six sigma tools are thrown in. I remember was using it for a while, and then somebody who is a lot more experienced than me said, “Why are you using DMake? The M should come before the D. It should be M DMAIC because everyone’s trying to define the problem, and then you move on to the measure. It should be the measure first. And actually, it made perfect sense to me that we complain about our problems, and we know we have problems, and we talk about them in management meetings without ever having the right measure. And if we have the measure, then we can take an action and re-measure. So sometimes I think we just don’t approach it in the right way.

David Norris  19:12

Yeah, I think that that’s a great example there. I’m a proponent of DMAIC, but like you also like what you learn if you’re interested in this space, is that you need to be nimble. You need to be able to be like, well, in every situation, it’s not rinse and repeat. It’s unique, and so being able to identify your issues, and that’s first assuming if you back up one more step, and we’re assuming that you’ve identified an issue. What I find is that there are a lot of organizations that have no clue that there’s an issue or haven’t ever looked, and if once you look, it’s like an onion. You start peeling all those things back, and then you get to maybe a bigger issue or bigger situation than you imagine. But at least you’re doing something to try to improve that, or. Your understanding more and more about one of the core functions you do within an organization, and that in itself is is valuable.

Patrick Adams  20:09

How do we how do we determine which areas that we go to to automate? Like, what what is there? Are there any keys that we should be any areas we should be keying in on to say, oh, that that’s a perfect opportunity. Now let’s go investigate to see where the waste is, and then let’s automate that.

David Norris  20:25

Yeah, I always start with your administrative functions. However, you want to think of those things, but paying bills, collecting money, paying people-sure. Also, like, do you have vehicles? If you have vehicles, are are you watching? Are we driving them? How are we driving them? Where are they being driven? How much via like gas are we putting into it? Go go in those spaces where it’s red tape. Travel is a good one for a lot of areas. Like it takes too long for me to submit my travel reports, and then it takes forever for me to get my reimbursement or my advance, whatever it is. Look in those areas. Every business has multiple of these. That is a good starting point. Usually, one thing you peel the thread, you’re getting to other things that people talk. Hey, this was helpful, or this is this is going to be great. As I see, look over here, and that’s what what is the real part about it. The next step is once you have that, create your champions, create them. There, there’s a lot of passionate people that just don’t know the principles of lean and other concepts. So you want to you want to change the culture. The culture is key. Otherwise, you need a consultant and you need them to always come in. What you want to do is change that culture of improvement so that it’s rooted in their day to day, and they’re looking and searching and finding these things. Maybe they don’t know how to automate them or how to improve them, but they have a resource in the organization or or purchased resource, whatever you want to think about it in that space to help them through those things, and then you leave a long-lasting legacy there, and that continues. Hopefully, I so I always say, look at those administrative functions. Those are usually the ones that are like, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. You don’t know if it’s broke if you’re not asking the questions. And likely, my experience is people aren’t looking in those spaces.

Patrick Adams  22:23

Yeah, yeah. And the other thing that I like to say is anything anything that’s repetitive. It could be in the administrative space, or it could be even be a hands-on job that you find yourself doing over and over again. You know, that’s a perfect one to ask. You know, can can this be automated in some way, so that I can I can stop working on the repetitive things and you know elevate my thinking to more strategic opportunities versus working on that repetitive task that’s happening you know daily or weekly or hourly whatever maybe.

David Norris  22:55

I mean that’s a great insight honestly like and that that is a key takeaway I leave a lot of times organizations with is like you pay people to be experts in their space, not to push buttons or fill in the blank. There, you pay them for the brain, you pay them for their expertise. They need to analyze information and provide a recommendation versus process the widget. And I think that that’s what scares people in times. You know, you go through a lean thing, or you’re trying to automate things. People get defensive. Hey, I know how to do this. You’re gonna take my job away, or whatever. Actually, I’m trying to help you. It’s trying to keep these things out of your way, so you spend more time on what we need and value most of you.

Patrick Adams  23:40

Last question that I have, David, is more around those that are listening in right now and are thinking to themselves, like, how do I get started? What what what is one thing that any listener can do right now that you know where they can, you know, maybe maybe it’s determining which process needs to be automated, or maybe it’s establishing current state or getting to root cause. I mean, what, where did, where does someone start? What would you say are kind of those starting points that someone could do this week to get started on this?

David Norris  24:10

I would say number one, ask the questions. So you know, ask your team, ask your leaders, ask your executives, whoever is listening. You know that in the layer that you work with, ask the question: When’s the last time we looked at fill in the blank? And that usually is the best starting point. I say I, I always say, pick one process that you’re interested about. It doesn’t have to be the coolest process. It’s a thing you do. When’s the last time we looked at it? Let’s start walking it. Let’s go and get the in there. Let me just see what this looks like. Let me watch them do this, and then you, as a leader that’s been in the space for a while, know if that’s something’s off there. Or and then you start digging and you start asking different questions and you start asking better questions. That’s usually how. What I would recommend is someone just pick a process and start. That is the only way to do it. If you try to think of how many things need to be changed, it can be overwhelming. You got to start somewhere and pick one thing and make it important.

Patrick Adams  25:14

David, if if anyone’s interested to learn a little bit more about elevated strategic solutions, where where would they go to get some more information, or how would they connect with you? And then also just maybe briefly, what what type of work do you do in at Elevated Strategic Solutions?

David Norris  25:31

Sure, a variety of ways. It can be reached a lot of different ways. LinkedIn, David Norris on LinkedIn. You’ll see you’ll see it right there. Or I have a website, Elevated Mountain Solutions. That’s elevated mtn dot solutions is the way to find me. My contact information is there. All the stuff you would want to know is all there. Some ways to get a hold of me as well. I would, you know, what I what I’m most passionate about is helping organizations through these spaces. So while I have a a core function that I service with the district, I am very passionate about doing this. So I’m out here trying to do exactly what we’re talking about today. Is like to have you looked at these things. If not, I’ll look at them. I’ll help you from small to large, I say from three-person employee companies to 3000. It’s the same situation, just different magnitudes usually. So I’m I usually jump into a financial analysis there of like, do you have the right revenue sources? How do you know you have a revenue problem? Let’s look into, and it inevitably always gets to processes like reduce to add. I mean, the the the faster and better you do things, the more capacity you have to do other things, and that’s usually what I help organizations through in a lot of ways.

Patrick Adams  26:59

Love it. Well, it’s been great to have you on, David. I appreciate appreciate you adding value to our listeners today, and I’ll have to look you up when I’m out in Colorado there and swing in the veil and say hello to

David Norris  27:13

you. Yeah, for sure, do that. That’ll be great.

Patrick Adams  27:16

All right. Well, take care, David. It was great to see you.

David Norris  27:18

Thank you. Appreciate the time. Really good conversation.