Ray Mills is the CEO of KUDU Industries, a manufacturer of progressive cavity pumps for the oil and gas industry. Based in Calgary and employing 280 people KUDU has emerged as the world’s second largest manufacturer and distributor of their product.
A recent article on Productivity Alberta broke down the productivity challenges faced by KUDU and how they overcame them. However, Mills is humble and uncharacteristically candid about the challenges faced by his company. We talked to him about his company’s productivity journey as well as the wider productivity issues facing Alberta.
PA - What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since you started really trying to improve your company’s productivity through lean methods and other initiatives? RM - The biggest lesson has to do with sustaining lean. Once you’re through the beginning phase it’s easy to rest on your laurels and enjoy the fruits of your labour. That’s probably been our biggest challenge. The key thing is to make sure your senior management team is always one-step ahead in terms of their learning on lean and then make sure its trickling through the organization. We’ve probably faltered on that a couple of times over the last 10 years. In a sense we had outsourced our lean and as president of the company it took some more learning on my part to realize what we needed to do.
PA - How do you motivate you and your team to stay ahead of the curve? RM - It starts with a commitment from me and from there it’s about building lean into your plans. In our yearly plans we specify an amount of continuous improvement projects that have to happen, and that’s how we gauge people’s performance.
PA What drew you to the Industry Advisory Committee at Productivity Alberta? RM - First and foremost it’s important to find a way to give back and also to influence the province in going in the right direction in terms of productivity. I see this issue as being key to sustaining industry in Alberta and we’re part of that industry. What helps sustain industry helps sustain KUDU. I believe Alberta no longer has the Alberta Advantage. We now see global competitors coming into Alberta and if we don’t learn to compete efficiently effectively then we’re going to have our lunch handed to us. It’s going to be a wake-up call to Alberta soon when we start exporting really important manufacturing and service jobs to global competitors and Alberta business is going to suffer.
PA - What are the structural productivity challenges that we face and how do we address them? RM - Number one is recognizing we have a problem, particularly with so many small and medium sized enterprises struggling to be profitable in this province. A lot of politicians don’t even know what productivity really is. That’s been my personal experience in the past several years with Productivity Alberta and my involvement with the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. The second thing is what does an SME do to address these productivity challenges? Those are the two big ones.
PA - What are the bright spots to look forward to in the productivity world in Alberta RM - I’m hearing business owners talk about productivity. I’m also involved on the board of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada and a couple of other groups and the topic that comes up right after labour is productivity. Everybody is now recognizing that the province has a productivity problem. Given the cost of doing business here the problem is magnified. I think Productivity Alberta has done a great job teaching people and making people aware of productivity and what it means.
PA - What are you excited about with KUDU and your productivity journey RM - We recognized that we had a problem and we addressed it at the leadership level. We’ve put a lot of money into training the entire company and I can see, slowly but surely, that productivity improvements are happening. What we always preach is that productivity goes hand in with improvements in safety and health and the environment. In a sense we can have our cake and eat it too and I’m seeing that change our company and accomplish all those goals simultaneously.
