Although Thomas Samuel has been the Vice President of Operational Excellence at BW Forsyth Partners for over five years, he believes the continuous improvement journey is just beginning.
In his role, Thomas works with teams across Barry-Wehmiller and, more specifically, BW Forsyth Partners platforms, to identify opportunities for improvement and help them perform their best.
BW Forsyth Partners is Barry-Wehmiller’s investment arm that partners with small- to middle-market companies in the capital and component equipment and professional services sectors. BW Forsyth Partners blends Barry-Wehmiller’s unparalleled legacy of value creation and people-centric culture development with keen investing experience to help companies realize their true potential.
However, this potential extends far beyond balance sheets; it lies in creating conditions that enable team members to achieve their goals for a better future.
“People who want to sell their companies, it's like their children and they want to leave it in a steward's hands that is going to take good care of it,” Thomas said. “We typically tend to appeal to those kinds of people. There are other people who are just motivated by the dollar and we don't tend to appeal those business owners.”
“In Barry-Wehmiller, we aspire to people and performance in harmony. That is the best way that we can respect our team members,” Thomas said. “There are a lot of benefits from a business standpoint as people form the core of any business. But it's how we make sure that our workflows and our process flows are smoother so that we can come in and do our work and go home happy. This focus on people and performance helps a lot with people retention as our associates feel we genuinely care to take the time to listen to them and lead improvements.”
As Vice President of Operational Excellence, Thomas works with the teams to continuously seeks ways to improve the business and team member experience. To do so, he listens to those who are actually involved in that particular part of the business’ work to find their pain points and brainstorm solutions.
“Everybody comes to work with ideas and has frustrations and issues that they face on a day-to-day basis,” Thomas said. “Our goal is to understand that, understand our opportunities, so that we can harness their creativity, their input, their knowledge and focus on the stuff that actually matters to the customers.”
The continuous improvement journey is focused on building a better future, but change can be challenging for people to accept. Thomas draws on the lessons learned from the Listen Like a Leader course offered through Barry-Wehmiller University — an internal learning platform that drives performance and empowers every team member to realize their gifts and talents — to handle conflict resolution and work with a win-win negotiation mindset.
“Being a leader of continuous improvement, I champion and manage change,” Thomas said. “We are helping design the future, but it’s difficult to change how we work. It's helping through the right protocols in the right words to be able to help people work through their emotions and helping them understand that the better future is going to benefit all of us.”
Although the continuous improvement journey is a marathon and not a sprint, Thomas has found great benefit in hosting rapid improvement (Kaizen) events that condense what might typically take months of gradual change into one transformative week. During these events, Thomas and the team spends a week at a facility implementing a detailed plan to make improvements quickly and leave it in better condition than he found it.
“It's coming in much more prepared for action and driving improvements within that week so that the team members, the operators, the people in the work area can experience a new reality as they move forward,” Thomas said.
Thomas and the team follow up weekly to make sure everything is still running smoothly with the goal of completing an event in 30 to 60 days. Continuous Improvement is an ongoing process that never truly stops, so this feedback allows the team to understand what’s working well and what could be improved upon.
“We are in a dynamic world, and if we don't adapt, we're going to go extinct,” Thomas said. “And for us to be able to drive that change in a people-centric manner, with a focus on performance, I think is the critical part.”
Just as Thomas points out, extinction should not be a threat that’s feared; it should act as a motivator for evolution. Barry-Wehmiller and BW Forsyth Partners’ continuous improvement journey is ongoing, a constant search for the best version of the business, for all of its stakeholders.
And Thomas can’t wait to see where the next evolution will take BW.