Boost Your Career with CAD Management Savings

ROBERT GREEN: So my name is Robert Green. Most people know me from Cadalyst magazine, the CAD Managers newsletter, stuff like that, over the years. I am essentially a recovering mechanical engineer. I was actually the guy who was dumb enough to volunteer to be the CAD manager. At some point in my career, they said, do you want to take this stuff over and control it make it work? And I raised my hand. And the rest is history.

How many of you have had experiences like that in your career? Yeah, it's kind of my experience that the job seeks the person, rather than the other way around. Well, it's good to know that my battery health is excellent. Yeah, I really have no clue why this is hung up. This is bad.

But the idea behind the presentation, anyway, is to talk about trying to gather some control over your environment. And let me ask you a couple of diagnostic questions. How many of you feel like you have all the authority that you need to do your job? Please look around. If you're in the front of the room, please look around. And everybody who raised their hand, please raise them again. And notice the abject lack of hands on a statistical basis.

How many of you feel like you have all the money you need to do your job well? [INAUDIBLE] Couple of hands. So what you're telling me is you're in charge of all this stuff, and yet you don't have the authority nor the money to really make it happen. Is that what you're kind of saying to me? Welcome to the club. All right. This is pretty much how we all operate.

PowerPoint is making its way up. So this is going to be great on the presentation when people dial to watch it, isn't it? What I want to do in this presentation is share with you the early days of when I became a CAD manager, and some of the things that I found that worked for me. I didn't know they were going to work for me. I just kind of accidentally bumbled my way into it. But it's strategies and little things that I did over time that eventually got my boss to give me the authority and give me the budget that I really needed to get my job done well, rather than just struggling and surviving.

And so here we are, finally. Now what do you think, the clicker's going to work? I doubt it. Hey, it worked. So here's my keynote. You ever been yelled at because you saved money? Yes? There's a head nodding back there.

What I found with my boss the first time they actually called me the CAD manager, real gruff old Swedish dude, and he's like you guys always want all the new toys. You're always asking me for money. You're always asking me for new computers. Why don't you just get to work? I can still hear him saying it, all these years later.

And what eventually kind of dawned on me is that I was talking to him incorrectly, and I was approaching the job from a technologist's point of view, which is, this stuff is cool. And that's us in this room. Hey, this stuff is cool. But did Curt think it was cool? No, he could really care less, right? He wants to see work going out and bills getting sent out. So that was kind of like Curt.

By the way, anybody recognize the face? That's Captain Kirk. So what I'm going to say is if I spend more time thinking, planning, trying to find where the errors are so that I do not have to react to problems, that I proactively plan for the problems, and solve them before they cause a train wreck-- by the way, can I always do this flawlessly? No. But can I do a better job of preventing things? Typically, yes.

What that's going to lead to is not having to rework and re-fix the same damn thing over and over, which ultimately leads to-- what's the s-word in this class? Savings. And that's how I'm going to start talking to my boss. So that's in microcosm what we're going to look at doing. And that's a great quote from Albert Einstein. "We cannot solve our problems using the same thinking we used when we created them."

So in a CAD manager's domain, if you go in and fight the same fire the same way every day, it's never going to get better. Would you agree with that? How long did it take me to figure that out? About two years. I honestly thought I'd made a career mistake, by the way.

So it all kind of comes down to this. This is a fun exercise sometime. Write down CAD management and you tell me which word is bigger. What's the bigger problem? And for me, it has always been the management piece. The CAD piece is fun. We were all really good at the CAD piece.

And we were so good at it that they said, you should manage this stuff. Then they make you a manager and throw you in. And this is usually where you start having questions about, did I make the right career call here? Because now I'm dealing with people. I'm dealing with money. I'm dealing with all this other stuff.

So what I'd first like to do is share an approach that I happened upon. Let's see whether this makes sense to you. There's basically three rules the way I see it spend your time managing the things that don't work. Where are the problems? Spend your time fixing the problems.

When you do that, you will make things run smoother. You will lead to better operational efficiency. And, ultimately, you'll save the company money and time. Well, time is money. So it's all the same thing, really, when you get right down to it.

Here's the corollary to that. If it's working, don't mess with it. Now, let's do a little self-assessment. How many of us love tinkering with CAD stuff? Every hand should go up. So what are we spending our time doing? We're tinkering around the edges of things that pretty much already work. And we're ignoring things like people flagrantly ignoring standards, which is the real problem. Would you agree? That's one of the real problems.

So I had to learn to get outside my comfort zone, which was technological, heads down, fiddling with AutoLISP programs and things like that, and getting more into the mode of dealing with people, and workflow problems, the things that aren't working. And I would contend if you look at a truly good manager you've ever had in your life, be honest with yourself. That person spent their time fixing problems.

And if they have people that report to them that do a great job, nothing's wrong, they leave them alone, because it's working. Here's a fun question to ask. How many of you feel like your boss understands what you do? This is another one of those. Look around and note the abject lack of hands that are going up at this point. Is that a good news or bad news scenario? I claim it's good. Why do you say good?

AUDIENCE: He leaves you the hell alone.

ROBERT GREEN: They leave you alone.

AUDIENCE: He doesn't care.

ROBERT GREEN: Yeah. Well, see, Stan-- I don't know what your-- can't see your badge. Yeah, Mike's doing a good job. Everything works. Why should I mess with Mike? I shouldn't. But that conversely means that they don't understand what Mike does. And that could be a career problem over the long haul.

Because I've talked to a lot of CAD managers, especially during the recession. These are bang-bang CAD managers, technically really on top of it, keep their companies running, and they got laid off. And why was that? Because the management had no comprehension that you're part of the financial solution to the problem.

Fixing trumps tinkering. All right. So does this mean you're going to spend more stressful time on the job tackling bigger problems that have been problematic for some while? Yes. But that's the best stuff to be working on. So I would say if you find yourself saying something like, man, I just want to get back to writing programs, and I hate all this managerial stuff, you may be in the wrong career as a CAD manager. Maybe.

Here is where I start. All of you provide support to your user base, correct? Do users seem to have any problem telling you what's wrong? I don't experience that problem. I hear a few people kind of chuckling. It seems like people are more than willing to walk up to me and tell me where they're having problems.

A lot of times, those problems aren't real. It's people refusing to follow the process, or they don't write things down, or you're answering the same question over and over. But sometimes there are genuine problems out there.

So here's my take on that. If you keep track of where things are going wrong in the CAD workflow or the CAD pipeline, if you will, then you will eventually start tackling those problems. And you'll get things moving quicker. So the mental image that emerges for me is a traffic jam. Here's this road that's all backed up. And clearly that's because something up front is wrecked.

Now we can sit here and we can complain about the traffic all we want. But in reality, the resolution is getting a wrecker, clearing the wreck away, and getting the traffic back flowing again, yes? So it's all about taking the action to get it fixed. In this case, it was fairly simple. There's a wrecked car up there and we got to get rid of it.

In a CAD ecosystem, the problems could be slightly more complex, can't they? It's not always easy to know exactly where all the problems are. So the diagnostic questions are, what's slowing us down? And what would you do to fix it?

Could all of you sit down right now and write down four or five things that annoy the hell out of you about your operating environment that you'd like to fix? I bet you could. I bet you could do more than five. I see a couple guys laughing back here. You only laugh if it's true, right?

So what is it that impedes the flow of CAD traffic through our organization? And what might I do to get that flowing more smoothly? Incidentally, this is your true value as a CAD manager. Not unjamming the plotter, not undeleting files, not the fire drill things that you do on a daily basis. Your genuine value to the company is you see where things are wrong and you know what it would take to fix it, if you were only given the authority and the money to do so. Would you agree with that statement? And I want to set you up to get there.

Now if you went into your boss and said, I'd like to hire some outside consultant. And this guy is going to come in here and charge us $5,000, and he's going to find $80,000 of efficiency every year. You pay him $5,000. He finds us $80,000 in return. Would your boss hire that person? How quickly would they hire them? You are that person. You're not talking to your boss that way.

Generally speaking, that's the problem. How many of you agree? I see a few heads nodding. How many of you are going to your boss and talking more like an accountant? This is where few hands typically go up. Now I've been accused of being part accountant. I'm not. I hate accounting. But it's what I have to do in order to get the budget.

So I just want you to understand that. I want you to walk out of here walking a few inches taller than when you came in. You're the answer to the problems inside your company.

So here's an exercise that I recommend that any CAD manager does. You don't have to do this right now, but when you go home or whatever. Sit down with a piece of paper and jot down where you feel like the time sucking, bottlenecking problems are in your CAD environment. And it can be anything.

It can be people can't find their files. It can be our machines lock up all the time. It can be people don't understand how to plot. We have glitchy problems with our PDF generator. It can be anything. It can be technical. It can be Ralph ignores the standards. So it can be human factors problems. There's no restrictions here.

If it's something that's causing you heartburn, capture it. Write it down I am a big fan of having a sheet of paper, because it's really easy to scribble on while you're on the phone. And that-- I call it the problem list-- lives next to my phone, because that's where people tend to tell me their problems. Otherwise, I'll get it on an email and I can jot it down anyway

Some things are being crossed off the list. More things are typically being added. It's a dynamic, living, breathing thing that you're never done fixing in my experience. Have any of you got your environment running just perfect? Anybody not had any correspondence from the office this week at AU? That's instructive right there.

Now, when you write down what these problems are, in a second column, write down what you do to fix it. Our computers lock up all the time. Solution, our company needs to get off these eight-year-old computers and buy us something new. Easy solution, hard to go get the money. But the point is, you've identified the problem, and you know what to do about it. You have to do some more detailed analysis later to get there.

Now, what you're going to find typically, in my experience, has been standards, lack thereof, lack of following them. These are big time and money wasting things that goes on everywhere. Project procedures that seem to be invented on the fly. Project managers that say, just get it done. I don't care how you do it. I see heads nodding there. These are the kind of things that go on all the time.

Abject lack of training, this is a real pet peeve of mine. You just throw people in the deep end of the pool and you wonder why they screw up. Well, it's because you've not told them what to do. So these are some things that we've got to deal with. Hardware.

And you know what still kills me is we're-- what?-- 27 years into Windows operating systems. I've been using stuff for over 30 years. And we still don't know how to file stuff. People drag folders into the wrong locations every day. They lose files every day. And so procedures around that kind of stuff still pay dividends. Right? You guys experience these problems, too? It's kind of amazing, the same problem everywhere. If I go do this class over in London, the same heads nod. It's exactly the same degree of problems.

So what I want you to think about now on this list is I want you to think about which problems you wrote down that can generate some big time savings. Example, we have 40 people doing production CAD work, and about once a week, half of them, it seems like, have to produce some 50 or 60 sheet PDF transmittal set. And our PDF generator software is wonky. And I'm constantly having to support this stuff. If I could actually make that work, like push a button and it works, I could save us several hours per week, which would add up to hundreds of hours per year. That's big.

So what you find is the problems that annoy the greatest number of people, and annoy them the most often, those are the ones that really save you time and money. So those are the ones I want you to look at. And what's kind of surprising to me is a lot of time, that's pretty simple stuff. It's configuration problems. It's an updated driver here and there. It's getting the time to be able to go fix it from your boss.

So focus on fixing things that provide the greatest amount of economy or time savings to the greatest number of people, and you're going to save time. And we know that the one equation that always works is time is money. So if you save time, you're saving money. Project managers like that. CEOs like that. People up the management chain, that's mother's milk to them. They like it.

So what I want you to do now-- you've found the problems. You know what the solutions are. But the core issue in my job is they don't give me the authority nor the money to make the fixes happen. Now you've got to put on your marketing hat. And you have to go convince the people who control the budget the validity of your argument, and how much time and money you're going to save them if they will empower you to fix things.

Now here's the way most CAD managers market. Oh, man, these computers suck. Why can't we have a new plotter? Is this marketing or is this whining? It's more complaining, isn't it?

Whereas, I've got this analytical engineer over here who does fluid computational dynamics. This guy's making $130,000 a year. We're making him work on an eight-year-old computer that locks up three times a day. Why am I paying somebody $130,000 a year to reboot their machine three times a day when a new workstation costs $4,000? You see how that works?

By the way, how CAD-centric was that? How time-centric was it and money-centric? Completely. Funny thing, right? If you want to go ask somebody for money, you better speak their language. And if the manager has the money, how should you speak to them? In their language, which is monetary.

So here is my argument. Here is how I've always spun it. And it works. Why would we make a change? Why would we change our procedure? Why would we use new software? Why would we buy a new computer? Why would we do anything new or change the way in which we operate?

Well, there's only three reasons I can think of. Because I get the job done faster. Because I get the job done cheaper. Or, in a perfect world, I would achieve both. And, in reality, if you save a lot of expensive engineering and architecture time, time is money. So you're not only accelerating the project, you're saving money while you accelerate it.

And the customer loves it, because they're getting stuff done faster. The boss loves it, because they're saving money as the project gets completed. This is a win-win. So if you walk around preaching this stuff, they can't ignore you forever. They might ignore you for some period of time. But they can't ignore you forever if you start showing them this.

Now, here's the thing. You can make a technical argument all day long. Well, we need this because, the thing is, every time I have a non-rational B-spline that hits a straight surface, our NVIDIA graphics board from three years ago is having problems, and it's dropping pixels. And when I do dynamic rotation, I'm seeing these digital skid marks as it spins around. When did the accountant quit understanding that?

Don't even waste your time talking about it. Talk about faster, cheaper, errors. Elimination of errors, smoother execution, saving engineering, architecture, drafting, design, whatever, saving the time of that person. Go to your boss. Show them your list. Show them your problems prioritized with highest savings potential first. Show them your proposed solution. Tell them what it's going to take.

We've got three people over here in computational fluid dynamics. They've got eight-year-old dog computers. They're wasting three hours a day rebooting. Three hours a day for three people, that's nine hours a day. That's 45 hours per week. Multiply it out by 48 hours, you're talking about 2,000 man hours at $75 per hour. We're paying these guys $150,000 a year to reboot computers, because we won't buy them a new workstation.

Do you see how I did that? When will you get your new workstation?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ROBERT GREEN: If they're smart, yeah. If they're smart, they'll do it. But here's reality. They're now going to cross-examine me to the nth degree, because there's no way organizationally we could have been this stupid this long. Right? You must be lying to me. You must you must be pumping up your numbers, because you've been asking me for these new computers for a year. Now all of a sudden, you pull a rabbit out of your hat and have these numbers.

So, do expect to be cross-examined. But go to the boss. State your case. Have your numbers. And stick to it.

Now you may need to have this conversation a few times. And you may need to grind them down. But if you're insistent, and you keep showing them the money, eventually they listen to it. And you may not get everything you want, but you may get one new computer.

Now you give it to the person-- of the three people that needed the new computers, which one will you give the new computer to, I wonder? Probably the one who knows the boss the best and can state the case the best. That way you'll get the other two. So I'm not saying be devious. Maybe I am.

You go to the boss. You talk about cost savings, cost savings, cost savings. You go to users, you talk about time savings. Now time's money. It's the same thing. But to the user you say, are you tired of rebooting your computer three times a day? Would you like it if you could actually go home on time for a change? I'm saying the same thing. But notice the different way I'm communicating it based on who I'm talking to.

So talk to your users. You need to walk around basically being the faster/cheaper evangelist. There's a better way to do this. Here's the problem. Here's the solution. You get a groundswell of user support. You finally grind the boss down into funding it. And now you get a win.

You get people walking around, man, this is great. These new workstations work fantastic. I'm getting stuff done in four hours now that used to take me six. And that has almost a viral effect as it spreads through the organization.

So the hardest thing is to get your first win. Mine was years and years ago, getting an 11 by 17 laser printer, back when those cost some money, for our electrical guys, who were having to plot stuff out on paper, and run it through paper trimmers, and manually collate these 50-sheet sets. It was taking them hours. We had part-time clerks trimming paper, all this ludicrous, stupid--

I went to the boss over and over again. The answer continued to be no. Finally dawned on me, I went to the reseller, and I said, can you put one of these things out here on demo for about four days, please? Had the electrical guys come through. They're printing their stuff. They got their things done in 17 or 18 minutes.

And once they got their jaw up off the floor, they went into the boss, buy this. Buy this. If they had tried to let the reseller pull that machine out, there would have been a revolt. It works. Show them the time savings. Get your users on board. And then show the boss the cost savings. And you'll pretty much win the argument.

Now, if you can start changing things, like using this process-- we need better workstation. Rather than everybody in this place trying to create PDF files 40 different ways, we need a standard way of creating our PDF documentation. And by so doing, we wind up saving a lot of time. We save one hour for every set of PDF files that are generated on a project. And we do these all the time, so it really adds up.

You do the math and figure out how many hours you're spending. And, by the way, you just convert hours into dollars with the labor rate. You save 40 hours of somebody's time and they make $40 per hour. You just saved $1,600 like that.

Once you now get your boss to fund whatever it is you need to do. New PDF drivers along with some training, let's say, in order to show everybody how that works. What you now want to do is, while the iron is hot, while the savings is there, and while people are enthused-- man, this is great. This works. Capture that attitude right there and retain it by making that the standard way you operate.

How many of you feel your life would be a lot easier if people would just follow the standards? This is where pretty much all the hands go up. And so this gives me a pretty persuasive way to say, gee, you know, I think you should kind of use the new way, because you press the button and it's done, instead of two hours of messing around and asking me questions. Kind of seems like that should be the standard way we produce PDF files.

So once you capture that, and get that improvement in place, you go around now using some combination of user communication, and maybe there's a training class, maybe there's some cheat sheet or handouts you do. You're talking to users about it at lunch and learns, however you communicate your change. You do that and start making that kind of behavior the standard.

By making it the standard what you are now doing is institutionalizing the savings, if you think about it. Because you proved that you could save all this time. But now rather than just saving the time of those three people over in the fluid dynamics area, you're saving everybody's time. So it starts to add up.

If you make things fast for users, they will want to follow your instructions. Would you agree with that? Most users. I'm going to leave the door open a little bit there. Most users. You show me a better, easier way to do something, I'm all ears. I suspect everybody in this room is that way. But do you guys have some users who still don't listen? Yes. And we'll get to them shortly.

Your solution becomes the standard. Everybody starts to use it, generally speaking, because it's easier to use it than not. And my feeling has always been, the best standard is the one they don't know they're using. All right, so when a new user comes in, how do I create my PDFs? You press this button right here. That's how you do it.

You don't go into, or you could do all this. No, you press this button right here. That's how it works. That's how we do things around here. That's our standard.

What I have now done is I've won the user over based on individual productivity. They don't know that I'm chasing savings. They think I'm there to get them home earlier. That's fine. I don't really care how they choose to look at it.

The thing I love about this, I was never the bad guy. I was never standing there saying, why aren't you using the standards? I'm never hitting this poor guy here over the head with my clicker. Please follow the standards. It's, here let me show you an easier way to do it. Let me get you home earlier. Let me get the project manager off your back.

I'm the good guy, all right? You can ignore me at your own peril. But let me help you get your job done somewhat easier. What this does is it allows you to build a standards program, bit by bit, over time, problem by problem, solution by solution, custom button by custom button, custom program by custom program. And it just continues to evolve.

I've never been a big fan of rolling out a whole big standards package at one time, because usually that culminates with some kind of big graft of paper that nobody reads anyhow. And they don't use it. They don't follow it. So I'd rather just tackle problems one by one, and solve it incrementally as I go along. And you look back a couple years later and, wow, huge difference here.

You keep at it over the long haul. And basically what you do is you build a high productivity standards regime, where it's just easier for people to do repetitive tasks. The trick is document it as you go. So every time you come-- this new fancy fangled PDF button, you have to do a little a one or two page training guide on that. Or you've got to do a quick video on it, or something like that. So that as new people come into the company, you can hand them that. And it becomes very easy for them to use your standards.

What you'll do over time is build a standards manual, by the way. I call it a savings manual. But everybody else seems to think that it's standards. The more standard things are, the more consistent things are, and the faster things get done.

And by the way, do I sometimes make mistakes in my standards? I do. How about you guys? I see a few heads nodding. The great thing about when you screw up the standards is everything's screwed up in a standard way, which means you know what you're attempting to fix. Rather than having 40 different derivative types of problems-- at least if everybody was consistent-- I've got one standard type of problem to fix, which is somewhat easier.

What I want you to do now is to-- you're winning the users over with this ease of use, time savings, make your job easier kind of speak and evangelism that you're doing. I now want you to broaden this discussion with your management. And I want you to go have this discussion.

CAD per se, or CAD tools, do not make a dime of money. Would you agree with this? It's a tool, right? That's like saying a carpenter uses a saw. A saw doesn't make money. The carpenter makes money. The saw is the tool.

Now this means that I have to go admit to my boss that the stuff that I'm managing is not really something that makes him a lot of money. And is that really something that I want to say to my boss? Perhaps not. But what I can say is this, I can save you money all day long if you let me manage these tools in an optimal way. If you let me train people, if you let me customize things, I can get stuff done in four hours that used to take eight. And penny saved is a penny earned kind of thing.

So if I tell my boss that, and I say, and furthermore, if you give me the authority to standardize things, not only will I save you time, but consistency and quality will actually go up over time, because people are using standard work methods and processes. Does everybody in this room have a certain way that you do things, because, over time, you've discovered it leads to lower errors? Exactly. All right, that's exactly what I want to do in my CAD environment. And standards allow me to do it.

If we have 40 people doing the same thing 40 different ways, all I'm ever going to do is fight fires and fix problems. But if everybody works in generally the same process, we'll get rid of the dumb, low level, stupid errors, like incorrect PDF. You ever plot something that looks like a postage stamp, because you got a dot way out somewhere. Let's get rid of those kind of problems that we don't have to fix.

I can save you time. I can save you money. I can improve quality over time. The only thing is you've got to empower me to do it. Is that a conversation that's worth having with your boss? Absolutely. Does anybody do this? Does it work? Yeah.

I came to find that the first three years I was a CAD manager, it was a wasted three years, in retrospect. I should have been doing this all the time. It just took me a while to figure it out. Standards save us money.

Does everybody know what an elevator pitch is? Where you condense an idea down to 30 seconds. That's crucial when you're talking to the big boss, right? You caught this person at the coffee pot. You've got 25 seconds of her time. How are you going to explain why you want what you want?

Standards yield consistency. Consistency reduces errors. Consistency saves us time. Consistency allows us to automate things that used to be manual, which saves us more time, which saves us more money, which raises quality higher. So over time, things get better and better and better the more we embrace intelligent standards.

So literally what you're saying to your boss is let me save you money. And what's the answer to that? Better be yes. Anybody who's saying no to that is probably a small family-owned company. This is the way we've always done things. And we're not going to change the way we've done things. And you probably ought not be working there forever, in my experience. Any management team who ignores this is probably going to be having financial problems down the road. A little gloom and doom.

In order for me to save you the money, I need you to understand the problems that I experience. I need you to give me the power to make the changes. I need you to fund me. Here's another thing. When somebody blatantly ignores me, I need you to enforce. How many of you have problems with this? It's usually where a lot of hands go up.

Yeah, well, I remember I had a British gentleman that I worked with. And I said, well, you're not following the standards. And he goes, well, I tend to see them as suggestions. So I had to go have a conversation with the division manager, who eventually yelled at him, and then we didn't get along real well for a while. But that's OK. We got over it after a while.

I need your support. I'll do the work. I'll do the heavy lifting. But I need you to go to the user base and say, this is how we're going to become more efficient. This is how we operate. I expect you to follow the rules. Just empower me.

How many of you have gone to your boss and asked them these questions in just this way? It's usually a few. And the few people who've done it generally achieve success. Maybe not the first time they ask. But over some period of months, the thinking changes.

The thing I love about this is every time my boss talks to me now, I'm talking about, how do I make the operational environment better? How do I get stuff out to clients faster? How do I reduce error rates? Notice how I'm never whining for anything new. I'm just talking about, what am I going to do to make the business run better? And that's a totally different tone. That's the kind of stuff that managers love to hear. So the more I talk to him in that way, the more it tends to work.

Now I asked, do you have people who ignore the standards, ignore the procedures no matter what you do? And everybody's had nodded yes. So I'm going to call this objection handling. How do you deal with people who just won't get with the program, that are causing you problems, that are continuing to cause errors? Whether that's a software error or a project or they're getting stuff in the wrong folder or whatever mistake they're making, they're basically not getting with the program, and they're continuing to be problematic. And no matter what you say it just kind of doesn't tend to work.

So how do we deal with these folks? Cattle prod. Renegades, cowboys, there's all these nicknames. I call them those who will not comply.

I go through a process. I go to them and I restate the problem. Please allow me to explain this once again. The way you are preparing your PDF file sets is not to the spec that the customer expects. We are under contract to produce these files in this manner. You're not doing that which means I've got to go back and rework it.

It's causing us image problems with the client, because they continue to get files from you that are not to their spec and standard. It makes us look bad. The project manager doesn't like it. This is the problem. Calmly. Please notice I never yelled.

The solution is you need to be using our super duper one step PDF generator that we have set up up here on our ribbon. It's been exhaustively programmed and done to help you create just this correct size files and everything exactly the way our client wants to get it. This is what you need to do to be successful and create files the right way.

Now here's what I'll do. A lot of times, it's a formality. But once in awhile, I'm surprised. I say, OK, why do you refuse to use the easier solution? What's the problem? What's your alternative? Why don't you want to get with the program? Now 99 out of 100 times, it's just because I've always done it this way.

But once in a while, they'll say, well, I had this case where your program didn't work. OK, show me. And once in a while, that's a valid complaint. If I get one of those complaints, I will go fix it immediately, or as quickly as I possibly can. But generally speaking, it's just because they don't care to learn anything new and they want to do things the way they always have.

So at this point I will say, OK, so really what you're telling me is you just want to do it the way you've always done it, which is leading to problems, which is leading to noncompliance, nonstandard, it's making us have to go back and fix things, because you just don't want to learn something that's going to take you 10 minutes. Is that what you're telling me?

You can see how this conversation is going to start to get sideways right about now, right? At this point, this is why most reasonable people will say, you're right. And they'll get with the program even if they don't like it. But most reasonable people will mend their ways at this point. If they don't, show them the cost of their noncompliance.

Remember the British guy I was telling you about? He produced these really detailed drawings for ocular tooling that made contact lenses. And these things got sent down to the shop floor, where they were put into an NC machine. Now part of the limitation of the NC machine was that it couldn't handle polylines. And it couldn't handle anything that wasn't on layer zero, because it was an ancient, old interface.

So we had standards set up so that they would draw stuff on layer zero, and we had an auto explode routine. It worked. All you had to do is press the button. But this guy would always draw in like eight different layers, and he color things yellow and purple, and all this other stuff. And every time it went down to the shop floor, they had to spend a couple hours fixing it.

So I have a little conversation with him and he says, I just don't like drawing on one layer. I don't like that. And I don't like the white color that you tell me to draw on. I don't like it. Therefore I'm not going to follow your instruction. I choose to take it more as a suggestion. I remember him saying that. I can't emulate his accent.

But I said, OK, so, Al, here's the deal. Every time you do this and it goes down to the floor, this is costing us two hours to fix this. And the people who are down there fixing it are valuable NC operators that are getting charged out at about $58 an hour. That's $116. And you're sending five or six of these things down per week that we've got to fix. Oh, and I'm not even talking about the fact that we have this $800 per hour multi-axis machine that's sitting there idle while we're trying to fix your mistake.

Now would you really like me to go to your boss and give him those numbers? What did Al say? I don't know, I still-- I had to go to his boss, which is the next step. OK, well, I gave you your chance. Go to his boss. Run through the numbers, and I said you are literally paying $500 a week because this guy doesn't like to draw on layer zero.

Now the next morning, I walked in, and I walked past Al's office, and Al's generally a jovial kind of dude. And the look I got was like death. So what had occurred? Yeah, the conversation had been had, and the problem then ceased.

Now was the relationship with Al ever really the same? No. Really wasn't, because he was kind of the sacrificial case. I mean, I had to bust somebody. I gave him every chance in the world to straighten up and fly right, but he chose not to. But what happened to my compliance problems at that place? It pretty much drifted down to nothing. Word was out. This guy will tattle.

This only worked because I knew how much money we were wasting. Did you catch that in the thread of the conversation? Figure it out, how much time-- I had to go ask the guys down in the tool cage. So, is this a problem? And they're like, oh hell, yes, this is a problem. Can you beat that guy in the side of the head? It was like one of those things.

And the thing about this is standards violators are not being obstinate. They're not being productive. They're not being free-willed. They're not being expressive. They're wasting money. See how that works? And once you start having that conversation, there it is, right? How can you with a straight face say, oh yeah, I enjoy wasting money. Well, if you want to waste money, why don't you give me that money then?

Now, all this is predicated on making sure that standards work in the organization. And I'm going to say this. The only reason standards ever work, in my experience, is because people are taught the standards. You don't just throw out-- you don't send an email, here's the standard, folks. Use it. Because they won't read the email. And they won't use the standard anyway.

So I'm going to have to push for some sort of training program or mechanism in order to really make this stuff happen. Now a lot of times, bosses, they don't see training as a cost-saving tool. They see it as something that costs them money, because when people are in training, they're not working. Is that true? Yeah, that's true.