Process Stability is First Step Toward Process Excellence
“Too many businesses fall into the technology trap—relying on new tech to fix broken processes—only to face more chaos and inefficiency. Technology can’t save you if your processes aren’t stable.”
This is how Rich Ermlick describes the motivation behind his company, Boring Excellence, and his drive to bring stable processes to mills, companies, and even the personal lives of those he meets. He will also share that perspective as a speaker at this year’s TAPPICon, which will take place in Minneapolis, MN, May 4-7.
Ermlick, who spent the first 25 years of his industry career as a converting plant operator, plans to use real-world examples to give attendees practical tools to achieve sustainable, scalable growth. His session is part of the “Equipment, Processes, and Operations” track designed as part of TAPPICon 2025’s dynamic new program format (see page 17).
Paper360° Editorial Director Jan Bottiglieri had an opportunity to interview Ermlick before the event, to give readers a “sneak peek” at this engaging presentation and TAPPICon’s new format.
P360°: Tell us about your “lightbulb moment”—when you began to see how damaging reactive processes can be.
Ermlick: I spent the first 25 years in a converting plant, working out on the floor. I was stacking pallets and running a production line. And frankly … I hated the job. I was on the receiving end of a lot of the paper that was coming in, so I saw firsthand how much just a little bit of variation in the raw material or the board made in our production lines. As an operator, I could feel it with my fingers. I could tell when the dies would not cut well. My boss at the time would call the paper mill and say, “this paper is terrible.” That’s not measurable! So I thought about it as an operator: What would define “good”?
At our mill, we always focused on getting the moisture right; but honestly, that was just the number that we could get. That’s not the number that we needed. I could see how much time and money we were wasting because we simply reacted to what we got, without knowing what we would want instead. We had no way to communicate clearly with the mill, or even with our own operators.
When I learned that our company had Six Sigma training available, I managed to convince upper management to send me; I was one of the very few machine operators that were allowed to take greenbelt training. Later I was the first machine operator in black belt class.
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How did your Six Sigma training change your thinking?
One of the things you learn when you get into Six Sigma is that you don’t focus on people. You don’t yell at Paul because he didn’t have a great day today. It’s the process. What is the process doing? If you don’t have a stable process for decision making, you cannot improve your machine processes. The first process becomes the operating system for the second.
Process stability starts with what I call strategic clarity: What is it you really need to measure? What will you do with that data? Here’s an example. While getting my Six Sigma training, I had the opportunity to go visit a paper mill for the first time—it completely blew my mind. This was a 100 percent recycled mill. They showed me the raw materials that were coming in and they showed me the materials they pulled out of those bales—brake rotors, chunks of metal, a whole six cylinder engine block!
See, the people at the recycling center would throw chunks of metal into the recycled material, because the materials were being purchased by weight; but if the mill didn’t catch that metal before it got into the pulper, it would trash the unit. The mill has just lost tens of thousands of dollars so somebody else could make an extra couple hundred, because that’s what they chose as the metric. What the mill really needed was not a certain tonnage of bales; what the mill really needed was usable raw materials. They did not have strategic clarity.
What’s the key to finding that strategic clarity?
You need to know what you want and you need to be able to communicate that to everybody in a way that each person understands how their particular contribution adds to the overall goal. Often, it’s about transforming the way we think to understand that it’s often not about the thing we’re actually measuring; it’s the thing behind the thing that’s behind the thing.
A good way to start it to ask, “Where do we want to be? Where are we now, and what’s the land in between? What are the barriers and what are the root causes to those barriers or those missing pieces?” This is called gap analysis. Only then can you plan to go after one, two, or three things. Choosing 10 initiatives at once is stupid, because you’re going to execute approximately zero.
Next, if you’re doing what you planned but not getting the result, it means you did not understand the gaps. Go back and dig deeper with the new information you’ve found. Once both of those are happening, then you go into the final step of reflecting and ask questions again. “How did it go? What went well, what didn’t go well, and what can we do better next time?”
Only then can it become a process of continuous improvement. You need more than one cycle—it must be continuous. This is how you turn an improvement concept into an operating system.
What I’m hearing is that the difference between just raw data and actionable data is knowing what you want.
Exactly. By the way, it’s important not to confuse this with an improvement project. Ninety-nine percent of what I see in “improvement projects” are NOT improvement projects. It’s noticing that things have gotten worse, then working to get your parameters where they used to be. Mills often then claim success and even productivity dollars when it’s simply a one-time effort to regain lost ground.
Deep clarity is about defining what really makes your site successful. It can be different from site to site. Determine who needs to know what, at what level—what information does each department head or division head need to know, at what time, to make the best decisions? You will need to ask them some gut-level questions. Ask each supervisor, “How do you know if you’re having a great day? What do you really look at to make better decisions?”
Strategic clarity means both: finding “the reason behind the reason,” then using the information to make informed decisions. Once that becomes part of your culture, the decisions become much easier—it’s almost automatic.
Okay, we’ve got our strategic clarity. What are the next steps for a stable process?
Right. We’ve deliberately built a baseline way of doing things. Strategic clarity is actually the first of five pillars that serve as a scaffold. So, when you make something better, you now attach this to the scaffold, which maintains your progress.
The second pillar is performance governance. This means reducing your results to numbers, if at all possible. Sometimes you can’t get a specific number; it might be unmeasurable. However, when possible, you need to assign a metric to evaluate. You can use lagging measures, like a quarterly report. As you get closer to the front lines, leading measures become more and more important. These must be both predictive and influenceable. We did that hard work in step one: asking the supervisors, “What do you need to see?” That’s how you come up with those actionable numbers. This helps everyone stay focused.
You say “actionable numbers”—so one benefit is that focus helps reduce decision fatigue.
Yes! And more of the decisions you need to make are the fun kind; it allows you to be more creative, because the process is taking care of the basics. This leads directly into our third pillar: a review and response mechanism. How do we do that?
A review and response system asks, “Are we winning or losing right now?” Are we winning or losing the hour? Are we winning or losing the shift in the day, the week, the month? Different departments are going to ask different questions and will need different numbers—but, if you’ve put the first two pillars in place, everyone will understand how their activities are affecting each other and the greater mission. I call it “review and response” because first you’ll check your numbers; then you’ll execute the response determined by the process. Finally, we’re going to reflect back over to that improvement process and ask, “What are the root causes of these issues?”
For instance, If the current output of this machine goes below a defined point over the last 60 minutes, we have automatic response. We get that operator some help. We don’t need to wait until the end of the day, while the machine has been running poorly the whole time. We don’t need to wait for one leader’s decision. Without a stable process, the operator may or may not feel comfortable calling for help. We can get rid of that lack of trust by saying, “this is our process.”
At first, this will feel strange. Mid-level managers may fight back on this, because it feels like you’re taking away their authority. It’s a matter of helping them see things a different way and helping them develop new skills, which is what I would call leadership. This is not about just landing a policy from the top; it’s about building a system that supports people and removes the barriers of good workmanship.
So “review and response” is also about communication.
Exactly. With strategic clarity, everybody knows where we’re going; with performance governance, we boiled it down to the numbers—that’s our map. The review and response mechanism checks whether we are winning or losing right now—i.e., are we on the right track and, if not, how do we course correct? Our fourth pillar is having written procedures. Whatever it is that you do, write it down. If you don’t write it down, you don’t have a process—you merely have habits, and habits can slip.
I have a format that I like that I’ve seen other companies use, too: it’s called an element tree. It’s just a wonderful base for understanding what is involved in certain jobs. You need an efficient way of capturing information that can be very dense and comprehensive, but at the same time can be very usable and actionable.
That finally leads us to the fifth pillar, which we call the layered audit. It embodies the saying, “you can’t expect what you don’t inspect.” A layered audit asks two questions: “Are we doing the stuff we said we would do?” and “Are we getting the results we wanted?”
The questions always need to be answered in terms of the improvement cycle—that is, our process. If a frontline worker is not hitting a target, we don’t yell at the worker; we acknowledge that the process itself is not working as intended.
During a layered audit, supervisors might be looking at what’s going on with the individual machine operators, the equipment operators—every “layer” of the process. It’s not just people auditing themselves.
Something we don’t acknowledge is that casting blame works! But only in the short term. Every production facility experiences natural variation. If a facility has a really bad day, it’s often followed by a better day, because of this natural variation. When you’ve experienced a really low point, the next point’s going to seem pretty high. In between, there’s been a lot of yelling … so the illusion is that yelling works. That’s not the way to stability.
How does auditing change that variation cycle?
By focusing on the process. If yelling worked long term, we could use it to change one person at a time. When you create a stable process, now you’ve changed 100 people. As the final step of our five-pillar scaffolding, auditing connects back to the idea of strategic clarity, so that the process can begin again. A well-built auditing program is a two-way communication tool at scale.
You mentioned leadership earlier. What are some leadership characteristics that can help this work?
I like the term servant leader. This doesn’t mean that we go out and give people everything that they ask for. It’s not about being friendly and popular. As W. Edwards Deming said, the job of management and leadership is to remove the barriers of good workmanship. That starts with clarity. Effective leaders need to be able to clearly articulate the goal. They also need to have enough humility to take feedback and act on it.
I don’t like the word “empower”; I prefer “trust.” A leader needs to be able to trust people to make their own decisions and to have efficacy on their own jobs. You need to educate and train people because if I expect you to think and act in terms of continuous improvement, but I don’t tell you what that is, we’ll get nowhere.
I hear leaders talk about “optimizing” their manufacturing process. Optimizing is BS. “Optimizing” makes one number more important than the rest; often, it’s an immediate financial target. They want to optimize for profit or even optimize for quarterly profit. Great! You’ve just tanked the long-term viability of your company.
Instead of “optimization,” I recommend “balance.” As a leader, if I balance all these things and help people maintain that balance, then as a whole our facility will have the strength, the power, the energy, the relationships, and the connectivity to get good results. We’re going to have all these things in place, and that’s going to grow over time.
What particular challenges face the pulp and paper industry when it comes to process efficiency?
Well, we are a capital-intensive industry with a lot of segments, like packaging, that serve end market consumers. That is kind of a canary in the coal mine for the overall US economy.
We’ve also got the simple history of every paper mill. A lot of mills have been around for so long—a few for 100 years or more. That sense of history comes with a very deep sense of old school thought: “This is how we do things here; this is our religion.”
I’m not trying to bust up somebody’s heritage, but I spent 25 years on the machine. I’ve seen that there is a difference between 25 years of experience and one year of experience repeated 25 times.
The problem with being capital-intensive is a matter of scale. It can simply mean that leaders have more money to throw at problems. Sometimes money can mask those problems short-term or conflate them. So, the money gets thrown and a mill puts in a new system, new technology—and it becomes really difficult to see what the root cause of the issues were, until the problems return. If you can focus on your continuous improvement process, there’s not a lot of capital involved and it’s a little bit easier to see the process at work.
I must ask: Your company is called “Boring Excellence.” Why did you choose that name?
Well, the basics can be boring! Let’s use football as an example. You’ve never seen a championship football team that doesn’t block and tackle. They can be the best team in the world, but they’re still going to block and tackle. They’re going to do the thing that everyone learns on Day 1.
This is what “boring” excellence is about: focused consistency. Focus on the right thing and be consistent, day after day after day after day. That is going to lead to stability and predictability. Build an environment and a culture where all your people have the information and the authority to make decisions in the moment. That’s what these points are designed to do.
Once that is done, it becomes the foundation. “Boring excellence” will get your facility from Square 1 to maybe 70 or 80 percent of the way to world class excellence. At that point, let’s start talking about sophisticated things: new data systems, new machine technologies, Total Productive Maintenance.
If we practice these five points, we can start anywhere. We can then scale it up to a mill, scale it up further to a mill system, then to a company, or the entire industry, I think. From the suppliers to the consumers, all the way down the value chain—that would change the industry. That’s exciting.
