Transforming Warehouse EHS with Nick Watson of Neovia Logistics

Evan [00:00:00]: Could you introduce yourself and help us understand who you are, your role, what you do at Neovia, and provide some context for us?

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Nick: So I go by Nick. I've been with Neovia for 13 years. I've been in every role in the building. I've been to multiple other facilities as well. I was Outbound Supervisor here for 8 years. We had a facility startup in Plainfield, Indiana for Whirlpool. I went over there and I was kind of training everybody. Then the LSM at the time reached out and asked if I would be interested in being the EHS Manager. That was in 2019. And then to come back to Harley. So I agreed to that. And then I ran Outbound for two years as the Ops Manager. I was still Ops Manager when OneTrack came in in December when we went live. At that time, my role was just to ensure my team was doing it. But then in February, I was asked to go back to EHS and take back over OneTrack and really run with it and learn what we could do with it. I'm an EHS Asset Manager. I'm over environmental health, safety, security, maintenance, any of our contractors in-house, pretty much over everything but operations now.

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Evan [00:01:00]: Is it typical for EHS to also have a big role in the asset maintenance side of things too?

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Nick: Oh yes. I'm the first guinea pig to do that for Neovia. I report to the GM here, but I also report to the Global EHS Director. But yes, it is very difficult. You've got to get really good at time management. But it also helps because it rolls in together, right? So maintenance and safety, they kind of roll together if you actually think about it. So it helps, but it's also a lot to take in.

 

Evan: Yeah, I can imagine. Well, you've seen the gamut in all these different roles. And I mean, you've been with Neovia for a while now. So taking a step back, how have you seen the industry, or maybe it's Neovia-specific, change over the years? What has been the biggest change that you've seen in the logistics warehousing world over the last 5-10 years?

 

Nick [00:02:00]: Ever since COVID, the culture definitely has changed. Back then, we didn't have issues of people hitting stuff and not saying anything. I mean, I'm sure we had a small portion of people doing that. But where we're at now in Indiana as well, they have built up a lot of facilities around us that are not Neovia. So getting associates in the doors is definitely a challenge. That's the two biggest changes.

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Evan: I hear that a lot when I'm talking to customers. Obviously, COVID made maybe not so great of a labor market even worse. We had things like the stimulus checks and then facilities had to fight with different facilities on maybe paying a dollar more versus the one down the road. What do you think the biggest driver of that change is from a talent and culture standpoint?

 

Nick [00:03:00]: Well, in my personal opinion, people really sat back, you know, they did get those checks, and we did give extra time off and things like that. And they thought about their career goals, I think, and decided they wanted to change their career goal. The internet, of course, that's definitely changed people's perspectives. You can get online jobs and work anywhere from home. We lost some people to that. Working from home is always a plus, and it just changed the industry. Like having people in offices, that went away for a lot of companies. And that's very enticing to say, "Hey, I'll pay you this much money if you work from home." And then, like I said, right as COVID was hitting is when they really started building up our area. We were the only facility in Greenwood, and now we have four Amazons, a massive FedEx Ground. There's just so much stuff building around us.

 

Evan: The growing of the industry, like your area getting specific, a lot more warehousing in the area, that's a new one that I haven't heard as much. But I was driving to South Carolina over the weekend actually, and I saw, I think, probably five two-plus million square foot warehouses that just got built all within two miles of each other, which I feel like you just didn't use to see that five, ten years ago. So shifting gears a little bit, what's one misconception that people who are either in the warehouse world or maybe that aren't have about the warehouse world that you kind of disagree with? Like what's one myth or misconception in your line of work that you're like, "Man, I just really don't agree with that."

 

Nick [00:04:00]: I hear this a lot, especially from new hires coming in. A lot of facilities say that we're just a number. I don't believe that to be true. We're getting a lot of millennials, and I am like very beginning millennial. Just the way they are different compared to like the old school people. So the misconception is they really want to be patted on the back and things like that, but if they don't get it, they think that no one cares about them and cares about their safety or cares about their life. But I don't think that's true at all. I just think it's we're learning a better system on how to meet their needs as far as needing to be told they're doing a great job and needing to be told often. I would say that's definitely the biggest one that I see.

 

Evan [00:05:00]: Yeah, no, I think retaining and training talent, especially talent now, because you're right, I think there's a big culture difference between my demographic and even younger than me kind of coming into the workforce. I think people are a lot more willing to jump jobs more than they ever used to be. They definitely need a little more of that pat on the back like you mentioned.

 

Nick: Yeah. We have a couple of agencies that they're even labeling them job jumpers now just because when someone offers a dollar, they'll jump to the money. Which makes sense, but you're going to continually jump to the money. So we just need to come up with, in our facility, a way where they don't want to, they want to stay regardless.

 

Evan: So what's one thing that you lose sleep over in your day-to-day job? What's that thing that keeps you up at night or gives you heartburn?

 

Nick [00:06:00]: Well, being in EHS, my brain never shuts off on proactively changing processes and looking at the facility to ensure that we do everything in our power to make sure that someone doesn't get hurt. There's so many different processes and things like that. It is a continual watching it, monitoring it, just thinking of different ways outside the box of ensuring that we're doing everything in our power not to allow someone to get hurt. In March, we put more focus on environmental safety, like fixing engineering standards and stuff like that. Now we're doing more behavioral-based as into what can we do to have associates make the right decision where we don't have to constantly watch them. So just making sure everybody's safe. I mean, a storm comes in. I'm on call 24/7, watching, monitoring weather, stuff like that. So just their safety is 100% my drive.

 

Evan: If you set OneTrack aside for a second and just think about visibility in general for how that pertains to you and your role, what role do you think just being able to see things that are happening in your warehouse plays for you?

 

Nick [00:07:00]: I know you said put OneTrack aside, but it's been a big change. Previous OneTrack, people were hitting stuff, not reporting it, doing unsafe acts, and we wouldn't know unless we were monitoring. So I can't really put OneTrack aside because it has changed a lot. At first, we had to make sure that when we rolled it out that we were letting them know it's not Big Brother in the sky, eye in the sky. And we had to really promote and let them know that it's for their own good and their safety. But it's night and day. I haven't seen a beat-up rack with a big hole in it since without knowing when it happened and how it happened. So it's changed our culture as far as people stopping and reporting right away instead of driving off and hoping a different camera in the facility didn't catch them.

 

Evan: And then that accountability piece, I think it's huge, especially when you talk about changing the culture in a building. That goes back to keeping and retaining talent and making sure talent doesn't leave for a dollar more across the street. What was your experience like when rolling out OneTrack in that sense?

 

Nick [00:08:00]: So rolling it out, of course, the people that were complaining, what we end up finding were the problem children. The veterans and the solid workers that stay busy and do what they're supposed to, they were 100% for it because, you know, they would complain and let their suits and stuff know that people are hitting stuff. And they had pride in the work, and they didn't see them do it, but they know it was happening through the facility. We have been able to get rid of some of those bad apples and we've had to take some off equipment. Their strength wasn't driving, but they had other strengths in the facility. So we moved them to that, and they're doing well.

 

Evan: What's an example of how OneTrack has helped you either find one of those processes that need improvement or maybe it was specific behavior in the building that you and your team had to focus on for training?

 

Nick [00:09:00]: Okay, so I got plenty. First one is, so you guys have an alert that's for mass. So when the mass goes up, as OneTrack feels like it's doing something wrong, it sends me an alert. Well, I monitor those, and I noticed that there's these five different OPs. Every time they would go up, it would set off 3 G's of safety violation. Come to find out it's because our equipment was set to a hard setting. So it was setting off, but then you really had to think about, well, what's the hard setting been doing to people's legs and backs? Because at 3 G's, they had to be getting sorer than the other drivers. So it allowed us to pinpoint those trucks and then change the lift settings. And then we got kudos because it was like, oh man, it's so much smoother going up and down now. And it's not as hard on our body. So there's definitely a plus on that. We've had to use it a few times for investigations. So an example, we had an associate picking in one of our rackings. They said someone came up behind them while they were in the air and hit them on an OP in the same aisle and back out and take off. But I still requested the exact time. And I found out that a new hire was on a rental piece of equipment without OneTrack. Drive up underneath him and hit him and take off. Of course, that led to termination. So that was a big help. Right now, I'm using OneTrack for equipment utilization. I'm starting to see that we probably have too much equipment. So we'll probably downsize some of our equipment not being used all the time, which at the end of the day, helps us with our costs.

 

Evan [00:10:00]: Yeah. From a usage and utilization standpoint, you just talked about maybe downsizing the fleet. What are some of the other things that you might think about doing as you get more into that data?

 

Nick: Well, of course, first is decreasing equipment. So I'm seeing just on the utilization report that we're probably like nine pieces of equipment heavy. So that will help our other facilities out if they're needing equipment. But that's another thing that changes lead time on getting stuff into a facility, especially like order pickers and turrets. It takes a long time nowadays. So if we have another facility that can use them and just switch over the lease to them, that's going to help not only us but the other facilities. Once we start getting more reporting as far as utilization rolling in our production rates and our production per hour and see if it aligns with what we're seeing in OneTrack. And if that's the case, then we can use OneTrack to help drive better production. So it would be less overtime, fewer hours for people to work, which is a good thing because for a long time, we worked a lot of overtime. I mean, it's six days a week, 10-hour days for everybody. So they're kind of glad to reduce that overtime. They're not really looking for more overtime.

 

Evan: Gotcha. No, that makes a lot of sense. One of my first jobs was actually working in a manufacturing warehouse facility when I was 18. And we were doing six days a week, 12 hours a day for months at a time. And man, that adds up on you.

 

Nick [00:11:00]: I mean, the checks are good, but you're too tired to spend them.

 

Evan: Absolutely. So when you think about coaching and video coaching, how has that helped you either connect better with associates or maybe uplevel your supervisors?

 

Nick [00:12:00]: The biggest thing is it stops people from saying, "I didn't do that." Because then you have the data to show. Anytime you go to coach anybody, I especially, me personally, I like to have all the data that I can to show them. But then with the videos, you can show them what they actually did. And then you and them together can work on how not to do it again. Or if they're doing it a certain way, why are you doing it that way? Then maybe we need to look at our process and change it. So the video breaks it all down for you. You actually can see physically what they're doing, and it helps a lot. It helps with the "I didn't do it" and then it helps with how do we change this? Instead of asking everybody and having to rely on what they saw themselves, you actually have a video. Like game film for a coach breaking it down with their players, right? You want to see a play after it happened, and why'd you throw that interception?

 

Evan: Well, it's because you didn't see the corner coming down, but in this case, it's forklifts and racks.

 

Nick [00:13:00]: Well, see, I look at it the same way. I mean, just think about the great quarterbacks, Manning, Brady, and them watching the plays where they messed up so they can fix it.

 

Evan: Yeah, absolutely. All right, last question for me. So if you could start your career over again from scratch, what would be the one singular piece of advice that you today would give yourself when you were just starting out your career?

 

Nick: The one piece of advice I give myself: listen before you talk and listen more because when you listen, you learn. When you talk, you don't learn as much. Cause back when I first started, especially when I got into management, I was a, let's do it this way and no other way. Don't listen, this is how we're going to do it kind of person. And now I'm more of a hey, let's talk this out and work this out together. And it's gotten me a lot farther. Production has gotten a lot better and relationships have gotten a lot better. And once you get the respect in your relationship, statistically you can look at about any study and it's going to tell you your people are going to be more productive and more amped to do what is needed to be done if you're out there leading like a leader and not a boss.

 

Evan [00:14:00]: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us, Nick.