Evan Wimpey: Hello, and welcome to the Mining Your Own Business podcast. I’m your host, Evan Wimpey. And today I’m super excited to introduce our guest, Derek Camp from Milo’s Tea. Derek’s a senior manager of operations analytics there. And for all the Milo tea drinkers out there, which hopefully is everybody should be everybody.
I’ve got Derek and his team to thank for helping make sure that Milo’s is on the shelf, wherever you go to buy your Milo’s Tea, Derek, thanks so much for joining us on the show today.
Derek Camp: Well, thank you, Evan. Thanks for having me.
Evan Wimpey: Yeah, absolutely. Derek, to get started, can you just tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into the role where you are now?
Derek Camp: I’ve been with Milo’s team for just over 11 years and I started out as a replenishment analyst. I made sure that we had the right amount of product at the right place, at the right time for our largest customer. And that role sort of morphed into a sales analytics role. So you did a little bit of replenishment, a little bit of sales analytics.
You helped the sales team. And I did that for about four years and then moved to operations about seven years ago and focused on logistics, logistics, analytics, and then slowly started doing work with quality and doing a little work with supply chain, doing a little work with operations. And, you know, over time it just kind of grew.
And so now I have a team of analysts, and we cover a lot of operations.
Evan Wimpey: You touched on a handful of the, you know. Like rolling them off and quality and logistics. Can you dive maybe just give us sort of like a one sentence or on each of the areas that this falls under operations.
Derek Camp: So the four main areas are logistics, supply chain, we say operations, it kind of covers operations, production, CI, maintenance, and then quality.
And so each one has its own set of metrics and we have an analyst dedicated to those areas. We dabble a little bit in inventory as well, and we actually do a little bit of people analytics as well.
Evan Wimpey: All right. And your role focuses on analytics in that space to do analytics.
We need some kind of data. Can you talk about the data that you have access to or that your, your team uses there?
Derek Camp: Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you a few examples from each, each area. So, in logistics, one of the big things we look at is, is OTIF. And OTIF, if you don’t know, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a more of a, it sits in logistics, but it’s really more of a customer service metric, but it’s on time and in full.
It’s how you’re serving your customer. As you order 1,000 cases of sweet gallon do this Thursday. If you have to cut product that that cuts your in full rate. If you’re late, you’re not on time. And so anytime that we make a change to a PO. Whether we have to take product off, or we have to change a date, or our carrier is late.
You know, we have reason codes that we put into our ERP. And, you know, for every Monday that comes through, we put in the reason codes and we’re able to do an analysis. And look at it to say, you know, if we had 20 late POs, 10 of them were due to weather. Whether it was the wintertime and you’re going over the Rockies.
And you hit, you hit road closures or a snowstorm, you know, that’s something that can be explained or there’s a hurricane in the mid-Atlantic States that can be explained. But if there’s something that, you know, that we did, you know, maybe, maybe we had unplanned downtime on a production line, then, you know, we look at that and say, is that a one-off thing?
Or do we need to look at that a little bit more closely? So that’s how, just a really brief example of how we use it in logistics and supply chain, we look at it in terms of. And it in supply chain, it’s direct materials and indirect materials and category plans and things like that. And direct materials for us is anything that goes into the finished product.
And so we have a plan and we look at the monthly cost. And are we favorable on jugs or caps or labels. And if we are, what drove that? If we’re not favorable on something, we have to get a shovel and start digging into why we weren’t favorable. And, you know, the things we are favorable for, what things can be?
Can we repeat and the things that are not favorable? What? What do? What do we need to fix? And so that’s not repeatable. And I always like to joke about the indirect for us. It’s anything from pens to palletizers. And so, you know, having category plans for all of that, you know, we’re using data to, to divide everything out into categories and for our production, we have a metric called OEE.
It’s basically the how efficient is your line running? And, you know, we will look at the OEE score and we will delve into, you know, what’s causing it to be that way. Is it hitting plan? Is it below plan? We start looking at that individual line or we’ll look at a shift and say, shift A is doing this really well, but shift B is not.
And then delve into what shift B, what’s happening with shift B and try to correct that.
Evan Wimpey: Yeah, I think that paints a really good picture. It also paints a pretty complex picture. You’ve got, you know, you think about on the analytics world, doing the technical work and doing the analysis, but then you think communicating that and sharing that with a stakeholder.
And it sounds like your stakeholders are, are sort of the You know, you’re, you’re not talking on time in full to the same people you’re talking OEE with. Do you, do you try to maintain those relationships sort of across all aspects where you’re, you’re analyzing their data?
Derek Camp: Oh yeah. I mean, a good example that is we were looking at one line and we knew that looking at data was only going to give us one side of the story.
And so we pulled together the, you know, the analytics people, we pulled together the CI people, continuous improvement. We pulled a maintenance engineer in, and we pulled all the production supervisors in, and we said, okay, this line is not doing what this line is not really living up to potential. Why are we doing that?
And we got everybody’s viewpoint from that. And in that meeting, if something came up, the maintenance engineer would say, okay, I know how to handle this. I can go study. You look the machine. We adjusted a p. M. And that was all on him. And maybe the CI Person wrote an SOP. And the production people were able to add in details to us that we never would have knew.
And so we try to reach out across all, you know, all the lines to get everybody’s point of view on it. And there will be times where we’re looking at, you know, the production, the production numbers, and we bring in the logistics team and say, okay, like, like you’re going to be backed up, you know, a couple of trucks because we’re having to do some, some either extended runs, or we’re going to have to take this machine down because this is, this particular machine has downtime.
And so you need to make adjustments on your plan in logistics. So, you know, talk to the carrier, you know, don’t, don’t come in right now, come in two hours later. And in most cases that works out pretty well.
Evan Wimpey: Okay, yeah, I love that. I love the way you talk about sort of the end state. There is not. Here’s the analytics.
But here are actionable things. Here are things that you can do based on the whether it’s new maintenance to help improve some O. E. Whether it’s logistics, adjusting the timing. There’s actionable things that that somebody can take away from that, which is great. Do you ever? Anytime the data suggests some action, there’s a potential for Some pushback or defensiveness.
Do you ever get folks that maybe struggle to, to incorporate your analysis or your, your team’s analysis?
Derek Camp: Some sometimes, I mean, it doesn’t happen as often as you think. I think for ops as a whole, everybody is, is, has that one kind of that one tunnel vision of, okay, like we’ve, we’ve got this many cases we have to make and we’re, we have to make them where we’re not going to sacrifice customer service or anything like that. And whatever we have to do, we’re going to go do now. There’ll, there’ll be some people that will, will not like a suggestion, but it’s never done in—they’re never, you know, for the lack of a better term, they’re never mean about it. They, but we try to work together and say, if you don’t like that, you know, what are you suggesting that we do?
And you know, we’ve got people here that have got a lot of experience. And sometimes I’ve walked in thinking this is the right way to go do this. And I’ve talked to a certain person, and I’ve walked out going, okay, that’s the better way to go do it. Just because he knows, he knows that machine better than I do.
Evan Wimpey: That’s such a good attitude to have. I hope our audience that are on the data practitioner side can adopt that of your data can suggest things can help highlight things, but you have to be open to. Other subject matter experts having an opinion, having ideas of how to improve whatever the data is highlighting there.
Derek Camp: Yeah, I mean, you’re only getting one side of the data. And that’s why developing relationships with SMEs are so important.
Evan Wimpey: Derek, I’ve not thought too much about this. You’re located in Alabama, physically?
Derek Camp: Yeah, I’m in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s where we’re headquartered.
Evan Wimpey: Okay. Perfect. I’m, I’m not as deep in the South, but I’m in North Carolina, still solid sweet tea country. And so I’m sure I’ve never really thought about it.
Does Milo’s Tea, how, how broad sort of is the offering of the only, I’m a sweet tea drinker and that sort of seems popular in the South. Is there, are there other offerings? Is there a wide product offering? And is it. Across the rest of the country as well. Your footprint.
Derek Camp: Yeah, we make different flavors of tea.
So we’ve got sweet tea, which is our most popular. We have extra sweet tea. That’s one of our newer items. We have a no calorie tea. We have an unsweet tea. We have a lemonade and then we have a tea and lemonade mix. And we just recently we went to all 50 states. So yeah, so we’re not, we’re not in every single retailer, but we’re working on it.
But we are, we have a president somewhere in all 50 states.
Evan Wimpey: Oh, congratulations. And I hope you’re your team’s up for the challenge. I’d imagine that comes with a lot. But the big footprint comes with a lot more data and a lot more operational challenges.
Derek Camp: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been with Milo’s for 11 years.
And when I started, we had one plant in Alabama and we had one shift. That was it in the plant. And then now, 11 years later, we have two facilities in Birmingham. We have a plant that runs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we are about to open another plant in South Carolina.
Evan Wimpey: Wow. That’s exciting.
Derek Camp: Yeah, so it went from, okay, what’s, what’s, what’s the one plant doing that, you know, what’s the data for the one plant?
Now it’s going to be when something comes up, okay, you did it for this plant. You had to do it for three more. So yeah, it can be challenging at times.
Evan Wimpey: For sure. I wonder perhaps the multiple plants, at least if they’re producing the roughly the same thing, or there’s some overlap in what they produce it, it can give you sort of a baseline too.
If one plant has production or OEE at a certain level, it’s hard. Maybe it’s hard to know what to compare that against, but when you’ve got multiple plants, maybe it’s, is it easier to see. Where to point for improvements.
Derek Camp: I mean, yeah, you don’t, you don’t want to, I guess there is always that natural comparison between the two plants, but the plant that I’m in right now, this plant is considerably older than the plant in our Tulsa location is, is four years older.
I mean, excuse me, it’s four years old. And so, you know, it’s got, the machinery is, is, is more advanced and more, you know, it’s newer. And so, you know, they’re able to run, you know, more efficiently than we are just because we’re an older plant. So while there is competition between the two, you know, whenever we look at numbers, we’re like, okay, you really got to compare it to its own plant for the most part. Now I’m not saying, you know, there’s, there’s not any comparison done, but it has to be taken in the right context.
Evan Wimpey: Sure, yeah. You’ve got the, you got, got to have a handicap on the plant there. Right—perfect. Okay. That’s super helpful.
Derek, you’ve, you’ve been at Milo’s for 11 years and you’ve got some background in different areas. You’ve now got a team. Can you tell a bit about the composition of your team, sort of how many and are most of them coming directly into your team, or have they moved somewhere from Milo’s in the business to, to come to your team?
Derek Camp: So I have four analysts on my team and three of them were internal transfers from another department and one was hired from the outside. And that’s the people who came from other departments have, have, have really brought that. They’ve seen the company from a different perspective. And so that really helps out.
And then it also helps that they know people in other departments. And if a question comes up, if you’re new, you’re like, I don’t know who, who all these people are in sales or all know who these people are. And when I came over from sales, if I had a question, I knew exactly who to call and picked up the phone.
And that’s how, you know, the two people on my team that came from sales, they, you know, they all have friends still back in sales and that they need to call them. They pick up the phone and call them. But you know, one great example of this is our, our person who does our quality analytics, he actually started in driving a forklift on the floor.
And so that he moved in from driving a forklift into scheduling the plant. And when the quality job came open. He applied and it was, it was all, it was like, okay, he knows the process of how we make our tea better than anybody else from the outside that would come in now is he was he trained and had a great analytics background?
No, but you hired we hired him on because he had that really good knowledge of the process, and we just knew that we would just have to train him in analytics a little bit. But I’ve been on calls with him and he’s rattled stuff off about quality and the process and how this works that That I didn’t even know.
So I mean, having that knowledge from other departments is sometimes it’s priceless.
Evan Wimpey: Yeah, absolutely. We often talk about the knowing the data generation process. So you’re working with data, you’re working in a spreadsheet or tabular file or flat file all the time. That’s a bunch of zeros and ones, but really understanding the context where the data comes from gives you so much power, much more than knowing a new algorithm or the most efficient way to use your visualization tool.
So yeah, that’s great to hear. Is there, maybe besides just experience within the business, is there anything in particular? Derek that you look for when you’re looking for, to bring folks onto your team, either from external or within other departments?
Derek Camp: I think there’s six things and I kind of break them up into two groups of three. And the first is, I always say that our main—if we’re doing, if our team is doing these three things, we’re doing our job really well. So reporting, automating, and generating actionable insights like you mentioned earlier, you know, how do you know if you’re winning? You look at the scoreboard. , and so every week we do KPIs and we take the data and we see if we’re winning.
The auto automation allows you to, to use Power BI or use Excel, whatever you’re using to, to visualize it. And it’s not just for KPIs. You know, if the logistics manager calls you and says, Hey, I’d like to look at everything from the West Coast, can you just pull some data together? And yeah, I can go pull it together and automate you something that you can refresh for the next four weeks, depending on what you want to look at.
But the last thing is probably the most important thing is the generating actionable insights, which reporting and automating kind of leads into that. But what I tell people is not everybody has the “want to” do that because you have to get a shovel out and start digging and figuring out, you know, what, what’s causing this to be 5 percent down week over week or 5 percent down year over year.
And, you know, a lot of times the answer is not straight in front of you. And so the willingness to dig. I found that some people like to do it, and some people don’t like to do it. And you really want to find out, you know, if you’re going to be an analyst here is do you want to dig and you have to dig to figure this out to me.
That’s kind of my personality and how I kind of grew up doing analytics for the past 11 years is just digging in and finding things is so important. And the other three things are you’ve got to have domain knowledge. You’ve got to now, that’s not a deal breaker, but you’ve got to be able to learn it.
When I moved and worked in logistics, I didn’t know anything about logistics, but I learned, I learned, you know, about logistics. Number two, you need to have some sort of technical skills. Again, if you’re teachable, that’s great. So whether it’s SQL, whether it’s Power BI, whether it’s Excel, you got to have some, something, something like that to be able to take the data and manipulate it to whatever you want it to show. And, but this was the big one. The last, this last one is you have to have soft skills because you’re, you’re not working in a vacuum, you’re working with people and you know, I’ve saw on LinkedIn one time that being easy to work with is a superpower and also saw that, you know, nobody wants to work with you if you’re hard to work with.
And so being able to take the data and communicate it to people and to, in some cases, get buy in to fix whatever it is, you know, not, not everybody has that as well as generating actionable insights. And so if you’ve got a good mix of those six things, then, you know, you’re probably going to be a good analyst. And that’s sort of the things that I look for.
Evan Wimpey: Yeah, I think that’s a great list to have. Sounds like a lot of it. Almost revolves around curiosity. If you’ve got somebody who wants to dig into it, they need to be naturally curious about the data. And yes, they come to you with no power BI experience, but they’re willing to learn.
They just cure, how does this work? What can it do for me? What can I show with it? But yeah, and absolutely like soft skills, the most actionable insights in the world don’t come from a presentation. Don’t come from a printed piece of paper. They come from a person. If you can’t. Talk to a stakeholder and get some action. Then they’re useless. You know, it’s a paperweight.
Derek Camp: Oh, I’ve seen so many chats in offices that turn into great ideas. So to having those soft skills can’t replace that.
Evan Wimpey: That’s great. Yeah. I think, I think that’s a really good list. You’ve given us a list of the things in your team that would be nice to have, that’s good for your analysts to have. You’ve got very broad scope of the types of things that you’re looking at within operations there.
In the dream scenario where all the reporting is done perfectly, things are running where they should, and you get to either you, yourself, or your team, point to something new. And as flexible as you want, whatever you want to work on that maybe hasn’t been looked at very much, And everybody’s on board.
Everybody at Milo says, yes, there take this run with it. Is there a thing that you would say? Yes, this is where I want to try to point our efforts.
Derek Camp: Well, with the caveat of what you said about every all the reporting is done and everything is perfect. I would, I would probably say, and let me preface this by saying things, things not being efficient drive me absolutely crazy.
I mean, that’s kind of I guess kind of why I’m in this job is I just I constantly try to strive to be efficient and improve efficiency. And so if I could get everything on board and have perfect, I would, I would make operations as efficient as humanly possible. And what I mean by that is, you know, every all of our lines run world class with no hiccups and everything runs to this certain schedule.
We get all the PMs done. If we go into the cooler, every truck that we send out is a full truck and in every pallet that we make is a full pallet. There’s no, there’s no making mixed pallets or partial pallets or anything like that the big constraint we have with that is a lot of that’s money is, you know, you could, you could put world class OEE in, but you’re ripping out every line and you’re putting the state of the art.
You know, millions of dollars’ worth of investment to, you know, to make everything fully automated and, you know, bring in robotics and all that sort of thing. , and our product is perishable. So it has to stay, you know, at 36 degrees from the time it’s made to the time is consumed. So that that’s a constraint on shipping.
So a customer may not have A lot of may not have a certain volume for a certain item, and so they instead of ordering a full pilot, they put it as a layer. And so you have to break down that palette from 5 layers or 4 layers down to 2 or 3. And, you know, sometimes that leads to where you don’t ship a full truck.
You ship a half a truck and. All of that just drives me nuts. And so if I could fix anything and have everything running, I would make this place so efficient. I would work myself out of a job.
Evan Wimpey: That’s the goal, right? Work yourself out of a job, but don’t tell anybody, just have it running in the background.
Perfect. Yeah, I think that’s a valiant goal and exciting goal, especially for somebody in your role. There, Derek, Derek, you and I met, I think a couple of years ago. Now it’s been at a conference at an informs conference and I see you on LinkedIn, you frequently post some of these—your thoughts around analytics.
I’ve seen you head to a bunch of other conferences. Can you talk about as a speaker as well? Can you talk about your role as a speaker? Do you, do you have anything upcoming? Are you looking for things?
Derek Camp: Yeah, one of my, one of my favorite things to do is, is to go and talk about analytics, and so I’ve talked at a, I’ve spoke at a couple in the past, but I’m going to be speaking at the University of Alabama analytics symposium October the 4th. And so you can catch me there or you can follow me on LinkedIn and, I’ll be happy to accept your connection.
Evan Wimpey: Perfect. All right. So all the listeners out there, if you’re interested in Derek’s world and operations analytics there at Milo’s Tea, give them a follow on LinkedIn, stay up to date when he’ll be speaking again, Derek, thanks so much for coming on the Mining Your Own Business podcast today.
Derek Camp: Oh, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.
In this podcast episode, we sit down for a chat with Derek Camp from Milo’s Tea Company. Derek is the Senior Manager of Operational Analytics at Milo’s Tea. Tune in as he shares his journey at Milo’s, where he’s grown from a replenishment analyst to leading a team of analysts across logistics, supply chain, operations, and quality.
Derek Camp | Guest
Evan Wimpey | Host