QAD Champions of Manufacturing 2025 | Ken Fisher, President, QAD & Brian Lange, The Hershey Co. & Terry LeDoux, Nestlé Purina North America

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More from QAD Champions of Manufacturing 2025

Ken Fisher

President

QAD Redzone

Brian Lange

Sr. Director; Manufacturing, Salty Division and North American CMG Manufacturing

The Hershey Co.

Terry LeDoux

Former Vice President

Nestlé Purina North America

play_circle_outline Introduction of Ken Fisher, Terry LeDoux, and Brian Lange at the Redzone conference.

play_circle_outline Redzone: Revolutionizing Manufacturing with a Leading Connected Workforce Solution for Enhanced Productivity and User Engagement

play_circle_outline Strong belief in people as the competitive advantage within manufacturing operations.

play_circle_outline Effective training for diverse workforce demographics using Redzone’s learning modules.

play_circle_outline Emphasis on collaboration among teams to ensure factory-wide success and communication.

play_circle_outline Transforming Manufacturing: Harnessing AI for Continuous Improvement and Proactive Issue Resolution in Operational Strategies

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Ken Fisher, President, QAD & Brian Lange, The Hershey Co. & Terry LeDoux, Nestlé Purina North America

Ken Fisher

President QAD Redzone

Brian Lange

Sr. Director; Manufacturing, Salty Division and North American CMG Manufacturing The Hershey Co.

Terry LeDoux

Former Vice President Nestlé Purina North America

In this interview from the QAD Champions of Manufacturing event in Dallas, Texas, Ken Fisher, president of QAD Redzone, joins Brian Lange, senior director of manufacturing for the Salty Division and North American CMG Manufacturing at The Hershey Company, and Terry LeDoux, former vice president of Nestlé Purina North America, to talk with theCUBE Research’s Scott Hebner about what a true connected workforce looks like on the factory floor. The group explains how Redzone’s people-first approach, coaching model and learning module are helping large manufacturer... Read more

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What are the backgrounds and current roles of the guests at the QAD Redzone Champions of Manufacturing Conference? add

What is the connected workforce and how is it related to manufacturing? add

What are the key factors in successfully training new employees in a rapidly growing manufacturing environment? add

What methods are being used to train employees and address issues of attrition among Spanish-speaking staff? add

What impact does the implementation of Redzone have on factory performance and communication among different areas and teams? add

What are the goals and benefits of using Redzone and Champion AI in operations management? add

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Ken Fisher, President, QAD & Brian Lange, The Hershey Co. & Terry LeDoux, Nestlé Purina North America

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Scott Hebner

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of the QAD Redzone Champions of Manufacturing Conference here in beautiful Arlington, Texas. I'm here with Ken Fisher, who's the president of Redzone.

Ken Fisher

>> Thanks for having me.

Scott Hebner

>> And you've brought some guests, Brian Lange and Terry LeDoux, and why don't we start before we get to you, Ken, with you guys just introducing yourself, a little bit of your background and the companies you're coming from?

Terry LeDoux

>> My name is Terry LeDoux, I spent 33 years with Nestlé Purina PetCare. I was the Vice President of Digital Manufacturing. So all of my responsibilities is focused on manufacturing, distribution. All of our IT infrastructure applications and how people use them.

Brian Lange

>> My name is Brian Lange, currently with The Hershey Company, been in the food industry for about 30 years. Last 10 years have been with The Hershey Company, and then the last two years has been essentially building the Hershey Salty Snacks manufacturing division.

Scott Hebner

>> And Ken, you're leading up Redzone, right?

Ken Fisher

>> Yep, yep. I've been with Redzone for about 10 years, and before that, I came out of manufacturing like these gentlemen. So I worked in factories for 15 years before that, in defense and aerospace, food and beverage and ag.

Scott Hebner

>> Great. Well, this is I think our sixth interview today. So we've gone through the products. We had Sanjay here. We got the big strategy. So let's talk a little bit about operationalizing the front line, and I think you guys are bringing the human power, the learnings, the coaching and all that stuff and making that into a methodology to help drive what ... I think you call it the connected workforce. So maybe you can unpack that just a little bit, the connected workforce in the context of manufacturing.

Ken Fisher

>> That's right. Well, absolutely, Redzone is the number one connected workforce solution in the world, and we measure that by number of factories and number of users. So 600,000 users, 1,700 factories globally. We started in 2012. Connected workforce, it's a new category, so it does require some explaining because there's a lot of confusion out there. It's got elements of MES, it has elements of QMS, it has elements of CMMS, it has elements of LMS, but at its core, it is a single pane of glass for the front lines that provides them a voice. It's got a communication and collaboration element so that they can connect with other teams. The goal is to ... in a typical factory, I know it's true when I was working in manufacturing, plant managers and engineers, they make the standard work. They look at the data, they make decisions and they push it down. Well, connected worker flips that upside down and provides the information and the skills and creates the environment for those frontline workers to know if they're winning or losing, know what their top problems are and have the skills to do the root cause analysis, put the corrective actions in place. And if they do need help from other functions, they can get that help very quickly using technology that they're used to using in their daily life. So many factories, it's like as soon as they walk in the door, we tell them, "Put your super computer into a locker and here's a three-ring binder and a piece of paper to go do your work."

Scott Hebner

>> Well, I've seen you guys referred to as a people company masquerading as a technology company. Let me ask you guys, Terry, Brian, what's your view of that, you've been working with Redzone.

Terry LeDoux

>> Yeah, I think that's real, right? There's two things I'd tell you about Redzone. A lot of people kind of push back on the coaching process and I come from a big company and we're really good at implementing software. I mean really, really good, but not in the way that Redzone coaching works. And that's really with people at the center and how you interact with people and how you get their emotional participation to understand that this is their system, not ... I'm from corporate and I'm here to help you make you do your job better, right? That's gone. So it's real, the operators take off with it in about an hour and you know you've hit the right pace when other operators are screaming at you while they don't have Redzone. And then, you start seeing operators training other operators in this activity and it just builds like this big wildfire, grass fire that spreads across your factory and from a management perspective, usually I have a hard time keeping up with how fast it wants to move. So it really is about people at the center of digital and the results its produced for us has been enormous.

Brian Lange

>> I would agree. We always say people are competitive advantage, right? We could have the same equipment, same processes, but it really is all about the people and it's how we get things done is through people, right? The thing about Redzone ... and you can measure it several different ways, right? So I take a look at it from different perspectives, but let's just take the learning module, right? So what we've had to do in the Hershey Salty Snacks division, we are growing so fast. So I've got ... I've invested, my company has invested 80 million dollars this year alone in several of our plants to keep up with the demand and grow capacity. Whitestown, Indiana, our facility that makes SKINNYPOP Popcorn is literally doubling in size from a capacity and head count perspective this year or next year. We installed two new manufacturing lines this year. We're starting up another kitchen. We're hiring about 120 employees, how do you bring on all of these employees and train them on new pieces of equipment? We've used Redzone, right? We've used the learning module, all their training content was put into the learning module. They're watching videos, all the manuals. So that's how we train our folks, right? We wouldn't be able to do it without a learning module like what's in Redzone. Another example is our Plymouth Indiana site. We have a lot of Spanish-speaking folks, right? Wonderful, wonderful employees, fantastic, but we had higher attrition with those folks because they didn't have a means to get promoted. We couldn't upscale them because we didn't have training modules in their native tongue, in Spanish. And so with Redzone, we've been able to create the learning content, we've been able to upscale them. And now they're able to get promoted to higher-skilled jobs, higher pay, our attrition is gone way down. So there's multiple ways you could ... you'll look at it from a people company, but it is all about the people and using this technology to keep them engaged and upscale them.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah. I spent the bulk of my career at IBM, so I went through the Gerstner, the Gerstner turnaround, and I remember when it was all said and done, he made the statement in one of his books that when I went in, I thought culture was part of the game, but it turned out to be the entire game. And I think what you're building is a continuous improvement culture that scales, right? And you're empowering people to do that. Is that a reasonable summary?

Ken Fisher

>> Yeah, I like to say typical factory has five or six people that are lean, six sigma, green belts, black belts. We create ... an average factory might have 200 frontline employees between production, quality and maintenance. So let's take those 200, 300 employees and make them your best problem solvers.

Brian Lange

>> And you mentioned green belts, black belts, right? Master black belts. You could do the same thing with your employees with the way Redzone's designed and how you do the process of the systems, they just don't know that they're doing it, right?

Ken Fisher

>> Right.

Brian Lange

>> That's the beauty of it.

Ken Fisher

>> Absolutely, right.

Brian Lange

>> I mean you think about it, TPM, lean, all these different CI improvement programs, it's been around for decades and we've all struggled to implement them correctly. You get a few factories that stand up well, but you get mixed results across the board and a lot of it is just the level of burden that's out there on the operator. They need to run the line, but they've got all this other work, that documentation related to these CI systems. So it doesn't take, it doesn't hold and you just keep going through the up and downs. Without even saying TPM or Lean, you go in with Redzone and you start seeing them do everything you wanted them to do under your CI system and they're happy to do it. They're heavily engaged in doing it and making recommendations on how you should improve this process as you keep moving forward. So it is just a different way, it's a better way of achieving those types of results with people at its core.

Scott Hebner

>> So you two are representing, I think on the upper end of size in terms of manufacturing companies and as long as I've been around, breaking down silos has always been a challenge, no matter what industry you're in, but I would imagine it's something that's a continuous process. So interlinked like manufacturing. So how is this all helping break down those silos?

Brian Lange

>> Well, I think we both have good examples. I always say that there's no silos in Salty, that's just my mantra and we're all playing each other's sandbox. But I think we've mentioned transparency, all the data is visible, it's that data democratization. I talked about all the capital and all the new lines that I've had to start up. I think earlier there was a question about what kind of benefits have you seen? And people talk about OE improvements and me, we're trying to keep our heads above water, how fast we're growing and trying to meet demand. When I talk about how fast we're growing our Dot's pretzel business year over year is 20 to 30% growth, right? And so with what we've been able to do and what we deployed the Redzone modules, specifically the learning that I talked about to train our folks and then the productivity, we've had extremely aggressive startup curves, right? To go from week one to week four and week four is a hundred percent run rate, being able to use the real-time data, everybody, engineering operations, everybody using that data to do real-time problem solving and addressing the issues in order to get started up as quickly as possible. Leveraging these assets and meeting our customer demand, but also too, like engineers, I've got engineers that are all over the country and they can't be everywhere at once, right? Well, I got them, iPads, they all got Redzone on and they're with the employees remotely helping address issues.

Terry LeDoux

>> Yeah. I'd say that large ... We are on the upper end, right? We have large factories and always said, when you get into these factories, you get out on the floor, you have all these different departments, you've got maintenance, you've got quality, you've got batching, processing, packing warehouse, and they all kind of become little neighborhoods. So, processing, if you have a great day, packing is having a tough time. Warehouse is mad because packing is not delivering any product. Packing is blaming processing. After you implement Redzone and you have this visibility to how the factory, not just my area's performing, that changes from neighborhoods to one community that now gets behind, well, we got to win the day for the factory, because just because I'm having a great day doesn't mean we did what we needed to do as a community. And you'll see rally cries come out from processing saying, "Hey, we need to get some people in packing. If you're available, please go help packing. Let's figure out what it is, get maintenance, get QA involved." So it was a dramatic change from my perspective to see those neighborhoods and those shift differences just kind of melt away, with this tool because that communication within the Redzone tool is just frictionless, right? They're not picking up a phone or trying to get ahold of the supervisor who's got to go chase the maintenance person, who's got to go chase their manager. It just all happens right there. And because everyone can see everything, it's now the whole factory knows, type of thing.

Scott Hebner

>> So Ken, how do you guys balance empowering the individuals versus empowering the team or the organization, right? There could be some dynamics there, right?

Ken Fisher

>> No, it's not black and white. Many things in life. There is no one right way. It's not just all about the individual. That can certainly drive the wrong behaviors, but individuals really matter. So you need to account for the individual. And so, I would say we start with team goals. So when we are configuring the system, when we're designing the software, when we think about goals, it's always about the team. We've been asked many, many times, I want to know the OEE of Bill. I want to know the top downtime for Sally and you can dig in it, but we're not going to create a first class experience to make it easy for engineers and managers to go do that because it will end up ... people will look at the tool as if it's a stick and not a carrot, and everyone knows. Three heads are better than one. Well, if three heads are better than one, 10 heads are better than one, 100 heads are better than one. And it's these cross-functional teams working together for common goals. So we do build that into the platform. However, what happens when that person is given an iPad? Well, that individual human, when they're given that iPad or they're given that Android device, that thousand dollars device, it's in a case and it's brand new and they're handed that on their first day or when they get to the line, they feel like, "Oh, my company is investing in me." And when they log in, it says, well, give us a picture of yourself or an avatar. What language do you speak? So then I configure my environment for me as an individual, but my goals are for a team.

Scott Hebner

>> Right. Yeah. It's more of an art than a science, I think.

Ken Fisher

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> I've always said, my management days that organizations don't do things, people do, but organizations that work well create that multiplier effect for everybody and it's a tough line. So let me ask you about ROI, sort of the ROI flywheel that allows you to drive change at a faster pace, yet retain the quality and all that. I know that's a big focus for you guys and I'm sure that you love that too, right? ROI drive change.

Ken Fisher

>> That's right.

Scott Hebner

>> Redzone is about outcomes. If you're doing something, if you're implementing a new system or doing a change program, whatever the case may be, the key to success is that everyone agrees that this is important for the people, important to the business. So outcome is first, and for the productivity module, which is what ... everybody implements first, that outcome is productivity, which is getting either more product out in the same amount of time or the same amount of product and less ... and on average it's 26%. But it depends on, are companies starting with high levels of efficiency, a lot of continuous improvement? Are they just embarking on continuous improvement? So there is varying levels of productivity uplift, but the average is 26%. But the productivity flywheel is three components. It's higher productivity, higher employee engagement and lower employee turnover. And I like to think about it. Now, we have done the analysis, so we do know that there is a correlation. It is heavily correlated, higher engagement, higher employee retention, higher productivity. These things are correlated. The bigger one is the bigger all three are. The smaller one is the smaller three are. What we haven't done in the analysis and it's very difficult to do is well what comes first, chicken or egg? And it may not be ... Most people think, well, you got to get the employee engagement first. What we believe, and we will do the study, is it's actually the productivity first. When people feel more productive, Then they're more engaged. When they're more productive and more engaged, they don't want to leave. I like to think of it as a sports team. You could think of it as the Kansas City Chiefs or you could think it of the Patriots of the early 2000, they won more. They were more productive. When you win, you come to practice. You want to practice harder. You also don't want to leave to go to another team. Even if they're going to offer you another million dollars or whatever. I'd rather win a Super Bowl than make an extra 100,000 or whatever going to another team. That's the flywheel effect that we create on the shop floor. But would love to hear your guys' thoughts on that and experience with it.

Terry LeDoux

>> Well, I think that's real. And I think productivity is first. We talk about the transparency and the visibility and the engagement, right? But when people ... You give them that tool and they have the ability to see very clearly what they're contributing, it makes them want to contribute more, which ends up being productivity. The side effect is you've got more engagement and they want to come to work, which means I end up with lower turnover. So starting with productivity to me is showing them, hey, you can win, you are important and you can contribute to how we win.

Brian Lange

>> Yeah. I'm a little mixed on this. Okay, I've made a career going around in turning plants around. That's what I've done for many, many years. I'm going to say out of necessity for the business, it always has to be productivity, right? You got to get productivity out, you have to hit your service, you got to hit your profitability, right? If I could do it my way, I'd always start with people though, right? Because hear what you're saying is let's all get all these people together and we're going to go somewhere, but then we're going to get there and we're not going to know each other. And then you're going to be fighting and arguing and everything else along the way. And so to me, if I had my druthers, I would really focus on the people aspect first. But out of business necessity, it usually does boil down to productivity first.

Scott Hebner

>> That's the art part of the science, right? Art and science. So help me tie together the 90-day implementation plan that we've heard a lot about. You got champion pace, you got champion AI, the adaptive ERP, Redzone, like pull all this together-

Ken Fisher

>> Very good because we're about outcomes. It's not just about the technology or the software. So if you're going to implement a technology, it needs to change behavior, it needs to change something material on the shop floor in order for you to get the results. So since our inception at Redzone, we've ... For each one of our modules, our productivity module, compliance module, reliability module, learning module, each one has a 90-day coaching program. And that 90 days is not coincidental. So there's science behind the 90 days, which is if you think three or four shifts, you're able to touch each one of those shifts over that 90-day period. And at the end of the period, you've changed the behavior. If you're an individual trying to change your behavior, there's a rule of 28 days, but when you're trying to change the behavior of a team or of a large facility, then that 90 days provides you 28 touch points across those factories. But what you've implemented a lot of technology in your time. And how did you view the coaching program's impact on the end result?

Terry LeDoux

>> It was critical for us. We've implemented a lot of systems and really good at it, large systems, but it was in the manner of project management. Thousand tasks, names, times, project managers following up with people, lots and lots of training. So on our first site, we noticed our teams were going in and starting to override the Redzone team. And myself and another colleague, we had to put everybody on the phone and said, okay, stop it. Got to pull back. We've paid for the coaching. We want you to learn how they're going to coach. And that coaching was very different in the sense that it wasn't ... We're here from corporate and we're going to make you do your jobs better. That's what we're about, change management. It was more about asking the help of the operator in their coaching process. Hey, we've got this new tool. We're going to try it out. Can you help us? So it was just a very different approach. It wasn't somebody with a checklist watching over them? There was a plan behind it, but it's not visible to the people on the floor in that sense. And it wasn't as rogue and rigorous, I should say, to getting that done, which made it fun for the operator. Because any of the other implementations wasn't fun for anybody. So I hear a lot of people complaining. They call me and say, "Hey, you did Redzone. Do you really have to do this coaching?" And I'm like, you'll be crazy if you don't do the coaching because I'm going to tell you right now, I've seen Redzone implemented wrong, had to go in and stop a factory where we had coaching and the coaching was fighting one of our factories, we had to in at 30 days. Stop the project and say, okay, we're starting over because you guys are doing this top-down digitization of Total Performance Management. And that's not what this is about. We need it to come from the bottom up. So you got to do the coaching if you really want to end up in the right spot at 90 days.

Brian Lange

>> I would agree. So the coaching not only is it a differentiator of Redzone to some of the other competitors, it's a competitive advantage, but I think it's absolutely essential, right? If you want something to stick, if you want people to grow with it, if you want them to adopt it and own it, the coaching is absolutely essential. And Angie, I just told her, go buy more coaching sessions, right? We got another six months in 2026 because I want this to stick. I want it to ... I think I talked to you, I want to make sure in 2026, all eight manufacturing plants in Salty are leveraging it and getting the most out of Redzone that we possibly can.

Scott Hebner

>> How are you using AI actually, champion AI specifically to make the coaching better, better, better, and be able to scale it?

Ken Fisher

>> I would flip that around and we're going to use coaching to make the AI experience better. So as we implement factories with Champion AI and we've got the machine learning and the generative interface and the agentic workflows where Champion AI goes and carries out tasks on behalf of the front lines, like go create an emergency work order for them or go communicate to the warehouse that our changeover is going to happen two hours earlier, so let's start prepping components for the changeover. Our coaches come in and as they're doing the implementation, they'll teach the operators how to do. I hate to use the term prompt engineering, that makes it sound overly complex. It's how do you interact best with the generative experience to get the best expected outcome? Part of that, they're going to learn just by doing, but that will be key in the coaching program to ensure they get up to speed faster and it's helpful faster.

Scott Hebner

>> I forgot for a moment, you're a people company that's working at a technology company.

Brian Lange

>> But can I make one more point about the coaching?

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah.

Brian Lange

>> So we deployed Redzone in five plants in 12 months. There's no way that we could have done that without the coaching, right? And so when we talk about speed of scale, scalability, speed of deployment, all of this, you couldn't do it without those folks.

Terry LeDoux

>> We did 15 in 12 months. If you take out the five months where we needed approval to continue after the proof of concept concept. And the other thing important about coaching is ... and I don't want people to misunderstand. This isn't just coaching operators and team leaders. There's a change for the management team. I would honestly say the coaching is harder for the management team because the operators take to it and the team leaders take to it right away. This thing's doing something for them. But for the management team, the leadership team at your site, this changes how you interact with your operators. It kind of flips ... Instead of planning control top down, it's a little bit of servant leadership that you got to get used to. I mean, you're getting assigned items off the factory floor that you need to deliver back. And that's different, because we already have full-time jobs, right? So it's a difficult change to say, okay, what of these tasks that I was doing before, now that I have Redzone, I don't really need to do that I can take that time and put towards servicing the needs of what's coming from the factory floor. And that was a difficult change at a lot of factories for us.

Brian Lange

>> I'm going to say that's an interesting, it is, right? So if you're empowering your frontline employees, we talked about a lot of times in our plants that the best operator gets promoted. Now they're the line leader or the supervisor, right? Well, if they're not good at leading people or supervising, they always go back to what they felt comfortable with was all these things happening on the line, right? Well, it's like, okay, the frontline employees have it now, right? They're empowered, they're doing it right. Now, these folks need to actually go grow into their roles and learn how to lead, right?

Terry LeDoux

>> That's very true. I would agree 100%.

Scott Hebner

>> We just got a couple of minutes left before we have to wrap here, but I always like to ask this question. We're sitting here two years from now, what are we going to be talking about? What do you think is going to be different a couple of years from now?

Ken Fisher

>> I mean, a big part of our investment is AI, and I would say on average, not for every factory, but on average, Redzone helps manufacturers by design go from, hey, I came into the Monday morning 6 AM production meeting, looking at the weekend's data. We missed our targets. D-Shift is back on Thursday, so let's set up an action item for D-Shift to do a root cause analysis. Then the action items on that root cause analysis are out three weeks from now. So for a month from now, we're solving problems that may never even happen again. Well, Redzone helps us solve those problems during the shift utilizing our highly capable frontline teams. Next, we're going to be talking about how Champion AI helps those frontline employees solve tomorrow's problems before they happen.

Terry LeDoux

>> Okay?

Ken Fisher

>> Forward thinking.

Terry LeDoux

>> And I believe that's where we're really headed, right? Operators today, even with Redzone in place and other predictive tools that we have, you're still reacting to problems. We're always a little bit behind the eight-ball. No one is perfect. I mean, all these tools are helping and we've gained reliability, but in the future, in the next two years, I'm hoping to see that no, most of my time is spent on continuous improvement and solving problems that haven't happened yet. That's the best use of the operator. And if you think about the people that have to come into work, they're going to be much happier, right? Because I'm not fighting a line, everything is going according to plan. How do I make the future plan better, right?

Brian Lange

>> Yeah. I don't know if I could add much more, but we talk about solving problems that haven't happened yet. I don't even think ... They're not even going to be problems, right? Because they're going to be addressed proactively. We're really going to be talking about growing our business. And that's what I think the main message is, it's just we're going to continue to grow because we're operating so well.

Ken Fisher

>> Mic drop.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, this has been a great conversation, I think very insightful. So Ken, Brian, Terry, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate it.

Ken Fisher

>> Thanks for having us.

Terry LeDoux

>> Thank you.

Scott Hebner

>> And for all you, we will have continuing coverage of the QAD Redzone Champions of AI Conference here in Arlington. Stay tuned. We'll be back very shortly.