Speaker: Ed "Kingfish" Lada, President and CEO, Goodwill Keystone
Tell us a little about yourself and your company
Ed "Kingfish" Lada: Hello, I'm Ed Lada, president and CEO for Goodwill Keystone and Goodwill Keystone Area Foundation. Goodwill is a 501c3 nonprofit operating in 22 counties in Central and Southeastern PA. We've been around for over 76 years, going on 77 years.
Ed "Kingfish" Lada: Most people know us for, you know, a place where you go, donate your home goods, to do some good, and, and we absolutely do that, but a lot of people don't realize that we're one of the largest workforce development providers in the state of Pennsylvania, as well as leaders in sustainability.
At the high level, what's involved in your manufacturing process?
Ed "Kingfish" Lada: Essentially what we do is we create widgets, you know, we have to curate product and in our case we price 40 million unique items a year and so in order to do that with our, with our processes, we have to be extremely efficient and effective in regards to how we move things and we use lean processes and Kizen, and traditional, manual manufacturing type of approaches in regards to how we curate this product. But what a lot of people don't realize is that part of our sustainability efforts is around recycling, reuse, and repurposing, and so. Part of what we do, we have conveyor systems that that help sort books. We use a lot of generative and computer vision machine learning AI to help with quality and help with pricing identification and things of that sort, and so, most people don't realize how complex our social enterprise is just even on the retail supply chain operation side.
What Factory of the Future step are you on?
Ed "Kingfish" Lada: So for us at Goodwill, the factory of the future may look a little different, you know, we are all about sustainability and so, trying to be as energy efficient or even create energy for our next warehouse that we're hoping to build within the next 5 years, is definitely gonna have a, a major focus on sustainable practices and hopefully energy generation.
Describe an initiative or innovation your company has implemented to automate
processes or to utilize technology.
Ed "Kingfish" Lada: We created uh an AI agent called the HelmBot, which essentially allows our employees to have a direct dialogue and conversation with our handbook, with our employee handbook. In a way that the handbook will then send them documentations that they're looking to do, will access how much PTO time they have, pull up different policies that they may have questions about and help them explain, This is an integration with with OpenAI's GPT models, as well as leveraging other programs to do things like voice modification, and, and, deep fake technology or avatar building and things of that sort and so one cool thing that we did was we found an old recording from the founder of Goodwill, back in the 1920s of old radio recording we were able to capture his voice and use his voice to have a conversation with our employees and talk about the history of Goodwill and use that as a touch point to kind of get this deeper connection to our long legacy brand.
What is one key lesson that you learned?
Ed "Kingfish" Lada: implications of the technology. You're gonna have a lot of employees that are very fearful of it. You're pro you may be fearful of technology and that's a healthy fear, by the way, but the more that you educate yourself around the the use cases, the limitations, the ethics around it. The more you're gonna be able to prepare your employees for the future of work in a way that I think will give you, that will build your staff to be agile, which I think is what we all need at this point is the ability the ability to pivot and the ability to, to adapt very quickly, to keep up with, with modern trends.
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Ed "Kingfish" Lada: At the end of the day, in my opinion, we don't have a choice, right? It has to be worth the squeeze because it's gonna keep us market relevant. It's gonna keep our business modern. It's gonna allow us to respond, to, to competitive threats, way more efficient, way more effective, and us as a nonprofit, you know, nonprofits typically are a champagne taste on beer budgets. So, so any kind of leg up that we can get to make sure that, that we're being good stewards of the public funds to do the work that we do or in our case donations from, from you all who donate the Goodwill or your, your stuff, we take that very important, very, very seriously so we can create more jobs and more sustainability so people can prosper and thrive.
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